Female sports writers denied entry to locker room at Lucas Oil Stadium

[wade boggs chicken dinner]

 
Good gravy. It's not "waving the victim flag" to tweet out the fact that they are being treated badly. They weren't "woe is me"ing.  They were calling bullshit -- which it was entirely appropriate to do, given the bullshit -- and they also then turned around and remarked that the organizations had handled it well post facto. Their restraint, all things considered, was admirable. If I were denied entry, to the place my employer required me to go, because I was a woman, by a misogynistic old turd who thought the sight of men grabassing would be too much for my delicate feminine sensibility to handle, I'd scream until glass shattered and then go full Keith Moon on whatever room I was in.
 
The problem with being aggrieved parties, like women in sports media, is that you have two choices: just grit your teeth and deal with it, or raise your voice and have people call you victims and whiners and complainers.  Gritting teeth didn't work for the first like 100 years, so now they're getting tough, as they should, and when they do they are greeted with a bunch of people calling them victims and microaggressors and psycho bitches. Which, again, is nonsense. They were treated badly, so we should all say "That sucks that they were treated badly." 
 
And again, it doesn't matter that the guy was old. It would be worse if he were young, but old age does not absolve you of the responsibility to treat people fairly. And if he is so old that he can't understand the basic rules of fairness and propriety, the team should have shuffled him into retirement already. 

 
A couple of things on the bolded.  First of all, they didn't just point out that they were being treated badly.  In her first, she said that she "just about lost it."  It wasn't just about being treated unfairly, she absolutely portrayed herself as a victim and does not strike me as being "restrained."
 
And I would take exception to your statement about being old.  Perhaps the guy was treating people as fairly as he could at that moment.  It's like when an old person looks at a young-ish looking coach or ballplayer and says, "Do you have any identification?"  We laugh when Brad Stevens gets carded at a NBA game.  It's not age discrimination.
 
And in the pre-twitter age, it would have been nothing more than a short discussion on the way out of the building.  The only reason it's a story is because they had an ability to post something on a public forum in the two or three minutes they were detained.

 

[Marciano490]

Of course she just about lost it, she's a woman and was emotional.  Maybe she was even on her period.
 
In all seriousness, why wouldn't she be upset?  She's being restrained from doing her job for outdated reasons.  She's missing choice quotes and interviews while her male colleagues - who already have institutional advantages - are getting them down, and in the 2-3 minutes she was locked outside she was put in a position where she didn't know what questions the players had already asked which compromises her ability to interview once she's in.  It's a big deal for her livelihood.

 

[nighthob]

Aside from the fact that she literally couldn't know that even if she were in there... I mean seriously, have you ever been in the chaos of a post-game locker room? I can tell you that it's impossible to follow all this in a baseball locker room with teams less than half the size and coaching staffs a quarter the size. In an NFL locker room in this age? I mean maybe if she had one of Bradley Cooper's magic pills she could simultaneously follow all sixty plus conversations, but in the real world even her male counterparts are all asking the same questions over and over again and the players are all giving the same trite answers to all the same questions over and over again.

 

[Gunfighter 09]

The only party worthy of criticism here is the Colts stadium operations staff for putting an untrained worker in a bad spot. Understanding why women need to be allowed in a male locker room at an NFL game (as opposed to your local gym) requires knowledge of how journalism works. That is not common knowledge, and, assuming the elderly gentleman was untrained, is not something we can hold against him. Once again, assuming he was untrained, Ken is wrong, the old man has no responsibility to allow people of the opposite gender into a male or female bathroom or changing room.
 
The bad guys here are the Colts organization and management, not the reporters trying to do their job and not some old man being asked to guard a door to a room full of naked men. Come on Pats fans, focus on how the Colts management is made up of bad people who are bad at their job who put old people in bad positions and don't consider what is required to allow female reporters to do their job properly. I think NFL security should set up a sting operation to ensure all future Colts Stadium staff are properly trained in how to handle journalists.

 

[nighthob]

The only party worthy of criticism here is the Colts stadium operations staff for putting an untrained worker in a bad spot. Understanding why women need to be allowed in a male locker room at an NFL game (as opposed to your local gym) requires knowledge of how journalism works. That is not common knowledge, and, assuming the elderly gentleman was untrained, is not something we can hold against him. Once again, assuming he was untrained, Ken is wrong, the old man has no responsibility to allow people of the opposite gender into a male or female bathroom or changing room.
 
The bad guys here are the Colts organization and management, not the reporters trying to do their job and not some old man being asked to guard a door to a room full of naked men. Come on Pats fans, focus on how the Colts management is made up of bad people who are bad at their job who put old people in bad positions and don't consider what is required to allow female reporters to do their job properly. I think NFL security should set up a sting operation to ensure all future Colts Stadium staff are properly trained in how to handle journalists.

Now this is reasonable. When you're an NFL team you need to have professional security staff working the locker rooms. There's no excuse for putting a retired WalMart greeter outside the locker room. Other sports teams that don't employ their own security personnel at least hire professional companies to handle that for them.

