With a woman coach, no locker room brofest is safe
Why the NFL’s first female coach will make the locker room better
By Asher Kohn
The manly men of professional football are pissed. The Buffalo Bills have hired Kathryn Smith as the sport’s first full-time female coach. This means that a woman will be a regular presence in the locker room, which has long been seen as a chapel to masculinity.
A radio host in nearby Cleveland denigrated Smith for having never played the game. Apparently unclear on the difference between coaching and gladiatorial combat, Kevin Kiley asked if she had “the ability to impose [her] will physically on most people.”
To be fair, the Bills organization has the back of their newest hire. Team co-owner Kim Pegula issued a congratulatory message. Head Coach Rex Ryan said he was “excited and proud for her with this opportunity.” Lineman Richie Incognito gave his emoji-laden endorsement:
But a thumbs-up from Incognito is a bit ironic. This is the psychopath who was suspended in 2014 for calling a teammate a “faggot” and a “half-nigger piece of shit.” Incognito blamed a team employee of Japanese heritage for both the Pearl Harbor attacks and North Korea’s Juche regime. Either the meathead grew up or locker rooms are no longer frat houses. It just might be the latter.
The locker room is a safe space the likes of which second-wave feminism could only dream of. It’s a work space for athletes, but one that the outside world shouldn’t intrude upon.
“There are no wives or girlfriends. There are no agents, or lawyers, or autograph seekers, or hangers-on, or bill collectors. … It may be the only place they feel safe to be themselves.”
— Will Leitch
Of course, the outside world has a habit of intruding where people wish it hadn’t. When Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, his teammates refused to shower with him. It took Al Gionfriddo, a swarthy Sicilian-American, to point out that Jackie wasn’t much darker than him and should be allowed in.
At that time, there was nobody who could have shamed the team into acting. Indeed, most journalists of the era protected white athletes instead of reporting what they saw in the locker room. During Mickey Mantle’s legendary 1961 season, sportswriters chose not to report on the mysterious liquids they saw injected into the outfielder’s butt or the young women that the married Mantle bragged of bedding.
It took a different sport and a different era — hockey in 1975 — for a woman to enter a locker room, ask questions, and expect men to act their age. The first female reporter, Robin Herman, was informed by way of hate mail that “if there had been any real, real men in the locker room, you would have been kicked out on your prostitutional ass.”
Football has, generally speaking, been much worse. In 1990, five New England Patriots surrounded a female reporter and waved their dicks at her. It was sexual abuse, pure and simple, but the Patriots’ then-owner said his players “can wiggle their waggles in front of her face as far as I’m concerned.” He called the reporter “a classic bitch.” She sued and received an undisclosed settlement. The NFL fined the Patriots $50,000.
The steady chipping away of the sanctity of the locker room has allowed for greater diversity in American athletics. Will it also mean that the glistening, chiseled, supermen will take orders from a woman? Ask the San Antonio Spurs, who lean on the basketball genius of Becky Hammon and are one of the NBA’s top teams. Sometimes it takes a woman to do a man’s job even better.
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