Last Updated: March 27, 2000
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Women in sports
New Yorker cartoon sends wrong message
Opponents of women in the locker room need only read
Marisa Acocella’s cartoon to get ammunition for their cause
By Stephanie Salter
It’s only a New Yorker cartoon. I know. And saying that it’s offensive
will surely mark me as an uncool, humorless old fogie. I know.
But I’ll say it anyway.
Marisa Acocella’s eight-panel “Talk of the Town” about her foray into
the New York Knicks locker room is about as funny as getting a sweaty jockstrap
thrown at you.
I know about sweaty jockstraps being thrown at you because I used to
cover professional basketball and baseball for a living. Someone once threw
a dirty jock at me. Someone else once turned out all the lights in the
visitors’ clubhouse as soon as I got in the door. Another someone once
stood behind me — naked except for an empty Pioneer Chicken bucket over
his genitals — and made faces while I tried to interview one of his teammates.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Acocella may have been beside herself with glee on getting a press credential
that let her into the Knicks locker room, but I can’t think of an enclosed
space I would less like to inhabit than any pro sports dressing room. (OK.
Maybe an iron lung.)
Why was Acocella so eager to get into the room where the Knicks take
off and put on their clothes?
She says in the second panel of her strip that it’s “because I am the
world’s biggest Knicks Fan.” Right. And her next panel depicts a press
room briefing in which a Fox Sports Net staffer answers her questions about
the “nakedness quota” of basketball vs. football.
Never mind that press credentials don’t belong in the damp little hands
of fans. Never mind that fans pretending to work in a locker room or press
box make real reporters’ jobs that much harder.
What I can’t “never mind” is how Acocella spent her time in the Knicks’
changing room and how her visit slimes the dozens of women sportswriters
who have to go out every day and prove that they are genuine journalists
who deserve to be taken seriously.
Did the world’s biggest Knicks fan go about the room like a typical
fan, collecting autographs and gushing, “You’re awesome, man”? No, her
cartoon says she pulled out a tape recorder and asked the following questions
of Kurt Thomas, Chris Dudley, Latrell Sprewell and Charlie Ward:
Kurt, on the court you’re a wild man, but here you’re Mr. Mild Mannered.
What’s up? Are you a Libra?
(Of Dudley): What’s your favorite shorts-length?
(Of Sprewell): How do you feel about all the women in N.Y. having
crushes on you?
(Of Ward): If you have an issue with PEOPLE in the locker room who
aren’t undressing, what if we ALL undressed?
Even though women have been regularly covering men’s sports for almost
three decades, they are still a very high-profile minority whose motives
and behavior are suspected at most turns.
This past summer, when the world learned that sportswriter Samantha
Stevenson had conducted a long affair with former Philadelphia 76er Julius
Erving and that the two had produced a child, women sports journalists
across the country groaned. (When one of your required job skills is convincing
people that you don’t come to the ballpark or arena in hopes of sleeping
with a player, it’s a real drag to hear that a colleague has done just
that.)
Granted, it has been a long time since last I covered sports. Much has
changed, including the length of basketball shorts. One thing that hasn’t
changed (I hear) is the belief among women sports writers that — when it
comes to sexual issues — they’re all still lumped together. For better
or worse, what one woman does reflects on all the others.
True, Marisa Acocella is a successful New York cartoonist, not a sportswriter.
But did everyone know that when she flashed her press pass to a security
guard, walked into the Knicks locker room, turned on a tape recorder and
began to interview players?
Acocella’s strip ends with her question to point guard Charlie Ward
about everybody getting undressed. His answer, besides an upraised hand
in her face, is: “I’m ending this conversation. I’m sorry.”
Ward doesn’t like women reporters in the locker room. He wants them
kept out. Thanks to the world’s biggest Knicks fan, he’s got swell new
evidence for his argument.
Salter is an op-ed columnist for the San Francisco Examiner.
