"Lady in the Locker Room": Adventures of a Trailblazing Sports Journalist

LADY IN THE LOCKER ROOM

ADVENTURES OF A TRAILBLAZING SPORTS JOURNALIST

By Susan Fornoff

Second Edition Copyright © 2014 by Susan Fornoff

Published by GottaGoGolf at Smashwords

Original Copyright © 1993 by Susan Fornoff

Published by Sagamore Press

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

The Lineup: A Cast of Characters

Prologue: One Of The Guys

Chapter 1: The Big Locker Room

Chapter 2: Barging In

Chapter 3: I Never Peeked (I Swear It)

Chapter 4: Keep Those Pants On

Chapter 5: The Locker Room In The Newsroom

Chapter 6: Kong The Rat

Chapter 7: Lady And Gentlemen

Chapter 8: What’s So-And-So REALLY Like?

Chapter 9: Save 1988 For Me

Chapter 10: A New Ballgame

Chapter 11: Readers Write

Chapter 12: Only Giants, Not Angels

Chapter 13: Thanks, Dave

Chapter 14: Strike Three

Epilogue: Twenty-five Years After The Earthquake

Connect with Susan Fornoff

Acknowledgements

Twenty years after the release of Lady in the Locker Room, Uncovering the Oakland A’s, I must again thank Melissa Ludtke for opening the locker room doors to women in sports journalism, and thank Betty Cuniberti for ushering me inside.

Many thanks to the cofounders of the Association for Women in Sports Media (AWSM) — Nancy Cooney, Michele Himmelberg, and my dear friend Kristin Huckshorn. We have all had many adventures since the days chronicled here, but AWSM cannot yet achieve our ultimate goal of obsolescence; it is still very much needed.

I have so many fond memories of my friends on the baseball beat, but the one for whom I will forever be grateful remains Mickey Morabito, the A’s travel director who welcomed me into his realm and treated me like a cherished family member. Ever since the first printing of this book, I have heard from other women scribes who remarked on the welcoming and professional treatment they received from the A’s. Susan Slusser has thrived on the A’s beat for the San Francisco Chronicle for several years now, and became the first woman president of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Many of us credit Mickey for fostering that kind of culture in the organization.

Sincere thanks to Tony La Russa for so patiently teaching me his game – and also to the great Baltimore Orioles teams of the 1960s and 1970s (especially Brooks Robinson) for showing me and my fellow Junior Orioles how the game ought to be played. Thanks Mom and Dad for packing us four kids into the car for all those days at Memorial Stadium.

Thanks to the men who hired me — Russ Brown, Henry Freeman, Stan Johnston, Jim Dawson, and Glenn Schwarz.

Thanks to my agents, Jack Hailey and Jim Levine, for turning my original manuscript into my first book, and to Joel Silverman for taking my story to Hollywood.

Thanks to Dave Kingman for removing me from his gift list. I happily report that I never received another present from the retired slugger.

Thank you to Cheryl Stotler for reviving Lady in the Locker Room so vibrantly at www.susanfornoff.com, and for motivating me to update the story.

With the exception of updates on the cast of characters (and I do not use the word characters figuratively here, for they certainly were then and remain so), the 1993 text has undergone as little change as it could bear. A movie made based on this story surely will have its share of embellishment, so the goal with this new edition is to preserve the original true story and offer it up in all its charm and spunk. Readers who have followed baseball over the years will no doubt be amused by the pre-induction descriptions of Hall of Famers in the Lineup section at the front of the book, so those have remained largely intact with where are they now postscripts.

It has been surprisingly joyful for me to become reacquainted with the upbeat, spunky, and funny young lady who wrote this book, and, 21 years later, I am pleased to have the opportunity to introduce her to new readers.

~~~~

THE LINEUP

A Cast Of Characters

Sandy Alderson. A’s president, Sandy was general manager the year that Dave Kingman sent me the rat. Sandy, an Ivy League-educated lawyer, was liked and respected by many, but I always remember him telling me that he didn’t give a shit about me and Dave Kingman. I did dance with him a few times, though — once to a bad Lionel Ritchie song in the bar of the Minneapolis Hyatt.

NOW: He’s general manager of the New York Mets.

Christine Brennan. Sportswriter for the Washington Post, Chris’s path never crossed mine until the formation of the Association for Women in Sports Media in 1986. We disagreed philosophically and ethically in many departments, and maybe that’s why she was working at the Post and I was not. She’s an enthusiastic politician and served AWSM well as president.

NOW: Chris writes sports columns for USA Today and appears frequently on ESPN.

Jose Canseco. Jose played for the Oakland A’s from September of 1985 through August of 1992. His teammates considered him a selfish player and the law considered him a menace to the highway, but — maybe because he was always good for a story — I always liked him. He’s such a pet lover, though, that if Kingman had sent him a rat, he’d have played with it.

NOW: Canseco has done two books himself and tries to maintain his visibility via a steady stream on Twitter (including details about the purchase of fainting goats he made with a recent girlfriend). After the A’s traded him to Texas in 1992, he wore seven different uniforms (including the green and gold again briefly) before retiring in 2002. He admitted steroid use, got arrested again, filed for bankruptcy, and the beat goes on.

Dennis Eckersley. The best relief pitcher in my baseball era, Eckersley won the American League’s Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards for his 1992 season. In my book, he was also the best-looking player in baseball and an all-around great guy. Knowing Eckersley kept me from believing, as many sportswriters do, that all baseball players are automatically jerks.

NOW: Eckersley’s in the Hall of Fame and covers the Boston Red Sox as a color commentator for NESN. His own colorful expression walk-off for a home run that ended the game has been repurposed as a general category and official baseball statistic. Yes, he is still good-looking!

Bud Geracie. A sports columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, Bud began covering the Oakland A’s the same year I did, 1985. He was well-liked by the people he covered (and also his fellow sportswriters), but the 24-hour-a-day potential of the baseball beat instilled in him such a fear of missing a story that he happily left after the 1988 season. He was one of my favorite drinking buddies.

NOW: Bud is the sports editor of the Mercury News!

Michele Himmelberg. A sportswriter for the Orange County Register, Michele was a battler for equal access and against sexual harassment in clubhouses. She was president of the Association for Women in Sports Media the year that Zeke Mowatt exposed himself to Lisa Olson and Sam Wyche kicked Denise Tom out of the locker room.

NOW: Michele remains committed to AWSM, but she’s happily out of sports journalism — public relations director for Disneyland Resort.

Kristin Huckshorn. A reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, Kristin was there the day I bought my first leather skirt. (She already had one.) She helped form AWSM and continued to design our annual T-shirt and administer our scholarship program even when she moved over to news.

NOW: Kristin lives in New York, where she is patient advocacy project director for The Dartmouth Institute. She returned to sports several years before that, as deputy sports editor at the New York Times and senior news editor at ESPN.

Reggie Jackson. A Hall of Fame player who hit lots of homers and struck out even more frequently, Reggie was almost as big a pain in the ass as Dave Kingman. I admired the way he played the game, even in his final season, 1987, but I didn’t admire the way he’d strut around naked in the clubhouse afterward.

NOW: Well, that depends on what he’s said lately. Reggie has served the New York Yankees off and on as a special advisor, but every now and then he makes a public comment that warrants a little vacation. His website also offers investment services to wealthy clients.

Bruce Jenkins. A sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Bruce was the guy who said, I’m writing this, the night I received a boxed rat. He’s an absolute sports nut and the fastest, loudest typist I’ve ever seen. Pounding referred either to sportswriters drinking or Jenks typing.

NOW: Bruce continues to write his popular column. And quickly.

Dave Kingman. An all-around weirdo not unlike Reggie Jackson, except that Kingman didn’t break a sweat on the field — much less bleed, the way Reggie would. He played for the A’s from 1984 through 1986, when he sent me the present that ultimately ended his career.

NOW: Kingman lives in Nevada in the area of Lake Tahoe and makes frequent autograph signing appearances at card shows.

Tony La Russa. Manager of the Oakland A’s, Tony was one of the few people I found impossible to reduce to just a sentence or two. I don’t think there was a better manager in my baseball era, yet, I wouldn’t want to play for him. I loved sitting down for dinner with him, yet, he’s not someone I’d put on my party list. Let’s say that Tony was either incredibly complicated or utterly simple, and I could never manage to figure out which. At least he was not a male chauvinist pig.

NOW: Tony managed the St. Louis Cardinals to two World Series championships and retired. Now he’s going to the Hall of Fame. He continues to be active in the Oakland area with his successful nonprofit, the Animal Rescue Foundation.

Robin Carr. Publicity manager for the San Francisco Giants, Robin taught me that the male chauvinist pigs didn’t stay in the clubhouse — sometimes they got powerful positions in the front office of baseball. She’s loved sports since her father, a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle, let her tag along to tennis matches, and she married sportswriter Barry Locke of the Alameda Newspaper Group.

NOW: Robin has had a stellar career in corporate PR for top companies including Nike, EA Sports, and the Gap. Most recently, she joined Xoom as the company went public. She’s married to Tommy Bonk, the former sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Melissa Ludtke. Former sportswriter for Sports Illustrated magazine, Ludtke and SI sued the New York Yankees for equal access after she couldn’t get into the clubhouse during the 1978 World Series. Since then, she has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a writer for Time magazine. Ludtke no longer covers sports.

NOW: Ludtke is raising a daughter and writing a book about her experience in the world of sports journalism.

Mark McGwire. The A’s first baseman, McGwire provided a great example of the personal cost of baseball fame and fortune. I really liked him in 1987, his rookie year, and I always enjoyed talking to him. But it was apparent that all of the attention ultimately made him wary, and all of the money ultimately made him uptight. And I hope he shaves off that awful goatee.

NOW: He’s the hitting coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers, following a stint with La Russa’s St. Louis Cardinals. He hasn’t shaved the goatee off and still hasn’t come clean on details of the steroid era, so his Hall of Fame induction remains in doubt.

Jackie Moore. Third-base coach for the Texas Rangers, Jackie is a much-traveled baseball man who stopped to manage the A’s for two seasons — including my first on the beat, 1985. He tried so hard to please everyone — from management to players — that his own managerial style never emerged. But his personal style was all class.

NOW: As of this writing, Moore had been fired in the Rangers’ post-2013 housecleaning and baseball waited to see where he’d land, at 74, for 2014.

Mickey Morabito. The director of team travel for the A’s, Mickey took me everywhere I needed to go (particularly to the hotel bars) for five years. The hardest part of his job, I learned, is keeping his players — and their wives and imports — happy on the road. Mickey was one of the best friends of the late Billy Martin, manager of many teams, and he remains one of mine.

NOW: That’s one bio that has stood the test of time!

Lisa Olson. Feature writer for the Daily Telegraph-Mirror in Sydney, Australia, Lisa was the Boston Herald football writer who accused Zeke Mowatt of the New England Patriots of sexual harassment for exposing himself to her crudely in the locker room in September 1990. By then, women sportswriters had actually begun thinking, This is no problem anymore — we’re just plain old sportswriters. We were wrong.

NOW: Lisa freelances.

Glenn Schwarz. The sports editor of the San Francisco Examiner, Schwarzie was the dean of the A’s writers when I joined the beat in 1985. He’s an approachable guy who shared his baseball wisdom generously, although I think he was still a Kingman fan then. He had moved to the Giants beat in 1986, and King Thompson replaced him.

NOW: Glenn has retired from newspapers but works for Major League Baseball as a freelance editor. He is working on a book with Joan Ryan on the San Francisco Giants of 1989. King Thompson died at 50 in 2004 of alcoholism-related ailments.

Claire Smith. A sportswriter for the New York Times, Claire was covering the Yankees when I began covering the A’s. She’s off the beat now — worn down, like me, by the daily grind and constant battles. But Claire showed me you could make friends on the beat without compromising your professionalism.

NOW: Claire is baseball editor for ESPN.com and appears on television occasionally.

Dave Stewart. A starting pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays, Stew was a four-time 20-game winner for the A’s during their heyday. He was opinionated about the game and its players, and that got him in trouble at times. He was really hardheaded, too, and I can say that because I considered him one of the best friends I made covering baseball. I love this guy.

NOW: Today Stew is a highly regarded baseball agent living in San Diego with his wife, Lonnie. He worked as a pitching coach for a time, but really wanted to be a general manager and grew frustrated in pursuit of that goal. I think he’d have been a great announcer — except for that high, squeaky voice.

Kit Stier. Kit covered the A’s for the only daily paper in their town, the Oakland Tribune. That may be why he seemed so territorial about the beat and secretive about even the most insignificant stories. The players didn’t like him much and he didn’t like them much, but he was great at what he did and I grew to enjoy his company at the post-game bar scene.

NOW: Kit has retired from the grind after years covering the Mets and the New York sports scene.

Lesley Visser. Sports reporter for CBS-TV, Lesley was already a sportswriter for the Boston Globe when I was breaking into the business. Now she’s hit the big time, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer (or funnier, or more professional or enthusiastic) woman sportswriter. Her husband, Dick Stockton, was signed on to do A’s TV broadcasts in 1993.

NOW: Lesley is a Pro Football Hall of Famer living in New York and Florida with her husband, Robert Kanuth. She wants me to teach her to play golf.

