Locker Room Hassle Exception, Not Rule

Trying to resolve the lingering crisis of female reporters in athletic locker rooms--the problem is threatening to bring down the country--a multitude of suggestions has been introduced.

It is recommended, first, that the athlete wrap himself in a towel. The only trouble is, before wrapping oneself in a towel, one finds it customary to remove one’s pants.

So, to avoid nudity in the presence of female reporters, a way must be devised, all at once, to remove the pants and wrap around the towel without exposure.

If this doesn’t work, the option is showering in one’s pants, or going home dirty.

Professional golfers don’t shower at the scene. Repairing to the clubhouse for refreshment, they pick up their street shoes, shined by the attendant, and take off their golf shoes, which will be shined before the next round.

For a fleeting moment, their feet are exposed, but their wives have yet to lodge a protest over female reporters seeing their husbands in such a state of undress.

It also has been recommended that no reporters be permitted in the locker room, that an interview area be set up in the hall.

Well, that’s all right for polo, which features four to a side, but you try to herd 90 football players into an interview area and you will encounter a logistics problem never envisioned.

When Harold Ballard, late owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, barred female reporters from the locker room, he got an understandable beef from the women.

Ballard relented. He said he would allow women in the locker room if they removed their clothes. They countered that male reporters weren’t asked to remove their clothes, after which one women volunteered to remove hers, if Ballard removed his.

In the end, no clothes were removed. Instead, it was recommended that Ballard take a brain test, a procedure he likely stood to fail.

For barring women from the locker room of the Cincinnati Bengals, Coach Sam Wyche recently was fined $30,000. Sam had a fine coming, but you’re not sure it was $30,000 worth. To be fined that much, Sam would have to bar women from the ladies’ room.

Nor are you sure that the football commissioner who fined Sam should have asked a Harvard law professor to investigate an indignity in New England where, in the Patriots’ locker room, a player is said to have exposed himself at close range in front of a female reporter.

How does Harvard figure in this issue? This is a case for Boston cops with a file on flashers.

What the player did wasn’t nice, but it wasn’t typical, either. For years now, day after day, female reporters have conducted their business in locker rooms, usually without incident.

They are familiar with stories of Henry Aaron pushing a strawberry pie into the face of a male writer, of Dave Kingman dumping a bucket of ice water on another, of Mean Joe Greene emptying soda pop on the typewriter of still another.

Verbal abuse has been constant and each crisis passes in the night, mainly because one entering a locker room isn’t looking to deal with mountains of intellect.

But in the recent cases of female sportswriters, the response has been out of proportion to the stimulus. Firmly and quietly, the rights of the women should have been reestablished and the matters dismissed without the circus that has been created.

USA Today and the Boston Herald especially have gone coconuts, dramatizing the issue, and the female writer from New England takes her story to national TV, telling of death threats and claiming the locker room adventure was so traumatic that she must leave the beat.

If we are her editor, and well-wisher, we tell her to duck this kind of action. “Order has been restored,” we say. “Go back to work. Don’t try to make news; report it.”

Somewhere down the line, the locker room will become a problem again. Traveled women will yawn and deal with it appropriately.