Female journalists report hostility and triumph at Smith Sports Media symposium

Mitten Hall’s audience of sportswriters and student journalists fell silent Friday morning as the video “#MoreThanMean” played across giant ceiling screens. Men in studios reading vile comments sent to female sports reporters in return, as the narrative goes, “for doing their jobs.”

Rape. Domestic abuse. Murder. The journalists sitting across from each reader in the video had seen every letter – and worse. The boys hadn’t done it.

As far as anyone knows, the men reading this stuff didn’t write it. But her gaze falls to the ground. Their voices fall silent. They squirm and stammer excuses: For themselves. For #AllMen. For humanity.

“I feel like I need to apologize to my mom,” says one reader.

The Claire Smith Women in Sports Media Symposium gathered for the first time Friday, bringing out too many luminaries from both worlds to count for panels and Q&As on the past and future.

There was silence for most of the morning and afternoon – thanks to all the reporters and production teams who were in Mitten Hall. As the video, which has garnered nearly 5 million YouTube views since its release in 2016, played on large screens to introduce the second panel, there was complete silence in the room.

Humiliation shapes Smith’s legend: The then-Hartford Courant baseball writer and future Hall of Famer, who was allowed into the San Diego Padres’ clubhouse during the 1984 American League Championship Series, found himself in a frenzy while seeking postgame interviews. Several men in the room demanded — in profane, misogynistic words — Smith to leave. She refused. So she was arrested by security and physically thrown out.

Teams and even leagues have often found a blatant excuse to kick journalists out of their facilities: women in locker rooms had the chance to ogle unclothed men. Smith believed the reality was that professional sports organizations viewed every inch of the ground they stepped on as a boys-only club — an ethos highlighted in the Temple graduate and event panelist’s ESPN documentary “Let Them Wear Towels.” Marsha Cooke’s locker room wars have been analyzed in depth.”

“It was really about women not being 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 jersey twice in a seven-month NBA season. Then-Boston Herald sportswriter Lisa Olson, who stunningly became a public enemy after members of the New England Patriots football team threatened her in a locker room incident in 1990, recounted a letter she received repeatedly during her breast cancer treatment.

It started like this: “Are you dead yet?”

WWTV-Indianapolis sports reporter Alexa Ross toiled for years “in a toxic workplace under a toxic boss,” she said – a man who mocked her in the presence of an intern: “Everyone wonders why we would hire a woman.” . Right on the first day, Ross said. When she finally got ready for another gig, the boss told her that nothing would ever come of it. When positions become available at the old subsidiary, she warns her colleagues not to apply.

And if women notice similar patterns elsewhere? “Go away,” Ross said.

ESPN NBA analyst Doris Burke became the first woman to call a men’s professional sports championship from the main stand in June. For longer than anyone else who has contributed to this article, Burke has provided a thoroughly masterful analysis of professional basketball – both from the booth and from the sidelines.

Exhibit A: The day she was asked to explain the global appeal of basketball while recording cutlines for NBA 2K.

“You need a ball, you need a basket and you need yourself,” Burke replied. “And you don’t need anything else.”

A river of tears. In a video game rap session. This is Doris Burke.

But the year in which ESPN abruptly eliminated two-thirds of its primary basketball slot and placed Burke alongside the equally priestly Mike Breen was, in her opinion, the most difficult of her career. For one thing, the loss of Jeff Van Gundy, the coach and analyst whom Burke described backstage as a “friend, colleague and mentor,” proved difficult to overcome.

For another?

“If I mess up, it’s not like anyone else is messing up,” Burke said from the stage.

This story tries to create heroes from outside. “Allies” in office jargon.

Padres and Dodgers legend Steve Garvey, standing with Smith outside the clubhouse in 1984 to protest their treatment, addressed the crowd about respecting women with such passion that no one seemed to care what he did anymore today: a Trump supporter and Republican Senate candidate in California, just two years after Roe was overturned.

There was Constance Baker Motley, a civil rights giant turned federal judge who ruled in 1978 that the New York Yankees’ ban on female reporters in the clubhouse violated her 14th Amendment right to employment opportunities. The plaintiff in the case, magazine writer Melissa Ludtke, was also in attendance – with her memoir “Locker Room Talk” in tow.

But the hero who kept appearing was not a single saving individual. Rather, speakers praised “the sisterhood”—women, from Jackie McMullen to Burke to Smith himself, who knew firsthand that they were baptized in treacherous waters. However, Smith said, the waters have become less treacherous with each courageous effort.

“We all have the power to speak out,” she told the room. “It doesn’t diminish anything you do to stand up for someone else.”