ESPN's "Let Them Wear Towels"

With locker rooms once again in the news, despite decades-old settled policies on open access, I thought I'd give everyone a heads-up to a terrific documentary coming in July by ESPN and Break Thru Films.

 "Let Them Wear Towels" debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. It captures the pioneering efforts of an intrepid and incredibly young group of women sports journalists to gain equal access to pro locker rooms for post-game interviews and, even harder, to win professional acceptance and respect.

You'll see the breaking of the "locker room barrier" when I was a reporter for The New York Times in the 1970s; Sports Illustrated's Melissa Ludtke suing the Yankees for club house access; CBS' Lesley Visser's path-breaking work in television, and more.

The documentary airs July 23 as part of ESPN's "Nine for IX" series. Check it out!

My Open Letter to Don Cherry

Dear Don,
Hi! Remember me? It's Robin, the young woman who used to cover the NHL for The New York Times back in the day.

I haven't seen you in person since the late 1970s, but I caught your remarks on "Hockey Night in Canada" from this past Saturday as they went viral. You were all out of sorts about women reporters in the locker room. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Don't you remember? I guess you don't...

Read the rest at ESPN-W

Don Cherry's Short Memory on Locker Rooms

Now Don Cherry asserts on "Hockey Night in Canada" that women reporters should not have access to professional team locker rooms. Here's the video via Huffington Post.


What's really weird is that, thanks to Coach Cherry, the Boston Bruins back in the day (1970s) were the first team to allow me into their locker room as a matter of policy. I was a sports reporter for The New York Times then, covering the NHL. Opening the door was Cherry's decision, urged by the team's pr man par excellence Nate Greenberg. Cherry's memory is really bad. But I certainly wouldn't forget the first coach and team to give equal access to a female member of the Professional Hockey Writers Association.

Concussions and NFL Culture Change

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell asked for and got a platform at Harvard School of Public Health this afternoon to offer his thoughts on promoting safety in football and other contact sports. His speech came four days after three top QBs were lost to concussions on a single game day.

I had hoped Goodell would grab this chance to get tough on his bosses, ask them to face the problem with urgency and demand harsher disincentives for the brutal use of helmets during tackles. But it was not to be. Goodell's speech, which he read from a prepared text, instead promoted the good intentions of the NFL while sprinkled with gratuitous references to Harvard's college football history. Goodell presented a compendium of sports safety initiatives the league is involved with, most targeting youth players. But he didn't make a shred of policy news.

He could have called for a new rule requiring teams to immediately pull players from the field and the game if they "helmet butt" other players. Instead he gave the tired explanation that the current regulations deal with the problem and need to be enforced. He repeatedly suggested that "a change in the culture" would cure the ill.

Thing is, the current regulations and the idea of a change in culture put all the onus on the "victim" -- looking to the hurt player to acknowledge an injury after the fact. What about the responsibility of the "perpetrators" as I think of them?

Public health is all about prevention and Goodell's ideas for improving safety in the NFL are not it. Prevention would be creating disincentives of such immediacy and magnitude that an NFL defensive player wouldn't dare helmet butt the opponent. I'm thinking immediate suspension from the game, something that really hurts the team. The $30,000 fine levied on the Texans' Tim Dobbins several days after his Sunday assault on Chicago QB Jay Cutler did nothing to affect the Texans' competitive ability during that game - while Chicago had to play without its starting QB.

A player might think twice before pulling the helmet move if he knows it will be the last move of the game for him, that he'll be ejected, and that, in addition to hurting his opponent, he will be directly hurting his team's best interests.

Goodell received polite applause after his presentation. Then the media gathered around to ask if the NFL had reached any decision yet about testing players for Human Growth Hormone (HGH).  No, it had not.

International Day of the Girl: The Threat of Education

Today is the first International Day of the Girl. In the public health world, where I worked for 13 years, it was always said that the most efficient and effective way to improve health globally was to educate girls and women. It also happens to be the best way to improve economies and to enlighten societies. This is unsettling to static, patriarchal nations. It may even be unsettling to people in our own country.

In "Her Crime Was Loving Schools," New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has written about the 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot this week by the Taliban for advocating for girls' education. The point blank shooting by masked men who boarded her school bus in the assassination attempt -- was an abomination decried by the Pakistani government and one that should be denounced by all who call themselves civilized. [at this writing Malala Yousafzai is still alive but in critical condition after bullets to her head and neck]

Kristof writes that the shooting and other recent international assaults against girls "remind us that the global struggle for gender equality is the paramount moral struggle of this century, equivalent to the campaigns against slavery in the 19th century and against totalitarianism in the 20th century."

Kristof does not exaggerate. I add to his words my archived blog post on the 40th anniversary of coeducation at Princeton University and the work that remains to assure that girls worldwide reach their human potential.

