Whoever said that becoming the story serves as the journalist’s worst nightmare forgot to tell the female reporters who turned a two- to three-minute delay in entering the locker room of the Jacksonville Jaguars into fifteen minutes of fame.
The reporters, participants in the Diversity Fellowship Program of the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE), decried the delay allegedly brought on by a Lucas Oil Stadium usher uncertain if the men’s locker room remained off-limits to women.
The man reportedly inquired whether the three women could enter the locker room and received a yes from the Jaguars. The women then entered the facilities where players shower, change, and speak to the press but not, presumably, before the patriarchy allowed their male colleagues to scoop them on all the hot postgame takes from T.J. Yeldon and Jonathan Cyprien and Mercedes Lewis that every sports fan breathlessly awaits in a manner akin to Ralphie impatiently counting the ticks until the Christmas morning arrival of his official Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred shot range model air rifle.
In the wake of the inconvenience, Yahoo’s Graham Watson derided the usher as “an old, out-of-touch geezer,” while Joey Chandler of the Tuscaloosa News mocked him as an “old man” unaware that he lives in 2015. The third journalist, who called the Jaguars-Colts tilt the first NFL game she ever attended, retweeted several of Watson’s complaints but remained mum regarding any of her own.
As a sports journalist discriminated against, I can really relate. I feel the same outrage regarding the APSE Diversity Fellowship Program excluding me that the diversity fellows grappled with over their brief exclusion from the locker room.
Unlike the Jacksonville Jaguars locker room, the program footing the bill for the diversity fellows (crusaders?) is not open to sports writers of both sexes, at least if you share Richie Cunningham’s complexion and Fonzie’s sexual orientation it’s not. The Orwellian “diversity” training program explains to hopefuls: “Women and minority journalists who have at least three years’ professional experience (exceptions may be considered) are eligible to apply.”
The APSE’s website lists six diversity fellows for 2015-15: four women, an African American male, and a white guy whose Facebook page features a scroll of articles on a track runner who came out of the closet by writing “#BeTrue” on his spikes, Princeton’s openly gay lineman not allowing a sack all season, a homosexual ranking as the eighth leading scorer in the history of Bucknell’s men’s soccer team, and the knee problems that “plague” LGBT football players. Perhaps he falls under the APSE’s “exceptions may be considered” caveat.
One can only mock so much the Fourth Estate’s obtuse hypocrisy in loudly protesting the discrimination they quietly practice. An Andrew Luck-less Indianapolis Colts defeating the NFL’s most luckless team of recent years 16-13 does not exactly scream “news.” That just does not get clicks like a Two Minutes Hate against a senior citizen working a weekend job to get by does.
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