“You have good taste,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, as our food arrived, and I noted that I actually, finally, had an appetite. No matter what happened on the job front, I had proven to Frank Smiley that I was legit.
“Oh. One more thing,” Smiley said. His voice was casual, but I could see in his eyes that he was about to test me. “How do you feel about women in the locker room? Think that’s okay?”
My pulse quickened, perspiration trickling down my sides as I did the silent calculation. I told myself that I could wear these no-nonsense clothes and forgo makeup. I could order a big slab of meat before noon. And I could pretend that true impartiality was possible in my highly charged, partisan world of college football. But I just couldn’t—and wouldn’t—give Smiley the answer I knew he was looking for on this one.
So without blinking I said yes. Absolutely.
Smiley raised his overgrown brow. “Oh?”
“No double standards,” I said, unyielding, firm. “Whether in the NFL or the WNBA. Locker rooms need to be open to all or closed to all. And closing them isn’t the answer. We need to be in there to get the immediate reactions and raw emotion. And, as a practical matter, to file our stories on time.” I noticed that I had switched from the third person to we and our—and wondered what this reflected about my true desire.
“What about player privacy?” Smiley asked.
“What about it?” I fired back.
“Don’t players have the right to it?”
I resisted rolling my eyes and instead told him that players of both genders had plenty of time to shower, change, or at least cover up during the requisite cooling-off period.
“And if they don’t want to cover up?”
I shrugged. “That’s on them.”
“Wouldn’t that make you … uncomfortable? If a male athlete chose not to cover up?”
“I’ve been in locker rooms, Mr. Smiley. I’ve been in winning locker rooms and losing locker rooms. And they all are the same. They all stink. And they are all full of dirty clothes and sweaty towels and bloody bandages.”
“And naked men,” he shot back.
“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes there are three-hundred-pound naked men with gnarly cuts and hairy backs and bruised hamstrings.”
He didn’t seem to get my point, or at least pretended not to, so I kept going, “Locker rooms aren’t lounges of flirtation, Mr. Smiley. Not in my experience. Nobody is thinking about sex after a battle. And if women are allowed to be war correspondents, they should be allowed in a locker room after a football game,” I finished, feeling jubilant, as if I had scored one for female journalists everywhere.
He looked at me and nodded, as if quietly acknowledging that I’d won the point. We spoke no more of gender after that, just silently spooned big helpings of hash browns and glazed carrots onto our plates and cut into our steaks, moving on to more general sports banter.
About an hour later, we had finished lunch and were walking out to the parking lot. Arriving at my car first, Smiley eyed my Walker bumper sticker circumspectly and said, “You’re sure you can be objective?”
“Those peel off, you know,” I said, picking at one curling edge of the sticker.
“So that’s a yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What if I told you the beat was for Texas?” he said.
“Is it?” I swallowed, hoping he was calling my bluff. That the beat was for any team but Texas.
“Yes,” he said. “The proud state university with the color you once called ‘bile orange’.”
I cringed, remembering the piece I had written in college as he continued to quote me. “ ‘The hue of regurgitated beer and burritos.’ Ring a bell?”
“Well,” I said. “It is a bad color.”
“Is that your final answer?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I wrote that when I was in college. Writing for the Walker paper. That was a different job description. I can be objective. I know I can.”
“Good. Because if a reporter so much as lets out one cheer in the press box, he’s done. He—or she—is history in this business.”
I nodded and said I understood, surprising myself by how very much I wanted the job, even if it involved a whole lot of bile orange.
Nine
After lunch, I headed to the Lea Journo Salon, where Lucy had booked me a blowout with her favorite Dallas stylist—a heavily tattooed, ripped gay man named Ricardo.
“Do you want sleek, big, or something in between?” Ricardo asked, as he unharnessed my ponytail and tousled my long hair.
I told him to go big, silently finishing the sentence with Coach’s words: Or go home.