Sometimes You Have to Cross When It Says Don't Walk

by Lesley Visser

  To be honest, I think our marriage was solid because we only saw each other three days a week. Can you imagine? But it was true; both of us loved our careers, which meant crisscrossing the country for the Globe for sporting events and appearances. Dick said we didn’t fight because by the time we saw each other, we’d forgotten what the argument was about anyway.

  With former husband Dick Stockton in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul in 1992

  Traveling with my former husband Dick Stockton on a ferry to Morocco in 1998

  Sometimes we worked together, like the legendary Celtics–Lakers Finals, or on a football or baseball game—even the Olympics. I remember one time during the ALCS in the early nineties, Dick, Jim Kaat, and I were doing a Twins playoff game in Minnesota and Dick said, “Let’s go to Lesley Visser for a report.” Kaat asked, “Why don’t you just say ‘my wife’?” Dick and I lived in Manhattan for most of our years together, although we also had a home in Florida. I never cooked, ever—not as a child, not in college, not in my career. My current husband, Bob, is a fantastic cook, so I’m still on cleanup duty in my sixties. But I remember Vogue magazine coming to our New York apartment to do a story on how I used the stove as an extra rack for my sweaters. If people asked Dick if I cooked, he’d say, “Sure, last night we had baked cashmere.”

  Our apartment on Sutton Place was huge, taking up an entire floor, with five and a half bathrooms, plenty of bedrooms, a home gym, and two living rooms, which meant we had lots of company and ordered lots of takeout. Dick was born in Philadelphia, moved early to New York, and went to Syracuse University, home of great broadcasters like Marty Glickman, Marv Albert, Bob Costas, and Mike Tirico. When I first heard of Dick, he had just become the Red Sox television announcer, but I didn’t meet him until that magical game in ’75 when he called Fisk’s home run for NBC. After our one date at the Cafe Budapest, I’d see him across the court at different events, but we never really talked again until a 1982 Laker game, when we were both staying in the same hotel in Los Angeles. A couple of months later, we were in New York and he asked me to marry him. I think we were both so flustered that we went into some bar on Second Avenue and knocked back shots of tequila. It was an easy marriage—we could talk sports or politics, and Dick could play Gershwin or show tunes on the piano. Both of us loved the theater and great Italian restaurants, and traveling was much simpler back then. By 2010, a wonderful marriage had turned into a wonderful friendship—I deeply respected that Dick had become one of the most recognizable voices in sports, calling play-by-play at the highest level. But I think we started to look at each other as excellent professionals, not lifelong partners.

  Before having a drink with Dick Stockton and Jack Nicholson in Paris, where Nicholson was filming Something’s Gotta Give

  Then, la-dee-da, life intervened for us—now both happily remarried. When I was only twenty-one, the Boston Globe assigned me to be the beat writer for Rick Pitino, who was the twenty-two-year-old kid coach of the Boston University Terriers. It was a blast. Rick tried all kinds of defenses because no one was watching, and I tried all kinds of coverage because no one was reading. I became great friends with Rick and his wife Joanne, and I continued both to follow and cover his career, including all seven of his Final Fours at Providence, Kentucky, and Louisville.

  With my husband Bob Kanuth at the 2012 Real Deal Awards in New York. Photo by Tim Kuratek/CBS ©2012 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved.

  Crossing Harvard Yard with husband Bob Kanuth

  Fast-forward to the 2010 Kentucky Derby. I went to Rick’s box—on the finish line of Millionaire’s Row, befitting the championship coach—to say hello to his family and friends. He had his usual suspects there: buddy Steve Alaimo, a handful of Maras (the owners of the New York Giants), some former players, his money man Tom Healy, and his jeweler Joe Iracane. He even had the singer Meat Loaf! At one point, Rick wandered over and said, “Lesley, you have to meet a friend of mine, Bob Kanuth; he was the captain of Harvard Basketball in 1969.”

  Well, I said to myself, I don’t think so, since I’ve covered thirty NCAA Tournaments and his name had never come up. I stuck my hand out forcefully and announced, “I doubt you were the captain of Harvard Basketball since I’ve never heard of you,” and Bob, all elegant six-foot-four of him, said quietly, “You must have missed four years.”