 

[KenTremendous]

We laugh when Brad Stevens gets carded at a NBA game.  It's not age discrimination.
 
And in the pre-twitter age, it would have been nothing more than a short discussion on the way out of the building.  The only reason it's a story is because they had an ability to post something on a public forum in the two or three minutes they were detained.

 
To the first sentence: I don't think you truly mean to equate the half-dozen times a young-looking dude was briefly kept out of an athletic arena with the decades-old, and still daily and on-going mistreatment and harassment of women in sports media. Right?
 
To the second: yes, the only reason it's a story is that the mistreated party had an ability to post on a public forum. I think that is a good thing -- that fewer examples of crappy behavior just disappear into the ether, and are instead dragged into the public square and exposed for being crappy, so maybe other people in other places will (if they didn't know already) that you shouldn't act like that.
 
If anyone thinks "too big a deal" was made out of this, I would ultimately respond by saying: (a) barely any deal was made out of this, at all, really, and (b) you can think that, I guess, but thinking that is far easier when you are not the constantly-aggrieved party, and (c) what is the benefit of thinking that, over thinking "Ugh, that sucks, that old guy sucks, hope it doesn't happen again?"

 

[E5 Yaz]

I'm so confused.

 

[EricFeczko]

Yeah, I'm not sure why that last sentence is copyrighted either.


EDIT: Copyrighted, not trademarked *facepalm*. Thanks Marciano.

 

[Marciano490]

Yeah, I'm not sure why that last sentence is trademarked either.

 
Copyrighted.

 

[Dehere]

The whole practice of allowing postgame locker room access at all is outdated and unnecessary. Plenty of major events including the Final Four, the Masters, the Kentucky Derby, the tennis US Open, and the Super Bowl deny locker room access to all or the vast majority of credentialed media and stage more formal press conferences and none of these events seem to be hurting for post-event coverage.
 
Given that teams and leagues will take virtually any opportunity to a) control the message and b) make more money, I don't know why so many teams continue to allow a chaotic locker-room scrum when you could so easily conduct a more controlled press conference and slap a sponsor's logo on the backdrop.
 
The public shaming seems a little unnecessary to me, particularly with one of the aggrieved journos going out of their way to call the person who made the error a "geezer". Somebody made a mistake, it was corrected, and the team - which, to give them a little credit, was hosting this group as part of a diversity seminar for sportswriters - apologized for the error. The response strikes me as a bit out of proportion.

 

[JimBoSox9]

 
Good gravy. It's not "waving the victim flag" to tweet out the fact that they are being treated badly. They weren't "woe is me"ing.  They were calling bullshit -- which it was entirely appropriate to do, given the bullshit -- and they also then turned around and remarked that the organizations had handled it well post facto. Their restraint, all things considered, was admirable. If I were denied entry, to the place my employer required me to go, because I was a woman, by a misogynistic old turd who thought the sight of men grabassing would be too much for my delicate feminine sensibility to handle, I'd scream until glass shattered and then go full Keith Moon on whatever room I was in.
 
The problem with being aggrieved parties, like women in sports media, is that you have two choices: just grit your teeth and deal with it, or raise your voice and have people call you victims and whiners and complainers.  Gritting teeth didn't work for the first like 100 years, so now they're getting tough, as they should, and when they do they are greeted with a bunch of people calling them victims and microaggressors and psycho bitches. Which, again, is nonsense. They were treated badly, so we should all say "That sucks that they were treated badly." 
 
And again, it doesn't matter that the guy was old. It would be worse if he were young, but old age does not absolve you of the responsibility to treat people fairly. And if he is so old that he can't understand the basic rules of fairness and propriety, the team should have shuffled him into retirement already. 

 
I think maybe what makes the nighthob/Oil Can side of it look at this and say what the journalists did was an overreaction (to simplify the crux of the debate) is that they used social media to do it.  I think (maybe) I can agree with this post and Rev's posts top to bottom, and still coherently think it would have been objectively "better" for the ladies to react just as forcefully, but within the confines of the stadium/staff and then their columns.  Obviously one can disagree with that, and to be honest you're probably closer to right as far as current mores treat airing it out on Twitter, but a part of me feels like its the nuclear option, so to speak, because of the potential for out-of-control exponential backlash if a thing hits at just the right moment.  

 

[j44thor]

Sorry but the whole "old, out of touch geezer" comment rubs me the wrong way.  She also doesn't earn any points with me by making sure we know she has covered male sports "all over the world".  She seems to have a bit of an inflated sense of self-worth.  
 
You are a sports journalist.  For all we know the "old geezer" may have served for this country and actually did something meaningful for society.  
 
I agree with those that put the blame on the Colts for putting this gentleman in a position he likely wasn't qualified or properly trained to do.  The way the tweets read she puts all the onus on the "geezer".

 

[Reverend]

I honestly think people are making a bigger deal out of the tweets than is warranted out of a weird strawman about going after people making a big deal out of things when it is unwarranted, even though that didn't seem to happen.
 
If they had outed the guy's name/identity, yeah, that would have been fucked up. But all I see is someone tweeting, "I can't believe I still have to put up with this fucking bullshit when I'm just trying to do my job." 
 
