The woman reporter who busted into the locker room

Jane Gross 1947–2022

Jane Gross wanted to cover sports like any other reporter. Knowing that pro athletes are most candid when giving interviews at their lockers right after games, she feared she’d miss quotes if she waited in the hallways outside the changing rooms with the other female journalists.

After another woman sportswriter, Robin Herman, broke the hockey locker room barrier in 1975, Gross grew even more eager, and the following month New York Knicks coach Red Holzman agreed to let her into the team’s locker room after a game at Madison Square Garden. Gross, who was writing for Newsday at the time, said she was “scared stiff” at first. But “you really can’t get the flavor of the players,” she said, “without seeing the camaraderie they share.”

Gross was born in Manhattan to a sports columnist father and nurse mother, said Newsday. She grew up accompanying her dad in the press box at games. After studying literature at Skidmore College, she got what she called “a nepotism job”—through her dad—as a researcher for Sports Illustrated. But even after she made it into the locker room, it “never was easy.” She once had a bucket of water poured on her.

Gross left sportswriting in the 1980s and spent the next three decades writing features—covering AIDS, abortion, and aging and gaining “a reputation for quickly inspiring trust,” said The New York Times. But her most intimate subject was herself. The memoir she wrote on caring for her ailing elderly mother, A Bittersweet Season, is still a popular paperback. “Most old people do not want their lives extended beyond reason,” Gross wrote. “Love them enough to let them go.”