  I can hear you laughing, I can see your pity. Yes, it was not pretty. And every time people ask how we met, Bob just looks at me. I blame Pitino.

  CHAPTER 5

  Because there were no provisions for equality when I started (known everywhere as, “Did you go in the locker room?”), I had to wait outside in the parking lots for the athletes or coaches instead of going with the other journalists. And from Chicago to Green Bay to Buffalo, it was plenty cold standing in those parking lots. I remember one day in December 1977, when I thought my Boston was the coldest place on earth. It was after the Patriots–Dolphins game, and with no other women and no chance to be inside the locker room with the other writers, I was outside in 10-degree weather, wind chill –5. While waiting, I remember thinking, “If I go find a bathroom, I might miss Sam Cunningham going to his car,” or “If I’m over near the Dolphins bus trying to get Bob Griese, Steve Grogan might slip by and get in his Jeep, and I’ll never hear from the winning quarterback.” It was a trap on many levels, but it was part of what came with the privilege of covering the New England Patriots as a beat writer for the best sports section in America when newspapers were in their golden era.

  With the late, great Boston Globe football writer Will McDonough

  Reporting outside the Chicago Bears’ Soldier Field

  Interviewing the great football legend Don Shula

  I’m not exaggerating about the cold or the literary climate. In 2009, Sports Illustrated named the Boston Globe sports section from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties (exactly when I was there) the “greatest collection of reporting talent ever assembled, unrivaled in its time and surely never to be duplicated today.” Will McDonough, our Hall of Fame NFL writer, told legendary editor Dave Smith, “Get us money, get us space, and get out of the way.” To this day, I have columnist Ray Fitzgerald’s first draft of Game 6 of the ’75 World Series. I was in the press box, not moving because I so desperately appreciated the ticket, but when Bernie Carbo came to bat as a pinch hitter in the bottom of the eighth with two men out and two men on, and the Sox trailing Cincinnati 6–3 and 3–2 in games, and Carbo blasted a three-run homer, Fitzgerald ripped the paper from his typewriter and let it fall to the floor. Like some kind of groupie, I groped around and picked it up. His lede, written after the seventh inning, said simply, “You could feel it slipping away.” For me, it was like finding a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Being in the Schaefer Stadium parking lot waiting for a Patriot was no different than being at Rich Stadium in Buffalo or Lambeau Field in Green Bay. I was caught in what John Madden used to say was a “two-way go.” I didn’t want to complain to the Globe, because they’d given me the cherished assignment of being the first female NFL beat writer in the country, and I didn’t want to protest to the Patriots lest they tell the paper, “See, we told you a woman couldn’t do this job.” So there I’d stand, hopping from one cold foot to the other and not wearing gloves because they were too bulky to wear while writing down what the players said. I suppose I could have tried some Yentl thing, dressing up as a boy, but I don’t think I could have cut it. And I didn’t know any Yiddish.

  Standing in parking lots was kind of an existential loneliness. I was divided from my colleagues. That separation made me feel alone and apart, and I had no remedy. It was an unsupported existence. But covering these games, my lifelong dream, was like oxygen to my brain. Some of the solitary confinement was even good for me. I had to think about which questions I would ask which players, not just stick a microphone in a player’s face behind a pack of journalists who never even make eye contact. I had to do it all myself and trust that
I’d be getting the readers of the Boston Globe the right information. It taught me to have real appreciation for the athletes and the job, and it crystalized my natural curiosity.

  Of course there were times when athletes wanted to take it further—dinner, drinks, or a romp in the hotel room. And I had one famous exchange with Bert Jones, the quarterback of the Baltimore Colts. By any standard, Jones was gorgeous. He’d been the second pick of the 1973 NFL draft, a legend from LSU. After the Patriots–Colts game in 1976, he asked if I wanted a round-trip ticket to Baltimore, and I went into my Gloria Steinem routine: “Absolutely not! This is my job, I do not dance with quarterbacks!”

  Bert just laughed, brushed my shoulder, and said, “Hey, you’re not that great anyway.” What? I was mortified, and I think Miss Alabama was over by the bus, looking to meet him. There were no quick fixes to the postgame formula because locker rooms weren’t open for another six years—and that had its own challenges, which I’ll get to later.