There are about a zillion similar tweets daily. That this bugs anyone strikes me as odd.

 

[Reverend]

Also, reporting at that level suck and is a cut throat business. There are more than a few successful journalists who would have wanted to burn the place to the fucking ground when initially denied entrance.
 
I like to think I would have. I like people who fight for their rights, but that's me.

 

[Devizier]

I'm just disappointed that this thread didn't descend into a discussion about how shitty the Rod Rust year was.

 

[Gunfighter 09]

 
 that old guy sucks, 

 
You have nowhere near enough information to make this judgement. 

 

[Grin&MartyBarret]

Sorry but the whole "old, out of touch geezer" comment rubs me the wrong way.  She also doesn't earn any points with me by making sure we know she has covered male sports "all over the world".  She seems to have a bit of an inflated sense of self-worth.  
 
You are a sports journalist.  For all we know the "old geezer" may have served for this country and actually did something meaningful for society.  
 
I agree with those that put the blame on the Colts for putting this gentleman in a position he likely wasn't qualified or properly trained to do.  The way the tweets read she puts all the onus on the "geezer".

Yeah, how do we know the old guy wasn't Dick Winters? That'd put that uppity broad in her place.

 

[lars10]

Yeah, I'm not sure why that last sentence is copyrighted either.


EDIT: Copyrighted, not trademarked *facepalm*. Thanks Marciano.

when you type ( c ) without any spaces (c) it makes the copyrighted symbol.

 

[Reverend]

 
You have nowhere near enough information to make this judgement. 

 
There is a great deal of conjecture about that guy in this thread.

 

[nighthob]

I think maybe what makes the nighthob/Oil Can side of it look at this and say what the journalists did was an overreaction (to simplify the crux of the debate) is that they used social media to do it.  I think (maybe) I can agree with this post and Rev's posts top to bottom, and still coherently think it would have been objectively "better" for the ladies to react just as forcefully, but within the confines of the stadium/staff and then their columns.  Obviously one can disagree with that, and to be honest you're probably closer to right as far as current mores treat airing it out on Twitter, but a part of me feels like its the nuclear option, so to speak, because of the potential for out-of-control exponential backlash if a thing hits at just the right moment.

See, if they'd maligned the Colts for putting a "geezer" that didn't know the job at the locker room door, I would probably have agreed with them. Instead they attacked someone waaaaay beneath them on the socioeconomic economic scale. It was simply terrible manners.

 

[nighthob]

I'm just disappointed that this thread didn't descend into a discussion about how shitty the Rod Rust year was.

Because in the new PC environment Patriot missile jokes are a banning offense.

 

[Reverend]

Because in the new PC environment Patriot missile jokes are a banning offense.

 
Nope--just a suspension.
 
In case anyone is wondering, there was prior history and warnings. He effectively asked for it, so I obliged.

 

[richgedman'sghost]

Huh, he had a disagreement with your opinion so you suspended him? I thought this community tried to promote a diversity of opinion? I did not think his opinion was totally out of line. Maybe I'm wrong, but I liked the back and forth in this thread. I guess the good Rev does not like dissent. Was he banned for the Patriot Missle joke? If so I take back my criticism. . One bad comment gets a suspension? Sorry if I'm out of line ..Just confused about why he's gone.

 

[The Napkin]

What part of "prior history and warnings" was so hard to understand that you think it was "one bad comment"?

 

[richgedman'sghost]

Sorry for upsetting everyone. I was just asking a question about what his prior history was? I did not see any warnings issued in the thread which is why I inquired in the first place. I guess I was asking what evidence in his prior history required a suspension? Again I am not arguing for or against. Just was curious.

 

[richgedman'sghost]

Again I do not want to upset the powers that be. Please accept my apology if I was out of line.

 

[wibi]

Sorry for upsetting everyone. I was just asking a question about what his prior history was? I did not see any warnings issued in the thread which is why I inquired in the first place. I guess I was asking what evidence in his prior history required a suspension? Again I am not arguing for or against. Just was curious.

 
Once you've been around here for a little more time you will learn that the moderators tend to take a very light hand in moderation so when they do step in the grievance is normally well past what would get one suspended on another board.   
 
EDIT:  Didnt realize you had an account since 2006.  You should know how this place works and how lenient in moderation guys like Rev really are. 

 

[richgedman'sghost]

Thank you for the explanation. I am on mobile. Could u delete the above comments. Thank you again WiFi and Napkin.

 

[SumnerH]

Sorry for upsetting everyone. I was just asking a question about what his prior history was? I did not see any warnings issued in the thread which is why I inquired in the first place

 
FWIW, warnings usually happen via private messages.

 

[SpokaneSoxFan]

It was during the Gulf War as I remember a joke that had something to do with "What do Lisa Olson & Scuds have in common?"   A "They have both seen Patriot Missiles in close proximity."

 

[soxfan121]

It was during the Gulf War as I remember a joke that had something to do with "What do Lisa Olson & Scuds have in common?"   A "They have both seen Patriot Missiles in close proximity."

 
hlord: