Dianna Russini resigned from The Athletic this week, on account of she could no longer do her job as an NFL insider without some drooling hack on social media obsessing over her like a hormonal seventh-grade boy.
Mike Vrabel, meanwhile did not resign as head coach of the New England Patriots, on account of he's the reigning NFL Coach of the Year and the supply chain tends to run thin in that area.
This should surprise absolutely no one.
It is, after all, the way of the world, and has been since Adam blamed Eve for that apple thing. In any unseemly -- or seemingly unseemly -- interaction between men and women, it's almost always the latter who take the hardest hits. The shame, not to say the consequences, are largely theirs. It's such a given after all these millennia the unfairness of it rarely elicits more than a shrug.
"Yeah, the woman loses her job and the man keeps his," is the prevailing sentiment. "And water is wet and fire is hot. What else is new?"
This is not to say there are never consequences for the guys, too, or that they don't occasionally get shown the street. But the second acts for them seem to come much more readily than for the woman in the (in)equation.
None of this, mind you, is to defend Russini or her judgment as a journalist. Whatever her relationship was with Vrabel -- and, listen, the assumption that she and Vrabel must have been knocking boots is merely that, an assumption -- it pretty clearly crossed the tricky line between source and buddy. And, fairly or unfairly, it was mostly Russini who had the most to lose by crossing it.
She was, or is, damn good at her job, after all. If credibility is the coin of the realm for a journalist, she had a truckload. And nowhere is that more valuable, for a woman, than in Sportsball World.
Neanderthals still roam freely there, after all, emboldened these days by the comeback of misogyny in this retrograde America of ours. And so occasionally they'll surface on the Great Intertoob Thingy wondering why these wimmin' are on their teevees talkin' about sports instead of, you know, in the kitchen makin' their man a sammich.
A hard dollar for sure, bucking that sort of headwind. When I came into the biz, for example, Melissa Ludtke of the New York Times was still suing to get into the locker room. Press boxes and sports departments were almost exclusively male. And very few of us wondered why that was so, or what it must have been like for the first women we encountered in those press boxes and sports departments.
Pretty damn lonely, I imagine. Pretty damn intimidating, too, what with all the whispers and innuendo that, when a woman ascended the newsroom ladder, it must have been because she slept with someone -- not because of her talent.
Now it's all these years later, I'm retired, and I can't count the number of talented women with whom it was my privilege to share press boxes and newsrooms. And yet, all these years later, some things never seem to change.
This fall, Mike Vrabel will be coaching the New England Patriots.
Diane Russini will be doing ... something.
So it goes.
