Locked down

I never really loved going into locker rooms. I don't know many ink-stained wretches -- or, in Ted Williams' famous words, "knights of the keyboard" -- who do.

I went into locker rooms for the same reason all of us did: Because it was part of the job, and also because sometimes detail revealed itself there that advanced whatever story you wanted to tell. Before Indiana University banished reporters from Bob Knight's locker room, for instance, nothing better conveyed a loss that particularly displeased Coach than walking in and seeing his players all sitting at their lockers with their heads down.

It was almost military in its aspect, the way they all sat there. And the pin-drop silence that attended it spoke volumes about the iron grip Knight held on his program.

That said, no one ever went in there, or into any other locker room, to linger. You got in, you jotted down a few quotes and details -- discarded balls of tape strewn around the Indianapolis Colts' locker room like the detritus of battle, for instance, or the framed photo of his child that occupied a prominent place in Pacers wild man Ron Artest's locker -- and you got out. Places to go, deadlines to meet and all that.

And so I have no particular reaction to the news that the NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer are closing their locker rooms and clubhouses for the time being in response to the spread of COVID-19. Seems like a prudent case of discretion being the better part of valor to me.

Here's what I wonder, though: What if those leagues, and others, decide they like keeping the locker rooms closed? That it's easier for their clubs to control media access in an era when controlling media access has become more and more a priority even down to the high school level?

Squeezing press freedoms has become accepted policy here in the Age of Trump, when the President himself has adopted the totalitarian mantra that a free press is the enemy of the people. On the sports side, this has manifested itself in the closure of locker rooms; it's now become standard procedure across major college athletics now.

Knight might have been the forerunner for that, or one of them, but his approach differed only in degree. Where most places take requests for certain players and bring them to the postgame conference room, Knight controlled whom he would send. And so you might get the guy who scored 25 points and made the winning shot, or you might get three seniors who barely played.

In which case you hoped that at least one of those seniors was the rare free spirit who would say something interesting.

In any event, it's a different world now. And you can only hope it's not going to get even more different.

"I think it's a good idea for now," Texas Rangers pitcher Edinson Volquez said the other day in response to the MLB clubhouse closure. "Probably later, hopefully we can get back together again."

Probably later, the man says.

Yeah. We'll see.