  There wasn’t a category of therapy to deal with being the first to do something (I didn’t think I could call African American tennis pro and Wimbledon trailblazer Althea Gibson), and the guys at the Globe just wanted to play pickup basketball or argue about Williams and DiMaggio. Dave Smith, and later Vince Doria, put together a 1927 Yankees lineup—Peter Gammons on baseball and Bob Ryan on basketball—and both started on the very same day, one a graduate of North Carolina, the other from Boston College. Tennis god Bud Collins had fought for social justice with Ali and Arthur Ashe. Dan Shaughnessy, Kevin Dupont, and I covered high school football in 1975. All-around writer John Powers won a Pulitzer Prize. McDonough once even punched Patriot cornerback Ray Clayborn in the locker room because Clayborn pushed him and complained that the reporter pack had gotten too close. Another Globe sportswriter, Leigh Montville, said he was terrified a brawl would break out, so he went looking for the field-goal kicker.

  Being alone outside meant I missed all that, but the long-term results were that I went to thirty-five Super Bowls, thirty-five Final Fours, fifteen Wimbledons, and ten Olympics, plus the NBA Finals, the World Series, and the Triple Crown. I used the same humor approach—Rick Pitino once called it my “wit and charm offensive”—in every sport, and it provided a balm for sports’ slings and arrows. After writing and filing the report, or going out with the other writers, I’d go back to the hotel room and let both the happiness and the hollowness wash over me. Even though I was often isolated, it was the career I wanted. And it more than returned the favor.

  Reporting from the 2011 Final Four in Houston. ©2011 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved.

  But The Locker Room—those three little words—dominated my life in sports for fifteen years. For the first seven or eight years, there were no provisions for women, so I stood in those parking lots after games, waiting for the athletes. It wasn’t even a discussion. Women and children had struggled as cheap labor—no property rights, no right to vote—for hundreds of years. We finally won the right to vote in 1920, but entering a locker room must have seemed a thousand years away! I remember reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which chronicled the emotional and intellectual oppression experienced by people like my mother, a teacher who could have been a university president. I think it galvanized me.

  Many people think I’m a product of Title IX, but I actually owe much of my career to the women’s movement, specifically the Equal Rights Amendment. I remember being about a junior in high school when, with a group of my girlfriends, I took a bus to Washington to march for equal rights. I was so excited that Gloria Steinem was there, although we never got near her. She later asked me to write one or two articles for Ms. magazine and I thought I’d won the Pulitzer Prize. The National Organization for Women argued that women had the right to apply for any job for which they were qualified, and they took the argument all the way to the Supreme Court.

  Things were happening in the late seventies, all to the good. Women were being hired as sportswriters, not for their looks, but for their ability to get the story, get it on deadline, and get it right. I didn’t see many of these women near the beginning, but they were coming, and when Title IX was passed in 1972 and kicked in for generations of women after that, the dam had been broken and there was no going back.

  The first two locker rooms I went in, at about the same time, were those of the Boston Lobsters, who played team tennis at Boston University’s Walter Brown Arena, and Holy Cross after a basketball game. Two extremely enlightened men made it possible: first Robert Kraft, who now owns the gold-standard New England Patriots (and about whom I’ll write more in Chapter 7), and George Blaney, the coach at Holy Cross. Not many people went to see the Lobsters, but it was a great training ground, and people like Martina Navratilova were on the team. I was the beat writer for the Globe, and I also did quite a few Holy Cross games, with my typewriter in one hand and a fax machine in the other. I would memorize my questions before I went into the locker room so no one could accuse me of looking around, and if I forgot a question, so be it. I just pivoted and left.

  By the way, it wasn’t some Chippendale’s in there; it was hot and sweaty and everyone, both players and journalists, wanted to get the work done and get out of there. In 2013, ESPN devoted a whole documentary, “Let Them Wear Towels,” to the first women who broke down the locker room barriers. It was one of the major battles in feminist history, but it’s completely taken for granted. I often look at so-called women’s magazines and they rarely, if ever, do stories about women who cover sports. And if they do a story about Venus or Serena Williams, it’s almost always about their clothing line.

