A little locker room talk

 I never really liked visiting locker rooms. I don't know many in the sportswriting biz who do.

They are cramped, some of them, and smell of stale sweat and analgesic, some of them, and there's a lot of crowded-subway jostling with other scribes and TV jamokes barking, "Move, you're in my shot."  The players don't like this any more than we do. We are, after all, invading what they see as their personal space.

So suffice it to say I wasn't surprised the other day to see the NFLPA is pushing to close their locker rooms to reporters.

They cited the usual privacy and inner-sanctum issues, and while I get that, it also makes me immediately suspect this is just another way to squeeze the media. The reason it makes me suspect that is it's the NFL, which tends to be as media-averse as any other massive corporate monolith. Dealing with it is like dealing with the Kremlin sometimes.

As media savvy as it is media averse, of course, both the NFLPA and the league said all the right things about the proposed locker room ban, swearing it wasn't about limiting access but about finding a better way to accommodate everyone. It's what people who are trying to limit access always say before they limit access.

I say that because I worked the sports media gig for 40 years, and it makes me a highly skeptical creature. It also puts me at a loss to understand how they can close the locker rooms without limiting access.

This is especially true if you've got a tight window to file and need a player who doesn't come to the podium for the postgame presser. Or who dawdles in either getting there or in coming out of the locker room to talk.

Not to single anyone out, because he wasn't the only one, but I'm thinking here of Drew Brees during his Purdue years, when he was a notorious dawdler. You could finish a seven-course meal some days before Drew appeared at the podium. It got so bad the media relations crew set up a box in the south end zone at Ross-Ade so we could catch a few Drew bits before he headed for the locker room. We called it the Brees Box.

Anyway, there's that. (And, yes, before you accuse me of being a relic from the Pleistocene Age, I understand everything's online now and tight deadlines are presumably not as much of an issue). But there's also this: Some details you can't get outside the locker room.

Texture and context are not always possible in journalism, but when they are they add a fullness to the narrative not even video can replicate. You can be as accommodating as you like in bringing players out of the locker room to talk, but you can't always bring mood with them. For that you need more than just sound bites.

Let me give you can example. It's one I've used before, but it still works.

Years ago, before Bob Knight closed Indiana's basketball locker room and started limiting postgame access to three or four players, the Hoosiers suffered an especially dispiriting loss to Illinois (and Knight nemesis Lou Henson) at home. The game ended, the locker room opened, and in we trooped to a mausoleum.

Every IU player was sitting in front of his locker, stone-faced and silent. No one spoke unless spoken to. I was working for the late, great Anderson Daily Bulletin then, and so I sought out Ray Tolbert, the hometown guy from Anderson Madison Heights. It's been 40-some years now, but I can still remember his listless handshake and muted, sparse replies. It was a 180-degree turn from Ray's usual exuberance.

I was just a kid reporter then, but even I recognized how perfectly that encapsulated the entire night. So Ray, and the locker room vibe, wound up in my gamer.

Maybe that sort of thing doesn't matter as much anymore, I don't know. I've been out of the game for awhile now. But it made my story that night better, and it wouldn't have happened if I couldn't have gone into the locker room. 

It was part of the job, in other words. Still should be, by my lights.