“This was locker room talk.”
We were not two minutes into Sunday’s presidential debate when this line came from Donald Trump yet again as an answer to why he had bragged about how his wealth and power allowed him to grope women, sexually assault them and, yes, “grab them by the pussy.”
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And then he doubled down on this misogynistic, sexist BS by calling this “just words.”
Well, since we are being coarse, GFY Donald.
Words matter very much, and more to the point those words are not being tossed around locker rooms in 2016 America.
I have been in many thousands of locker rooms and press boxes in my work life — baseball clubhouses, football, basketball and hockey locker rooms, the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, World Series, Stanley Cup finals, golf and tennis tournaments, college and pros, owners meetings and media days — and I have never heard anything this disgusting. And I have oftentimes been the only girl in the room.
What I have found to be true is athletes comport themselves with more class, and with more kindness toward females than fellow sports writers, than a lot of my bosses and most certainly more than a certain candidate for President of the United States.
Welcome to America in 2016, where we demand more decorum, accountability and maturity from our athletes than from presidential candidates. And this is a big part of what is wrong with us.
Seriously, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was suspended for four games this season, at least in part, because he deleted emails and texts about how much air was in his balls. And Hillary deletes thousands of emails with less scrutiny and certainly less TSIC (time spent in court).
And then we have 49ers backup QB Colin Kaepernick being absolutely crushed for taking advantage of both his right and privilege as an American citizen to protest a real problem in America while Trump and his supporters blow off his right to do so.
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Odell Beckham Jr., Cam Newton, Hope Solo and on and on and on goes the list of athletes being destroyed for how they comport themselves under duress while we allow a presidential candidate to non-apologize while proffering an argument usually made by my 7-year-old in times of crisis.
“Well,” Trump argued, “if you look at Bill Clinton, far worse. Mine are words, his are actions.”
Can you imagine if Michael Vick had chosen this tack?
“Hey, mine were dogs. Leonard Little killed humans.”
Or if Vick had gone the flat-out-lie route employed frequently at Presidential debates and said: “There were no dogs.”
And when players really screw up, like Vick did, we demand they come back on a bended knee with a contrition story and apologies that must be repeated again and again.
We demand this behavior after much lesser offenses, as well, such as giving up a game-winning goal, or failing to come down with a ball in the end zone, or not being as gracious as we the watching public believe an athlete needs to be after a loss. Cam Newton, anybody?
And yet they show up daily.
At their lockers, moments after unspeakable disappointments and amid great joys, they manage to be generous with their time and gracious with their stories and good temperament in the face of dumb or hard or awful questions. And these are kids sometimes as young as 17 and rarely older than 35 able to display this even temperament.
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Do you hear sexist stuff? Absolutely.
A “baby” here and there, the running back from Seattle who blasted crude rap lyrics, comments about who is hot. But never once did I hear anything anywhere near as crass as grabbing girls by the P.
And more often than not, other athletes would step up and say stop, rather than giggle along like that assclown Billy Bush.
Donald is right. Locker rooms are not like the rest of the world. In many ways, they are better. They are melting pots — liberals and conservatives, white and black, Christians and Muslims, gay and straight, many backgrounds and origin stories and POVs coming together for a common purpose of playing ball and winning games and making money.
Social media is way worse than any locker room, usually guys with daughters in their avatars and Christian in their description and #MAGA using “just words” to shut women up, to make them scared, to flex their internet balls.
Just the other day, after a particularly harsh column I wrote about Baylor, one of the good Baptists sent me multiple tweets calling me the C word that rhymes with punt. And then there was the guy Sunday who noted that Trump would never assault Hillary Clinton because she’s “an ugly hag.”
Trump and his “just words” have emboldened the sexists, the misogynists, the racist, homophobic, anti-Muslim contingent with this idea that talking like this is keeping it real, just “locker room talk.”
And what I know is if these were athletes saying these things, we’d be all offended.
So shouldn’t we hold presidential hopefuls to this standard?