It was a whole different game the last time the Leafs played the Canadiens in the NHL playoffs

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/05/2021 (1220 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens are going mano a mano in the playoffs for the first time since 1979. Perhaps you’ve heard. There’s been a bit about it in the papers.

Took a while for the lightbulb over my head to click on but … oh yeah … I covered that series.

Good golly, 42 years ago.

Which means I must have been single digit years old.

Don’t know why it took so long for the recall haze to lift except — 42 years ago.

The hockey annals tell me Leafs were swept. Bummer for them. But memorable, if fuzzy around the edges, pour moi.

First time I was ever permitted to step foot in an NHL dressing room, or any sports league dressing room for that matter. And only on the Habs side. Harold Ballard still wasn’t having any of it for his team. No “broads.”

It was — this comes back clearly now — a nerve-wracking experience. Because I was stupidly young and considerably callow. Although I already had some professional miles on me — hired and fired by the Star, not yet hired (and fired) by the Globe. At the time, I think, editor of the Maple Leafs program — a terrific freelance gig until I punched an executive in the nose and cops were summoned to physically remove me from the premises.

Never grown out of that. Temper.

Anyway, accredited and Full Monty present.

The gender barrier had actually been broken four years earlier, by Robin Herman, then a 23-year-old reporter for the New York Times, and Marcelle St. Cyr, a Montreal radio reporter, at the 1975 All-Star Game in Montreal. The two women calmly strode into the inner sanctum with the rest of the media pack to conduct interviews post-game. And immediately became the story.

“I kept saying, ‘I’m not the story, the game is the story,’” Herman recounted a decade ago to the Times. “But of course that wasn’t the case. The game was boring. A girl in the locker room was a story.”

In any event, that was a one-off thing and the NHL slid back to “normal” afterwards, with the league leaving it up to individual teams to decide whether women would be prohibited or admitted. The Boston Bruins, then-coached by Don Cherry — of all people — was the first club to allow a female beat reporter routine access to their locker room sanctuary, a couple of years later. In 2010, after Cherry had caused a typical ruckus on his Coach’s Corner segment — blustering that women didn’t belong in dressing rooms — Herman wrote him a “Dear Don” open letter published by ESPN online. Reminded Cherry that he’d been her “hero.”

“You were the first coach in the NHL to allow me, a female, accredited sports reporter and member of the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association, into your locker room as a matter of policy.

“You were coaching the ‘Big Bad Bruins,’ and it was ironic that a team with that reputation should be the most forward-thinking in the NHL.”

Funny, because these days most sports clubs have inner and outer dressing chambers. There’s scarcely any such thing anymore — apart from baseball — as sitting down next to a stall and having an actual conversation with an athlete. Most of the time they’re trotted out individually, dressed in gym shorts and tees, or long underwear, for pile-on scrums. Where a print scribe is more likely to get a TV camera banging her in the noggin.

But back in the day, in small and smelly locker rooms — Maple Leaf Gardens among the worst for cramped quarters — there was precious little room for modesty. The prevailing view was that players were entitled to privacy — from presumably female prying eyes, as if — and women journalists protected from nakedness.

For several years, I had to wait in the corridor outside the Leafs dressing room while male colleagues went inside, cooling my heels until the PR guy — Howie Starkman, before he departed for the Blue Jays, then Bobby Stellick — hauled out a player with a towel wrapped around his waist.

These days, I’d actually prefer the one-on-one.

There was no women’s washroom in the press box; had to tap a man on the shoulder any time I wanted to use the loo, to stand guard.

Most players, far as I can remember, actually transitioned quite well to female reporters in their intimate midst. The NHL was the first league to drop the women-no-go-zone. Other leagues fought tooth and nail. In 1977, after Melissa Ludtke, an accredited reporter for Sports Illustrated, had been granted access by both the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers, on a player vote — this was during the World Series — Major League Baseball came down with a hard fist, right in the middle of Game 1. Ludtke was “disallowed.”

The magazine’s parent company, Time, Inc., brought a lawsuit against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, on the grounds that Ludtke’s 14th Amendment rights — the right to pursue her profession — were violated by excluding female journalists. Kuhn’s argument was that his decision was necessary to “protect the image of baseball as a family sport” and “preserve traditional notions of decency and propriety.”

A year later — Yankees and Dodgers squaring off in the Fall Classic again — a U.S. District Court judge ruled in favour of Ludtke. MLB appealed the decision but it was upheld.

My late, great friend, Christie Blatchford, was among the earliest cohort of female sports writers, given a column by the Globe in 1975, just 23 years old. Sent to Florida to cover the inaugural Jays spring training in ’77, Christie was given a real hard time — not so much by the players but, rather, upper management and ownership. She was accused of just being there to try and shag ballers. Christie, not easily rattled, was deeply distressed — to the point that she came home and ordered her boyfriend to marry her, if only to flash an I’m-taken wedding ring. Well, that’s how she always told the story, anyway.

I have no nostalgia for sports writing days of yore.

Far removed from that girl who verily tip-toed into the Montreal dressing room at the old Forum and got a sudden gander, off the bat, of Ken Dryden, naked as the day he was born.

This year, because of pandemic protocols, there will be no reporters of either sex allowed in the Leafs or Habs dressing room, not in Toronto and not in Montreal.

COVID-19 is gender-neutral.

Zoom-you.

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno