She was a sports writer. She was a pioneer. Jane Gross was an American who in 1975, as noted in her New York Times obituary after her death last week at the age of 75, “became the first female sportswriter known to have entered a professional basketball locker room”.
The story is worth re-telling and then looking at from an Australian perspective.
Jane Gross covering a Nets-Spurs game for Newsday in 1975.Credit:Getty
See, back in the mid-70s, Ms Gross was hired by Newsday, a newspaper from Long Island, to cover pro basketball.
The problem was that a large part of doing the job properly involved going into the very territory that she was forbidden from entering – on the grounds of having the wrong genitalia – the locker-room after the game. While male sportswriters could go straight in, interview the players and get the quotes and insights they needed, Ms Gross was inevitably left to wait outside with other female journalists.
Finally, Ms Gross had had enough, and in February of 1975 convinced the coach of the New York Knicks, Red Holzman, to allow her in. She got the interviews, published her stories, and everyone couldn’t help but notice the sky didn’t fall in; people weren’t going mad in the streets and the morals of America hadn’t gone to hell in a handcart.
And Gross was impressed.
I remember her telling us stories that would peel paint.
“I began to realise what a fellow sportswriter at Newsday had told me,” the NYT quotes her saying back in 1976, “that you really can’t get the flavour of the players without seeing them in the locker room and the camaraderie they share. It’s a beautiful thing, the closeness and lack of inhibition after great physical exertion. Most women rarely experience it.”
Four weeks later the New York (now Brooklyn) Nets also allowed her in, then four other teams followed and within four years there was an NBA mandate that all teams allow female reporters access to dressing-rooms.
Not that there weren’t problems of adjustment thereafter; for all that, and Gross would also record that while one baseball player poured a bucket of water over her, another even threw spaghetti and meatballs at her, hold the bolognaise.
And even with access for females soon de rigeur, as late as the 1990s, there remained issues in the USA. The most famous example was when the sports reporter Lisa Olson went into the locker-room of the New England Patriots, on a practice day. Two players complained to the Patriots’ general manager that she was only there to ogle. The general manager observed Olson closely, and disagreed, taking no action. This caused some of the players to sexually harass her with comments, lewd gestures, and all the rest. It was bad enough that Olson said the experience was a “mind rape,” which caused the Patriots owner to describe her in public as a “classic bitch”.
The whole thing blew up, the NFL got involved, coming down heavily on Olson’s side, and the reaction of the Patriots’ fans was so bad and dangerous – with slashed tyres and death threats – that Olson moved to Australia for a while, working for the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald from the mid-1990s for a few years. I remember her telling us stories that would peel paint.
The Australian equivalent of these pioneers?
My friend Debbie Spillane is oft cited, but she is careful to credit a sports-writer for the Sun-Herald, Dorothy Goodwin, who was getting into male dressing-rooms around 1980, as well as a league writer for the Mirror, Julia Sheppard.
These two encountered similar resistance to Jane Gross, but were equally persistent.
“I remember at Balmain in 1980,” Goodwin, now 88 and living in a Melbourne retirement home, told me on Wednesday, “I’d sorted out with Balmain boss Keith Gittes to get access into the changing sheds but the old fellow on the door stopped me and said, ‘You can’t come in here, darl’.
“I pointed out to him that I had a son nearly the same age as his first-graders and he replied: ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, dear, he certainly wouldn’t want his mother coming in here!’”
Still, in late 1980, Goodwin was blocked from entering the Roosters dressing room after a match against the Magpies. Goodwin raised hell, writing in The Sun of her frustration at seeing male reporters streaming in while she was blocked by a belligerent doorman, saying “Anyway, waddya wanna talk to ’em about?”
It was in vain to explain that in the dressing room she was “not a woman, [but] a reporter”.
In the end the league came good, and she soon became the first woman invited to the Rothmans Medal Dinner, and in 1983, won a rugby league journalism award.
Similar to the USA though, such breakthroughs in Australia didn’t mean the struggle was over.
ABC Sports commentator Debbie Spillane in 1985.Credit:Fairfax Media
Debbie Spillane followed Goodwin and Sheppard through the door, and would tell in a lecture she gave at the NSW Leagues Club in 2011, of hearing that “Peter Peters on 2GB was declaring I wasn’t really interested in rugby league, I just wanted an excuse to get into dressing rooms and check out naked men…” Which was nonsense, of course.
Tracey Holmes and Margie McDonald were two other female journalists around at the time, pushing hard against equally outrageous attitudes. Holmes recalls interviewing players while other naked players would come up and waggle their hips. When McDonald accompanied the Wallabies to Britain in the late 1980s, there were no female toilets at places like Twickenham and Murrayfield, as women being in that part of the stadium was the most unheard of thing anyone had ever heard of!
Back in Australia, it was my colleague Jacquelin Magnay who really pushed things.
“One of my favourite memories is of being with Jacqui Magnay in the Penrith dressing room in 1987,” Spillane recounts, “when I was doing around-the-grounds for radio and she was doing the match report for the Herald. Tim Sheens was Panthers coach and, as he started his post-match chat with the media, he was standing in front of a row of open showers. No screens, no shower curtains and all cubicles were fully occupied.
“As Sheens started answering the first question, Jacqui actually reached out, put her hands on his shoulders and turned him around, effectively swapping places with him. As she did so she said she wanted to be able to look at him without a backdrop of naked, showering men.”
A few years later, Magnay went the tonk when Tigers coach Alan Jones insisted on the rule of “No women reporters in the dressing room”.
Worse, when Magnay knocked on the door after a match between the Tigers and Newcastle and tried to get in, Jones actually stormed out, she recalls, and “yelled in my face, ‘Stop acting like a temperamental schoolgirl!’ Then he saw my tape recorder, told me to turn it off, and I refused.”
Like Gross, Magnay had had enough and took Balmain to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. The ban was removed in 1994, and the Tigers obliged to publicly apologise.
Bravo, the lot of them.
And vale to you, Ms Gross, from Australia.
Twitter: @Peter_Fitz
