Female reporters don’t need Cherry’s protection
On Wednesday night, while we sat watching Coach’s Corner, Don Cherry cited something I’d written to bolster his argument that female reporters should not be allowed into big league dressing rooms.
He butchered the pronunciation of my name. My wife looked over at me and said, “Is he talking about you?”
As she said it, my phone began to light up. Hers did as well. We both got dozens of notes, some from people we hadn’t heard from in months or years. If Cherry’s critics contend that his cultural influence is on the wane, this was proof of rather the opposite.
Cherry’d picked out one anecdote in a column I’d written in the immediate aftermath of Blackhawk Duncan Keith’s tangle with a female reporter in a Vancouver dressing room. It had to do with something I’d seen in the visitors’ locker room at the ACC the week before.
I’d used it to suggest that while idiots will be idiots worldwide, most women possess a fairly reliable idiot-deflection apparatus. Every female sports reporter I’ve ever known is more than capable of shrugging off a lout. It’s a key skill in life, as well as in sports.
Cherry has made several logical leaps here, becoming more unbalanced after each one. He’s taken the Keith incident and spun it into the oddest sort of populist campaign — getting a bunch of working stiffs fired. He tried it once, and was hellaciously ripped. Cherry being Cherry, he doubled down on his stand on Monday night.
“You would not want your daughter or your sister in there, believe me,” Cherry said.
As men, perhaps we ought not be in the business of telling women — however they’re related to us — where they
Female sports reporters are more than capable of shrugging off a lout.
can and cannot go. We’ve tried it before. I thought we’d all agreed it was a bad idea.
Ron MacLean, playing the straightfrom-central-casting role of The Reasonable Canadian, tried deflecting him. He pointed out, quite rightly, that dressing rooms are not fundamentally places to get dressed. They’re a public work space. They’re the spot where the media interact with the team.
“I don’t care what it is,” Cherry bellowed. “I don’t think women should be in there.”
If teams were to set aside another room for this purpose — Cherry’s suggestion — the players would never enter it. They’d duck us in the dressing room as well, but then they’d have to leave the arena without pants.
The essential disconnect here is one of work flow. If you want to cover professional sports, you need to be in the locker room. You need to be in and out of there, sharpish. If they’re not dressed by the time you hit the doors, that’s too bad. Most of them don’t care. Those who do dress in some adjacent, off-limits room. On the ground, this is a non-issue.
The stories are being told in the locker room. If you can’t get in there, you might as well be reporting from your den.
Since Cherry wants women spared the dangers of the changeroom, he also wants them all — ipso facto — to lose their jobs to men. I suspect he hasn’t thought of it in those terms. He’s out of touch, not cruel.
In a thoughtful written follow-up, MacLean suggested what I think Cherry’s open-minded critics would allow — that this is all born of some misguided sense of chivalry.
Cherry wants to protect women from men. This argument stands on a terrible fault line. Cherry’s got one foot on either side.
He spends most of his time lionizing NHL players, talking up their old-timey values and fundamental decency.
Now, on the other hand, he’s painting them as lecherous villains who can’t wait to humiliate any woman who wanders into their million-dollar frathouse.
Let us be clear. Some pros resent the presence of women in the media. They also resent the presence of men. Their problem is with reporters as a species, rather than with any particular strand of it.
Outbursts of sexist bullying — weenie waving, or catcalling, or theatric ogling — do happen. Rarely these days, but they do. After the wrong game with the wrong player, any clubhouse can become a very mean-spirited work environment. This minefield, or a more fully clothed version of it, is strewn throughout every workplace. The world is full of dullards and bullies and they cannot be avoided. They must be confronted. The women who work in this industry have done that, and won. They don’t require Don Cherry’s protection. And yet, he insists. Cherry believes this is about venerating women. Let’s spin that out a little further. Ought women be spared the chance of a hurtful comment in the boardroom as well? Are waitresses and teachers and factory workers and lawyers also at risk here? In the interests of moral hygiene, perhaps women shouldn’t leave the house at all. There are a lot of men out there and Don Cherry knows what they’re thinking about. The reductio ad absurdum of his argument is the burqa. Is that what Don Cherry wants?