~~~~

PROLOGUE

One Of The Guys

This is not one of those balls baseball books. Ball Four ... Balls... Foul Ball... No Balls... You Gotta Have Balls... Moneyball. I spent 13 years poking around in locker rooms and learned exactly one thing about balls: The umpires break in the new ones with a coating of mud.

No, I don’t know much about balls.

And, no, I don’t know the size of Jose Canseco’s penis. I don’t know how long it is, how thick it is, how functional it is, or how pulchritudinous it is.

I never saw Jose Canseco’s penis.

In 13 years of covering sports and interviewing men in locker rooms, I learned one thing about penis exposure: men look, women look away.

Wait a minute, you say. No balls? No penises? But, lady, you must have learned something useful, something compelling, from 13 years in men’s locker rooms, five of them spent exclusively covering the Oakland A’s.

So what did I learn?

I learned all about what it’s like to be one of the guys, whether I wanted to be one of them or not.

I was a living lab experiment on what would happen to a child raised to dress, think, and act like a woman but sent to live in a world of men. Only, the world I was sent to live in was not inhabited by mere men, but men of muscle and machismo. One could argue that every woman lives in a man’s world: I was living in the quintessential man’s world.

I wasn’t living there alone. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of women working in the sports media today, all across the country and in other parts of the world. But when I first started covering the Oakland A’s in 1985, only two other women writers were traveling with major-league baseball teams. By 1987, no other women were traveling full-time with major-league baseball teams. By 1993, when this book first appeared, not one woman writer had been assigned to a traveling baseball beat for the 1993 baseball season.

The numbers rendered me a freak. One player, Dave Kingman, may even have called me that. But most of his teammates came to think of me as one of the guys. Mickey Morabito, the travel director of the A’s, once told me, You fit.

This was, to these men, the supreme compliment. In their world, to be a man meant to be strong and swift, to be smart and successful and sportsmanlike, to play through pain, and to always do your best. No one ever says, C’mon now, be a woman. It’s a man we should all aspire to be.

On the other hand, I learned, being a man in the locker room also meant being stubborn and self-absorbed, with an ample shot of swagger and strut. But when these men said, Sue, you’re like one of the guys, I was supposed to say, Thank you.

I did try to feel flattered. After all, their world didn’t say things like that in the beginning. A woman doesn’t become one of the guys without a long, sometimes unending, initiation period.

Said New York Times baseball writer Claire Smith: I’ve always said that you could take a bum off the street, shave him, clean him up, and put a pad and a pencil in his hand, and he could walk into a clubhouse you or I have worked for five years, and he will be instantly accepted — in a way that you or I will never be.

The road to acceptance for women is lined with the men declaring, We don’t want you here. Men in sports did this through the ages, taking their sons to the ballgames, keeping the remotes from their wives, barring women sportswriters from their playhouses — oops, I mean, clubhouses — even into the otherwise progressive 1970s and 1980s. One baseball player, Bob Knepper, said that God did not mean for women to be sportswriters or umpires.

When the women responded, Too bad, I’m here, then the tests of manhood began. Michelle Kaufman of the Detroit Free Press had to tolerate a dancing football player who gyrated naked behind her back as she conducted an interview. Lisa Olson of the Boston Herald was dared to touch the penis of football player Zeke Mowatt. Rachel Shuster of USA Today recalled a Green Bay Packer vigorously fondling himself — Rachel’s family-newspaper euphemism for masturbating — as she tried to interview him. I received a gift-wrapped rat.

Those were the tests. Some of us would answer by silently turning away. Others would reply by screaming and then leaving.

Me, I belonged to the holler-and-stay school. Nobody was going to jerk off in front of me or expose himself to me or do a little dance around me and expect to get away with it without a lot of yelling — from me, and my boss, and sometimes even the culprit’s boss. And then I’d come back tomorrow and see if we could please get it right this time, or I’d start yelling again and come back and try again the next day, and the next, and the next, until we got it right.

