Listen, Sport, Sexism Is a Foul

A woman never forgets the sensation that engulfs her the first time she walks into a locker room full of male athletes.

The stench.

In the eight years I spent as one of the first female sportswriters, I fought for equal access to postgame interviews--and the most disgusting environment I have ever set foot in, the locker room. The smell of this success was not sweet. But without it, I would have had to cut out the heart of my profession: competitive, complete coverage of the most widely watched games.

Now, like a recurring nightmare, there is a distinct odor wafting from the direction of Boston. It’s the locker room controversy again, 10 years after I thought it had been settled.

Boston Herald sports writer Lisa Olson covers the National Football League. Unenviably, this often places her in the New England Patriots’ locker room, where she says five players recently approached her, exposed themselves and dared her to touch their private parts. Keep in mind the rules of the NFL and the Patriots mandate equal access and allow her to be there doing her job. If these guys had pulled this stunt in the park, they’d be looking at jail time.

Instead, their boss, Patriots owner Victor Kiam, pointed the finger at Olson, calling her “a classic bitch.” Gosh, doesn’t this have the familiar ring of rape victims being blamed for their fate because they dressed or spoke or acted in the wrong way in the presence of a normal, healthy male? I love it when sexual harassment is excused by what I call the Mt. Everest theory: She was there.

So give her what she deserves. Verbally assault her. “Why not stand in front of her if she’s an intruder?” Kiam asked, apparently failing to notice she had been wearing a locker room credential issued by his own team. Even if Olson were the nastiest witch in the East Division of the American Football Conference, that does not excuse criminally lewd conduct, what Olson correctly called “mind rape.”

Last Monday, sex discrimination cropped up again, this time in Seattle. Cincinnati Bengals coach Sam Wyche barred USA Today reporter Denise Tom from the locker room after a 31-16 loss to the Seattle Seahawks. I suspect that, like rape, cases of locker room sex discrimination, have been widely under-reported and now may surface in the wake of the Boston incident.

The NFL has fined Wyche and asked a Harvard law professor to look into Olson’s claims against New England. One of the New England players has been fined. Kiam is alternately apologizing, saying he was misquoted, and sticking to his guns. And you can’t turn on the television without seeing a film clip of some pooh-bah bemoaning the presence of women in the locker room.

At the root of this uproar seems to be the ludicrous suspicion that women are up to no good in those locker rooms. This concern about sexual overtones must be the result of male critics fantasizing how they would feel walking into a room of strange naked people of the opposite sex.

To conclude that in real life this would be a garden of delight is a distinctly male point of view. One only has to look at the magazine racks to see which gender wants to look at naked strangers. “The oldest profession” has flourished, thanks to men seeking out strange women, but there’s precious little business going the other way around. Have you ever heard of a bottomless waiter? Women would never purchase a cup of coffee from such a person, trust me. Peering at naked strangers is not a woman thing. It’s a man thing.

But assuming, for a moment, that anything is possible and, perhaps, some women do purposely look, I can tell you that it would pale in comparison to the amount of body-watching some men sportswriters do. I recall more than one occasion when a group of us were throwing down a couple of drinks after a hard day in the press box, and only the men were participating in a survey. “Who is the most endowed of all?” on this team or in that league.

Are there accidental glances? Of course. In certain professions, this happens. Mature adults deal with such things. (Perhaps I’ve just answered the question of why the NFL is still struggling with this.) Funny, there never has been any male objection to women dominating the nursing profession or changing boys’ diapers. I guess it’s OK to look as long as you’re underpaid and doing the kind of dirty work that a man’s man avoids at all costs.

Although women sportswriters behave with the utmost professionalism in this difficult milieu, it is legitimate to question whether sportswriting must be an endeavor that involves a person being unclothed in front of any stranger.

But please remember, it was not a woman who first dreamed up the idea of conducting after-game inquiries of semi-clothed men inside a giant stink bomb. It was men, in their superior wisdom, who long ago wrote the commandment that athletes’ time is so precious, they couldn’t possibly sit on a chair above sea level with their pants on, surrounded by other clothed people, and answer a few questions after a game.

The dank, rank, subterranean strip-search for quotes was the man-made rule when I entered the game almost 20 years ago.

This sacred tradition began back in cave-man days, when only a few guys covered sports. It was easier for traveling teams and writers to catch their trains or planes if the one or two men covering the game drifted quickly through the locker room to grab a few quotes.

It was an unseemly solution even then. And now, with the situation multiplied by an overblown, co-ed press corps, it is not only unseemly but inefficient. There are now dozens, sometimes even hundreds of sports reporters covering a single professional event.

The logistics of squeezing all these people into a steamy locker room defy description. Most travel is now by charter or easily scheduled commercial flights, eliminating the necessity to turn showering into a sprint. There is now time for players to remain partially clothed while dozens of writers and television crews are milling about.

I hate to think that some girl now printing the alphabet is going to run into this problem in another 20 years. Nothing has hindered the progress and reputation of women sportswriters more than this silly, unrelenting locker room issue.

The failure to arrive at a peaceful resolution has convinced me that the answer is: Lock the door and throw away the key. Kick everybody out--the male and female reporters (yes TV, you too), the governors, agents, owners, college administrators, former players, fathers, assorted VIPs and their male offspring of all ages; hangers-on from every race, creed and walk of life.

Teams could do what is successfully done in men’s and women’s tennis and golf: Have the players’ association or team owners require athletes to come to an interview area, and fine them substantially if they refuse. It is more complicated logistically in a team situation, but glitches could be worked out.

Nonetheless it would then be the male journalists who would hold their blankets, stamp their feet and cry, “But it’s always been this way! Teams would use this policy to run away and never talk to us again!” I have no doubt that some NFL teams would try to take unfair advantage of this, but I still think panic is unwarranted. Good reporters, like Olson, are going to endure any hardship, topple virtually any obstacle to get their stories.

I do believe in the right to privacy. But if that’s really the issue in the NFL locker rooms, let’s throw the men out too. The right to privacy should not become a flag that is draped over the greater horror of discrimination.

The bottom line is, discrimination against anyone in any professional arena should never be tolerated, especially in this country. It is ironic that this issue resurfaces at a time when the crisis in the Middle East has America basking in stories contrasting the courage of our modern women soldiers with the backward treatment to which the veiled Saudi women are subjected.

Let’s wake up, check the calendar year and clean our own house. If women are lined up next to men poised to die for our country, surely they can be treated equally on our fields of sports journalism.