Sultanas of Sweat

The home-town Hornets have just blanked the circuit-leading Mudhens, and the "writers"--as athletes tend to call reporters--are crowded into the Hornet locker room. There in the whirlpool bath is Ace Hurler Ace Hurley, naked as a slow curve, telling a cub reporter how he fanned the last three enemy swatters. She is scribbling fast.

She? The locker room, perhaps the last defensible male bastion in journalism, has gone coed. Since the National Hockey League broke the ice last year, more and more pro teams are admitting women to the sanctuaries of sweat. It is perhaps the biggest breakthrough for female scribes since Jane Swisshelm became the first woman reporter to invade the congressional press gallery more than a century ago.

Once a rarity, a woman sportswriter has become a fixture at a majority of major U.S. dailies. Of the 180 or so American print journalists accredited to this month's Montreal Olympics, about a dozen are women--not many, but possibly ten more than were at Munich in 1972. Women sportswriters, used to be relegated to covering women's basketball, field hockey and sport fashions, but now work such brawny beats as football and boxing. Indeed, the demand for women writers may be outstripping the supply. Says Blackie Sherrod, sports editor of the Dallas Times-Herald: "I wish I had one. Everybody's looking for one. What I'd give for a good one!"

Good ones are proving they can do as well as men--or better. Newsday's Jane Gross, 28, scooped the competition by slogging through court records to come up with a copy of Nets Forward Julius Erving's $1.9 million contract.

Lynn Rosellini, 29, was recommended by the Washington Star for a Pulitzer Prize for her four-part series on homosexuality in sports, a topic male reporters have generally avoided. Mary Garber, 60, has been covering sports for the Winston-Salem Journal since 1944, and colleagues agree that she is the toughest interviewer in town.

Talk v. Action. Despite such performances, women sportswriters still face more obstacles than a hurdler. Sportswriting nowadays is focusing less on the play by play and more on the thoughts, problems and personal lives of athletes, and women can be at a disadvantage in getting close to their sources. "There is too much misunderstanding, too much innuendo if you try," says the Washington Star's Kathleen Maxa, 27. Assigned to cover a major tennis tournament last summer, Maxa talked a famous European player into an exclusive interview and accompanied him to his hotel, where it turned out that he was less interested in talk than action.

Nearly all male sportswriters have grown up breathing sports rules and statistics; many of the women newcomers lack that heritage of trivia. Cyndi Meagher, 28, who last year was transferred from the Detroit News "Accent on Living" page to the sports department, has made a few embarrassing mistakes, like confusing a stolen base with a runner's advancing on a throwing error. One irate fan mailed her a jock strap.

The players seem to be more enthusiastic. "Women are a lot better," says Heavyweight Boxer George Foreman. "They ask questions that are not usually asked." Says New York Islanders Defenseman Denis Potvin, whose team does not allow the New York Times's Robin Herman, 24, into the locker room;

"We know she is at a disadvantage, so we all try to accommodate her by giving her priority."

Women sportswriters sometimes have built-in advantages. "Male athletes are more relaxed when their interviewer is a woman," says the Washington Post's Joan Ryan, 40. "A man can show his gentler side and his emotions to a woman." Washington Star Sports Editor David Burgin argues that women "bring a freshness to the sports section--they ask the whys and hows of things." Two seasons ago, for instance, while male reporters stayed home after bad weather canceled a University of Wisconsin practice session, Tracy Dodds, 24, of the Milwaukee Journal went to the stadium anyway--and came back with a moving story about a forlorn quarterback working out in the snow, trying to stay on the team.

Some women sportswriters are troubled that their quest for equality has been lost in the hoopla over admission to a few locker rooms. Says the Washington Post's Nancy Scannell, 30: "The men are usually dressed or so swaddled in towels that it makes no difference. I just ask the coach to have a player come outside. That way you get fresh quotes." Adds Betty Cuniberti, 25, of the San Francisco Chronicle: "Political reporters don't jump into the shower with Ronald Reagan."

But hurdles remain: there are as yet no female sports editors at major newspapers, and not many women have been entrusted with that sports-page prize, a regular, signed column. Some women sportswriters credit much of their progress to circulation-boosting hype and tokenism. Says Jane Gross: "One of the real signs that women sportswriters have arrived will be when newspapers start having more than one."

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