Sports reporters need to adjust to covering opposite sex
August 19, 2007
By Phil Arvia
Full of a 21-year-old's brand of naive confidence, Julie Swieca took her Northwestern education and her microphone, strode into the Blackhawks' locker room at the old Chicago Stadium and -- froze.
"I was mortified," Swieca, the former WSCR-AM reporter, said over a recent lunch in Arlington Heights. "Hockey players, as much as any sport, tend not to cover up. I interviewed the first person I found who was dressed ... I was like, 'You'll do,' and I got out of there as fast as I could. I really was so intimidated by it."
Intimidation would over the years give way to resignation about the clothing optional strangeness that was her occupational hazard.
"I can remember it clear as day, that the Blackhawks would sit on this black leather couch, naked," Swieca said. "I remember thinking, 'Don't they stick to the couch?' ''
Swieca, now a north suburban pastry chef, deals today with sticky buns of another sort. But back then, working her way up over a decade to what eventually would become a gig hosting her own show at The Score, she found it hard to deal, period.
"I just remember that feeling of, 'What have I gotten myself into?' " she said. "I really thought it was going to be easy. You walk up to the player who scored the game-winning goal, and you get the interview. But I was so uncomfortable from the first minute I set foot in there."
I was listening to this anecdote because I'd just told a similar one about my first experience at a Chicago Sky women's basketball game last season. I entered the locker room following the WNBA team's first home game and was immediately overcome by the feeling that I wasn't supposed to be there.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone emerging from the curtains fronting the showers. I quickly located the one player I recognized -- Stacey Dales -- got a couple quotes and bolted, suddenly full of empathy for what female journalists have endured for years.
Toni Ginnetti, a Sun-Times sportswriter since 1986, chuckled at the tale of discomfort, and conceded, "In general, it's a weird place to do your job."
In general, yes, it is weird to interview men in various stages of undress. Weird and necessary.
"One thing people may not understand from not having been in the locker room is you're fighting for position," Swieca said. "If there's 40 media members waiting to talk to an athlete, you have to be as close as possible to hear what they're saying or to get your microphone close, so people will form that semicircle around the player while he's getting dressed.
"I don't want to be five inches from somebody who's getting dressed. But if I stay five feet back, will I be able to get my microphone in? Will I miss out on the interview because of my sense of decorum?"
It is a conundrum that does not exist in the WNBA -- despite my slight, er, exposure to the women's basketball league. The Sky's Kayte Christensen, a six-year veteran of the 10-year-old league, expressed surprise that anyone was anywhere near the shower so soon after the game.
"If that happened, they probably were fined," Christensen said. "It's a league requirement that we stay in uniform until the media is gone."
It is, by the way, a great policy.
"I think it's the most professional thing to do," Christensen said. "You're in uniform, it's right after the game, you're not making anybody wait, you're not making anyone uncomfortable sitting there in your bra and spandex. I like how it is.
"There's a really good reason for a lot of the rules that we have, and a lot of it is because we're trying to be the more presentable, more friendly, more marketable people, where the NBA doesn't really have to do that."
Cheryl Raye-Stout, who in 1983 became the first woman to work regularly in a Chicago pro sports locker room when she covered the White Sox for what was then WMAQ-AM radio, had a guess as to why the NBA would choose not to follow the WNBA's policy.
"Because a woman probably thought of it," Raye-Stout said. "It makes too much sense."
Actually, the credit goes to Brian McIntyre, the NBA's senior vice president of basketball communications, who happened to be on hand when league commissioner David Stern gathered his braintrust together and asked, "If you could start a league from scratch, what would you do?"
McIntyre knew of the NBA's open locker room policy, similar to that of other pro sports leagues, which often resulted in crowds of interviewers around undressed subjects.
He also knew the NCAA did it differently, bringing players out to interviewers and closing the dressing rooms.
"It's the only line of work I know of where people conduct interviews naked," McIntyre said. "I said, 'Here's the way we do it: Let's put a finite cap on it; let's keep it clean and streamline it for the people doing the grunt work -- the beat writers and the TV reporters who need a quick sound bite. You can do feature interviews other times.'
"It's worked well for everybody."
