Mitten Hall’s audience of sportswriters and student-journalists fell silent Friday morning as the video, “#MoreThanMean” rolled on giant overhead screens. Men in studios, reading aloud vile comments sent to women sports reporters in return for, the narration says, “doing their jobs.”
Rape. Domestic abuse. Murder. The journalists, seen in the video sitting across from each reader, had seen each missive — and worse. The guys hadn’t.
As far as anyone knows, the men reading this stuff didn’t write it. Yet their eyes fall to the floor. Their voices trail off. They squirm, stammering apologies: For themselves. For #AllMen. For humankind.
“I feel like I need to apologize to my mother,” one reader says.
The Claire Smith Women in Sports Media symposium gathered for the first time Friday, bringing into the flesh too many luminaries from the twin worlds to count for panel discussions and Q&As on the past and future.
For most of the morning and afternoon, silence was at a premium — thanks to all the reporters and production crews milling around Mitten Hall. Once the video, which has garnered nearly 5 million YouTube views since its 2016 release, rolled on large screens to introduce the second panel, the room fell totally silent.
Degradation leadens Smith’s legend: Credentialed to enter the San Diego Padres’ clubhouse during the 1984 American League Championship Series, the then-Hartford Courant baseball writer and future Hall of Famer stepped into an uproar on the hunt for postgame interviews. Several men in the room demanded — in profane, misogynistic terms — Smith leave. She refused. So, security seized her and physically threw her out.
Teams and even leagues often uncorked a crass excuse for kicking journalists out of their facilities: Women in locker rooms had chances to leer at men in undress. The reality, Smith believed, was that pro sports organizations saw every inch of the ground they trod as a boys-only club — an ethos thoroughly dissected in Temple alumna and event panelist Marsha Cooke’s ESPN documentary about the locker wars, “Let Them Wear Towels.”
“It was really about not wanting women to be a part of a game that was considered a fortress,” Smith said.
But sexism went far beyond the locker room door. One reporter described receiving nasty emails for wearing the same dress shirt twice in a 7-month NBA season. Then-Boston Herald sportswriter Lisa Olson, who astonishingly became a public enemy after members of the New England Patriots football team menaced her in a 1990 locker room incident, recounted a letter she’d get, repeatedly, while undergoing breast cancer treatment.
It began like this: “Are you dead yet?”
WWTV-Indianapolis sports reporter Alexa Ross spent years toiling away “at a toxic workplace under a toxic boss,” she said — a guy who scoffed, “Everyone’s wondering why we’d hire a woman,” in the presence of an intern on her very first day, Ross said. When she finally lit out for another gig, that boss told her she’d never amount to anything. When jobs open at the old affiliate, she warns her colleagues not to apply.
And when women notice similar patterns at other positions? “Walk away,” Ross said.
ESPN NBA analyst Doris Burke in June became the first woman to call a men’s pro sports championship from the main booth. Burke has been delivering thoroughly magisterial analysis of pro basketball — from the booth and sidelines alike — for longer than anyone who worked on this article has been alive.
Exhibit A: The day she was asked to explain basketball’s global appeal while recording cutlines for NBA 2K.
“You need a ball, you need a hoop, and you need you,” Burke replied. “And you don’t need anything else.”
A tearjerker. In a video-game rap session. That’s Doris Burke.
Yet the year ESPN abruptly canned two-thirds of its lead hoops booth and placed Burke beside the also-priestly Mike Breen was, she said, the hardest of her career. For one, losing Jeff Van Gundy, the coach and analyst Burke described off-stage as “a friend, a colleague, and a mentor” proved tough to weather.
For another?
“If I screw up, it’s not like if anyone else screws up,” Burke said from the stage.
This story does attempt to produce heroes from without. “Allies,” in office-hours parlance.
Padres and Dodgers legend Steve Garvey, who stood with Smith outside the clubhouse in ’84 to protest her treatment, addressed the crowd on his respect for women with such passion that no one seemed to particularly care what he’s up to these days: A Trump backer and Republican Senate candidate in California, just two years after the fall of Roe.
There was Constance Baker Motley, a civil rights giant turned federal judge who in 1978 ruled that the New York Yankees’ ban on women reporters in the clubhouse violated their Fourteenth Amendment right to pursue job opportunities. The plaintiff in that case, magazine writer Melissa Ludtke, was in attendance, too — with her memoir, “Locker Room Talk,” in tow.
But the hero that kept coming up was not a single salvatory individual. Rather, the speakers exalted “the sisterhood” — women, from Jackie McMullen to Burke to Smith herself, who knew firsthand that they were baptized in treacherous waters. Albeit, Smith said, waters that were getting less treacherous with each courageous effort.
“We all have the power to speak up,” she told the room. “It doesn’t take away from what you do to stand up for someone else.”
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