Jenna Bush Hager detailed how her late grandmother, First Lady Barbara Bush, once accused her of unsportsmanlike conduct in a letter.
“I’m a competitive person, and I like performances that are competitive,” the anchor said on Thursday’s “Today with Jenna & Shaynel.”
During a family tennis match, 44-year-old Bush Hager was “eating bugs and yelling, ‘Not today!'”
At that time, the anchor was a “respectable adult.”
Bush Hager admitted, “I like heckling, okay?”
“My father (former President George W. Bush) thought it was so funny and said, ‘That’s my girlfriend!'”
Her father, a 79-year-old journalist, was amused, but her late grandmother and late grandfather (former President George H.W. Bush) were not.
Bush Hunger didn’t heckle his grandparents, but they weren’t thrilled about what they witnessed either.
“My grandfather really believed in sportsmanship, being really kind and being humble,” co-host Sheinelle Jones, 48, recalled. “And my grandmother wrote me a letter because I think my…actions had a negative impact on her.”
Bush Hager was returning from summer vacation and preparing her three children (Mira, 13, Poppy, 10, and Hal, 6) to return to school when she received a note from their grandmother.
“The best part was that she wrote to me and my father,” the author said. “She said, ‘That can’t happen on the tennis court. And George, you shouldn’t have been rooting for her either.'”
Meanwhile, the former first lady didn’t want anyone to know about her memo.
Bush Hager elaborated, “And it said, ‘P.S., please throw this letter away and don’t tell anyone about it.'”
As the NBC anchor cheekily said, “Oops!”
Bush Hager has never shied away from broadcasting her hilarious family stories during live broadcasts.
Last month, the reporter, who married husband Henry Chase Hager in 2008, revealed the offensive nickname her children gave her.
“They call me Biggie,” she confessed to Jones. “They’re like, ‘Okay, Biggie!'” And I’m like, “Excuse me?” They said, “Whatever, Biggie! ‘I feel like that.’
The TV personality asked her eldest son to stop calling him that nickname because he was worried that his younger children would use it in the wrong environment.
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“I said, ‘Mira, stop saying this. Hal is going to school, and the teacher is going to say, ‘Okay, Hal, turn in your homework.'” And he said, ‘No way, Biggie! ’”
She explained that the word “Biggie” comes from “Big Back.”
“She simplified it to just Biggie. At first, part of me thought, ‘Oh, that’s creative,’ because…I like humor expressed in words,” the media mogul elaborated.
“But I’m like, ‘Stop calling everyone Biggie. It’ll spread,'” she joked.