So why not bring the WNBA's policy into the NBA (or, for that matter, Major League Baseball or the NFL)? McIntyre has had informal discussions to that end.
"People are reluctant to make changes," McIntyre said. "It isn't going to happen this year. But I would hope over the next season to discuss it further and see where it might lead."
Such a change would be another step in the evolution of locker room decorum -- or lack thereof.
In 1978, a federal judge ordered equal access for female reporters in response to a lawsuit filed when baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred Sports Illustrated's Melissa Ludtke from interviewing players in the locker room during the 1977 World Series. Open minds didn't necessarily follow open doors.
Not everything turned into the Lisa Olson incident -- in 1990, the Boston Herald reporter was surrounded by several naked New England Patriots and verbally assaulted while one of the players groped himself, sparking a national furor. But lesser, if less than subtle, harassment occurred.
Raye-Stout had her path smoothed on the Sox beat by manager Tony LaRussa, who made sure Sox staffers understood she was to be treated as any other accredited media member.
The Bears, however, were a different story, allowing Raye-Stout into the locker room after games, but confining her to a Halas Hall hallway after workouts during the week.
"The one time I did go in, during the '80s, during their heyday, several players screamed and yelled at me," Raye-Stout said. "None of my peers came to my help, and the PR guys go, 'Sorry, you're going to have to leave.'
"It took a player -- (quarterback) Jim Harbaugh of all people. He said, 'I don't understand why she's sitting out here. Why isn't she allowed to go in there?' They couldn't answer him. Here's a player -- a player -- who came to my defense."
Mostly, though, Raye-Stout's sense of humor was her best protection -- as was the case with noted White Sox flake Steve Lyons, a utility player best known for being traded for Tom Seaver in 1986 -- at least until he was fired from FOX television for a racially insensitive remark about Lou Piniella during last season's playoffs.
"I was talking to (reliever) Barry Jones, and (Lyons) yells to me, 'Hey, Cheryl, look at me!'" Raye-Stout said. "He's got nothing on, and he's posing. I turn, I walk away.
"The next day, I brought a bottle of suntan lotion, and ... told him, 'You missed some of your lines.' I felt I had to use humor in order to deal with it. Otherwise you become a pariah with them if you try to make a big deal. Some people always wanted to make a big deal, and you can't, because otherwise you're not accepted. They're not my buddies, they're not my friends, but I want to be able to do my job, do it well, get in, get out and get what I need."
Ginnetti, too, frequently chose to handle things on her own. But, once, a scene in a baseball clubhouse involving another female reporter required something more.
"I said to the person, 'You can't let that go by' -- and it was something much worse than what happened to Lisa Olson," Ginnetti said. "So the person wrote a letter to the league office, to the league PR people at the time. It was handled immediately, internally.
"The player who was involved was told to write a letter of apology to the reporter who was involved. The next time he was in town he was to apologize to her in person and the league president wrote a letter to her apologizing."
Such incidents are few and far between. But the notion that women don't belong in a locker room is never far away. Indeed, it is hardly uncommon to hear female reporters demeaned -- out of their earshot, of course -- with a two-word, rhyming insult meant to insinuate they have roving eyes.
"Checker" would be the second word. Swieca first heard the phrase when ex-Cubs first baseman Mark Grace employed it while chatting with a bunch of writers.
"I was, one, appalled that there were women who would fall into that category," she said, "and two, appalled that the players had a name for it."
But, while Swieca believed the phrase wouldn't apply to "99.9 percent" of the women she worked with, she had a cautionary word for at least one athlete.
"I remember talking to (Former Bulls center and current radio man) Bill Wennington about it once," she said. "I said, 'Why are you so uncomfortable with having women in the locker room? You should be uncomfortable with having anyone in the locker room.'
" 'First of all, you should be uncomfortable with any of these perfect strangers seeing you naked, but for that matter, what makes you think all the male reporters are straight? If you're really looking at it as the women are checking you out because you want a date, maybe some of the guys are checking you out for the same reason.'"
Phil Arvia can be reached at
parvia@dailysouthtown.com or (708) 633-5949. Read his blog at
http://blogs.dailysouthtown.com/arvia
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Constitutional law, hopefully.