  “Let Them Wear Towels” got a lot of attention in 2013, just as the subject did in the 1970s and 1980s. Opponents of women entering the locker room claimed it would violate the players’ privacy—we were seen as voyeurs. Then we would argue that the locker room is the place of business after a game—that’s where the quotes are, that’s where the game is analyzed by players and coaches. It was obvious that 75,000 fans couldn’t be in there to hear the players’ reactions, so our press passes gave us that responsibility. It’s where the stories are.

  Much of it in the beginning was ugly, but all of us know that this wasn’t ISIS or child slavery—we were covering sports. Still, it was a frontier. Melissa Ludtke, covering baseball for Sports Illustrated, said she felt “like a stranger in a strange land”—quoting the title of a popular book at the time. One day, she talked her way into manager Billy Martin’s office and sat there until she was thrown out. She was told that she was not to go anywhere near the clubhouse because Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had decided that the players’ wives would be embarrassed or ridiculed. In 1977, Time, Inc., the parent company of Sports Illustrated, sued the Yankees under the Fourteenth Amendment (the right to do your job with equal protection under the law) on Melissa’s behalf to enter the locker room. Time won. The Boston Globe sent me the day the Yankee clubhouse opened, and Melissa and I have been good friends to this day.

  You must remember this was before Google, Twitter, Facebook, or cell phones. We were all operating on just the engines of our brains. The first generation of women sportswriters included Ludtke at SI, Betty Cuniberti in San Bernardino, Michelle Himmelberg in Tampa, Robin Herman at the New York Times, and myself at the Globe. We all had embarrassing stories. I remember once, when quarterback Jim McMahon was with the Philadelphia Eagles, he told me to come to his locker, that he had a Christmas present for me. I was shocked and delighted, thinking it would be some cookies or maybe candy canes. All the players gathered around and McMahon fished through the bottom of his locker until he found the holiday box. He handed it to me, smiling, and told me to open it.

  It was a black negligee.

  I was horrified, and I know every woman in this business also has had moments of great discouragement. The next generation of women were equally talented: Christine Brennan, Ann Liguori, Sally Jenkins, Jackie MacMullan, Johnette Howard, Cindy Shmerler, Susan Fornoff, Kristin Huck
shorn, and Melissa Isaacson. Brennan famously used to say that going in the locker room meant “you had to be a little deaf.” She’d remember taunts like “Take a bite of this”—“things they would be arrested for on the street corner.” Fornoff covered the Oakland A’s for the Sacramento Bee in 1985, and Dave Kingman would constantly belittle her, often ignoring her questions. The next year, Kingman famously left Fornoff a rat in a box with the tag, “My name is Sue.”

  In 1990, many years after we’d been going in and out of locker rooms, Lisa Olson, the talented writer for the Boston Herald, was subjected to boorish behavior by some of the New England Patriots. Lisa called it “mind rape,” and the Patriots were fined a mere $25,000. The players were fined $12,000. This was before Robert Kraft owned the team—he’d never have put up with it. Even the legal system didn’t cleanse Lisa; she fled to Australia. But what does that say? One player was later signed by the New York Giants, and Olson moved halfway around the world. Is that what Susan B. Anthony marched for? I used to say to people, you wonder why we drink! By 1990, I had gone to CBS and The NFL Today, and thanks to executives there like producer Ted Shaker, sexism and discrimination were not tolerated.

  There were times, though, that the challenges remained. In the early 1990s, Jenny Kellner of the New York Daily News faced down New York Jet Mark Gastineau with an oft-repeated remark, one I’d never have the guts to say. When Gastineau, the star defensive end, showed his privates to Kellner and asked, “Do you know what this is?” she famously replied, “It looks like a penis, only smaller.” Now that was a confident demeanor, no matter how she felt inside. I remember doing a story on the Jets a few years before that, and when I walked into the locker room, tight end Mickey Shuler yelled out about a “broad being in here looking around.” CBS, Shaker, and the Jets did not let it stand. Shuler wrote me a heartfelt apology, but I always tell young women that no one teaches you a class in humiliation. You study, you pay attention, you ask the right questions (with the notepad not far from your nose, so no one suspects anything), but that doesn’t mean you’ll always be accepted. There will be times when you do everything right and someone will still make you feel like a creep, like something dirty or unworthy. I don’t think he was thinking about us, but in 1967 when Cat Stevens sang the song, “The First Cut is the Deepest,” he had it right.