Strike Out

Thursday I had lunch with Tony, who was in town covering the Yankees as they played the Rangers for MLB.com (he's living the American baseball writer's dream). Tony and I met when we were both working on the "hawk" desk at the Globe, doing scut work like typing in agate and taking football scores over the phone from coaches with ridiculously thick accents. Sometimes I had to get other hawks who'd grown up in Massachusetts to translate for me.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my semester working agate. I did it three days a week; Thursday night until about midnight, Saturday afternoon until 9 p.m., and then Sunday late night, until the paper was pretty much sent to bed. The Globe had a brand new beautiful newsroom, but sports was in this part of the building that was old and skanky, with stained ceiling tiles and worn, green carpet and special trash cans you had to put foodstuffs in because there were mice.

An agate person is the bottom of the totem pole in sports; you type in scores, hundreds and hundreds of scores from every high school and university within a really wide radius, and you answer phone calls and fetch pages and first edition copies of the newspaper from the press, which was on-site (a rarity in papers these days).

What I hated and loved the most was answering the phones. Sometimes it was fairly straightforward, like taking down scores from high school football coaches, getting the names and yards run and conversions and everything else. There was also a guy named Frank from Montreal who was obsessed with the Bruins and would call almost every night, wanting to know if we'd heard any rumors or news about the team and its players. He'd like to carry on conversations about his hopes and dreams for the team. I liked Frank, because he was easy to prod into a conversation—he once told me about how he took a bus all the way to Boston once to see the Bruins play when he was a young man. (Tony claims that Frank never liked him and would always ask to speak to someone else if he answered.)

The worst phone calls were the random trivia ones. People would call up, often from bars, and want to know the answer to some really obscure question, like who the Bruins' goalie was in 1972. I think there was probably money riding on a lot of these calls, and this was before everyone had an iPhone and could look things up themselves.

The random trivia part sometimes annoyed me; I am definitely NOT a sports trivia person, but with putting a person on hold and using Google, I could find most things. The thing about these calls is it was men calling 98% of the time, and probably a good number were semi-drunk when they called, but as soon as they heard a female voice, everything changed.

Journalism is much better when it comes to sexism; the upper levels are still mostly men, but newer generations of women means that the work-force is much more balanced than it historically was. Sports is also better than it was; there are women reporters, occasional women columnists, but it's still mostly a man's world.

And even if things are better actually on the sports desk, no one seems to have told the people who call. A lot of times the callers would ask me if I knew anything about sports; there's no way they would have asked a male hawk that. If you call the sports desk, you should assume the person can answer it. (Despite my general lack of knowledge off the top of my head, I found answers for most of my callers, including a man who wanted a dissertation about brands of ice skates.)

Callers also asked me what I was doing working the sports desk; it was usually a friendly question, sometimes borderline-flirtatious (like I said, I think a lot of alcohol was involved), but again, a male hawk would never be asked that unless he had already done something to prove himself incompetent. (There were the odd total incompetents that would come work for a few weeks before they disappeared.)

And then there were the occasional callers who asked to be transferred to a guy.

Kudos to the world of journalism, and specifically sports journalism, for trying to get past the good-ol-boy culture that was ingrained into every newsroom in the country. Now how do you change the minds of readers and show them women can be just as competent as men? Do readers look at bylines enough to realize it when they read an article by a woman? Or are people just recognizing women when they see them in person as sideline reporters or something on the television? How many women sideline reporters are in that position just because of their looks, and how many due to their talent? How many will ever get positions as anchors on Sports Center or the like?

And is there any better entry job in a newspaper than working agate? Except for being a cops reporter, I don't think so.