When the initiation period ended in 1987 — after eight years in the business — I found the biggest surprise of all awaiting me: We could get it right! We could do our work in spite of the gender gap. The Oakland A’s and the writers who covered them realized I didn’t have to peep at the men in the locker room or cramp their social styles. I realized they didn’t have to hit on me in the bars or send me nasty gifts.

I learned that if I approached them with knowledge, compassion, and humor, they would overlook my disconcerting presence in their dressing area and accept me as a human being. On the job, they looked me in the eye and answered my questions as they would anyone else’s.

But they also flattered me, bought me drinks, and danced with me. I think they knew I wasn’t one of the guys.

And I think, after that long initiation period, that it was okay not to be one of the guys. I could accept every advantage of being a woman in a man’s world and fight every disadvantage. I could be myself, and this business of being a woman in a quintessential man’s world could work.

I just wish it didn’t have to take so long.

~~~~

CHAPTER ONE

The Big Locker Room

Eluding security, the rat made its way to the press box in the second inning, disguised in a corsage box as a friendlier gift. The letters printed on the top of the box formed the words, Sue Fornoff, Sac Bee.

I went by Susan. My newspaper was the "Sacramento" Bee. I guess I could have told the courier, No sir, you’ve got the wrong Fornoff. But there was no denying that this gift was clearly intended for me.

As I removed the lid, the tissue paper inside rustled.

It’s alive, I said, quickly closing the box.

It’s a rat, surmised the security guard who had unknowingly acted as its deliverer.

Oh. Snicker. Hee hee. Ha ha.

Did you get it?

The rat was baseball player Dave Kingman’s gift — his idea, he said, of a hilariously clever practical joke — for a woman sportswriter who covered his team, the Oakland A’s. He didn’t want that woman in the clubhouse, didn’t think any women belonged where players might be undressing. And that was Kingman’s way of expressing his opinions.

The joke bombed, though. I didn’t get it. The Oakland A’s didn’t get it. Not even Kingman’s teammates seemed to think it was very funny.

And the joker was out of the game, involuntarily retired, by the end of that year, in spite of his statistically respectable season.

That was when I finally started thinking, Maybe that joke was funny after all. I remained for many more laughs, traveling with the Oakland A’s into their glorious seasons of the late 1980s, through their visit to George Bush’s White House in December of 1989. It was an unexpectedly bumpy ride for me, that sportswriter, but I do gloat now because it was also a joyride.

I got to know Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire and Dennis Eckersley. I learned baseball from Tony La Russa. I shopped and dined from coast to coast.

I lived the baseball life, and I enjoyed it.

I sunbathed on Dave Stewart’s boat, such an opulent vessel that a less modest man than Stewart would have called it his yacht. I breakfasted at Denny’s at 3 a.m. with some A’s players and the ladies they’d been dancing with. I went out to dinner with Tony La Russa and his coaches, and once I even danced with the manager.

I had a lot of fun and made a lot of friends in 13 years of sportswriting. Serious journalists will say I had too much fun and made too many friends.

But I decided, over a dinner with John Feinstein many years ago, that they were going to say that anyway.

I don’t remember why I was having dinner with Feinstein that night in North Carolina. We were probably just killing time in the hotel restaurant before some University of Maryland sporting event, and he probably thought it would be big of him to entertain a 21-year-old rookie sportswriter. I know I thought that he, being three years older and working for the God almighty Washington Post, knew everything about sportswriting while I knew nothing.

That premise certainly set the mood for the dinner chitchat — so one-sided, I should perhaps stop at chit — that evening. Feinstein would later become rich by writing a book about Indiana basketball titled A Season on the Brink, but this talk was cheap. He embarked on a train of sexual tittle-tattle about Betty Cuniberti, a sportswriter at the Post who considered John to be her friend and whom I considered to be my mentor.

As a nervous journalism major at Maryland, I had watched Betty, the only woman sportswriter I knew then, go about her business in a pleasant manner that seemed to successfully tiptoe the fine line between professionalism and intimacy. The football coach, Jerry Claiborne, called her Miz Betty in his Southern drawl. The basketball coach, Lefty Driesell, lit up whenever Cuniberti showed up.

The subjects of her stories seemed to feel compelled to give her the kinds of come-on-in details about their lives that made for some of the most revealing