Baseball, Locker Rooms and Equal Protection

Thirty-four years ago today, Federal Judge Constance Baker Motley ruled that female sports reporters were to be allowed equal access to Yankee Stadium's locker rooms. The plaintiff was Melissa Ludtke, a young journalist (and friend of mine) then at Sports Illustrated who had been barred from the Yankees and Dodgers locker rooms during the 1977 World Series. The lead defendant was Major League Baseball's Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.

 Yankee Stadium was a city-owned facility. Motley cited the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause. Case closed.  But not really...

The ruling was hardly the end of the story for women reporters who still had to contend with other teams and sports, yet it was exceedingly high profile and served notice to all leagues (and symbolically to any all-male institution) that the time had come; women would be treated as the professionals they were or the law would have something to say about it.
As Melissa explained to me today via FB: "Technically only Yankee Stadium was affected by Motley's ruling, and Major League Baseball appealed that decision. In early October, we were back in Motley's district courtroom twice, once for a hearing amending her ruling and then Kuhn's lawyers refused to agree that Motley's order be extended to the city of Philadelphia to allow equal access there during the playoffs. But on January 3, 1979, Kuhn attorney's notified the Second Circuit's Court of Appeals that Major League Baseball would not pursue further its appeal of Motley's decision. When the baseball season opened in 1979, equal access was the rule with all of the league's teams."

Others of us had been in NBA and NHL locker rooms since 1975 (Newsday's Jane Gross was the pioneer covering basketball; The Daily News' Lawrie Mifflin and myself at The New York Times were the intrepid female duo covering ice hockey).

But Ludtke vs. Kuhn and Yankee Stadium sent the loudest message to date. Yet here we are 34 years later with another closed room still to contend with. My question: When is the NFL going to put a woman in the anchor booth?? We could all die waiting....

NFL Referees Built That

With the regular refs locked out by NFL management and with college replacements on the field, the whole weekend saw football games that looked more like hockey or rugby rumbles. The uncalled late hits alone were terrifying. Several fistfights broke out. The refs were confused or hesitant or equally overeager in calling infractions. The men in stripes couldn't control the game, and the players knew it.

The Monday night Seattle-Green Bay game-ending call topped it all.  After the Seattle quarterback's Hail Mary pass was unmistakably intercepted, Seahawks' Golden Tate and Green Bay's Jennings landed on the turf and wrestled for what seemed like an hour as the officials tried to clear the pack. One ref signaled touchdown; the other signaled no touchdown. The replay, shown immediately by ESPN to millions, testified to an interception (and to earlier offensive pass interference by Seattle -- no NFL pro ref would have missed that). But then came the announcement that, after review, the ruling on the field would stand. Seattle ended up "winning" the game 14-12. Read the NFL's exegesis of the call.

We've all had enough -- the press, the players, the fans in the stand, the fans at home. We have not been watching NFL ball the past 3 weeks. This is clear and needs no replay.

The owners are willing to pay tens of millions to a single player but won't cough up a little change for the guys who actually run the game on the field (NFL refs make between $25,000 and $70,000 tops) nor guarantee their paltry pensions (let them eat 401Ks). Prevalent attitude this election year...

Michelle O at DNC: Don't Slam the Door of Opportunity Behind You

Michelle Obama at the DNC last night had some great messages about equity, education, health care and the true meaning of success, while also telling the story of Barack and her own modest beginnings, the debt owed to govt student loan programs and their continuing focus on providing a good upbringing and better world for their girls and, by extension, all of the next generation.

photo AP

And without saying the word "Romney" she managed by implication to undercut the Republican candidate's economic policies, his character and his moral values.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUpN6klYP9o&feature=player_embedded

"Barack.. believes that when you work hard and done well and
walk through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it
shut behind you."

"Because for Barack, success isn't about how much money you make.  It is
about the difference you make in people's lives."

"And he believes that women are more than capable of making
our own choices about our bodies and our health care."

Taking Your Husband's Name

My new friend Carol Cassara has a great prose poem post on her blog Middle-Aged Diva, musing about the choice of whether to change your last name to his when you get married. She's let me share it with you. Here's an appetizer; then read the rest at her blog.

These arrived the other day.
Yes, the college I'm teaching at needs to have them on file
to be sure I have the appropriate credentials
to be teaching young minds. 

Not that these tell you much

except that I met a university's degree criteria.

But, whose name is on them?

Mine. 

That is M's surname, which I took in 1972 when we married the first time. 

And that's who I was as I finished my college career.

And then, one day, after he left, I was writing a check in Publix on Appalachee Parkway in Tallahassee, Fla. {Yes, there was a day when grocery stores did not take credit cards and debit cards had not yet been invented.}  I remember the moment vividly. I stopped, mid-signature and thought to myself, Why do I have this name? 

CONT'D at : Middle-Aged Diva

Purchase Power = Women Power

BlogHer is a big deal. And a blast this year in NYC. Plus the Expo hall is jammed w brand name company booths trying to interest us in their latest products. Women in U.S. make up to 85% of household consumer purchase decisions. 

Sponsors of the event include Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Hillshire Farm, Samsung, Dannon, Lysol (!), Wells Fargo and Harley-Davidson Motorcycles to name a few.