Robin Herman, trailblazing female sportswriter who broke gender barrier in NHL locker rooms, dies at 70
Credit: Staff/The New York Times
Robin Herman always knew how to speak up.
There she was, in the June 11, 1969, edition of the Schreiber Times, in a preview of the graduation ceremony at Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, listed simply as "student speaker" for commencement day.
There she was again that autumn, a member of the first incoming class of women at Princeton, demanding to be given a sports beat at the college newspaper, just like all of the other new members of the staff. (She chose rugby.)
And there she was again, most famously, on an NHL All-Star Weekend 47 years before this one, at a time when an All-Star Game in Las Vegas would have sounded as absurd as a woman in a pro hockey locker room.
In an interesting life and career, it was that day, Jan. 21, 1975, when she was all of 23, that secured Herman a place in sports history and the gratitude of generations of female sportswriters.
Many of them have paid tribute to her since she died of ovarian cancer at 70 on Tuesday, while recalling an era in journalism that is difficult to believe by 2022 standards.
Yes, women in sports media still deal with harassment daily — which the rise of social media has made only worse — but in the mid-to-late 1970s, something more fundamental was at stake: the ability simply to do one’s job.
To make a long, complicated story short, women had begun to trickle onto newspaper sports staffs by the mid-70s, often given relatively low-profile beats such as hockey.
But they were saddled with an impossible competitive disadvantage: No locker room access.
They usually had to wait outside the door for a team official to drag a player out for a postgame interview, whether or not a deadline was at hand or the player was relevant to the story.
There are too many stars of what came next to chronicle here, including Melissa Ludtke, whose victory in a 1977 lawsuit after being denied access to the Yankees’ clubhouse during the World Series was the final legal straw.
But that 1975 All-Star Game in Montreal was a singular landmark.
Herman was a young Long Island woman covering the fledgling Islanders for The New York Times, even though she never had attended a hockey game before getting the assignment.
"I had been asking many times over — different teams, different players, different coaches — if I could be allowed into the locker room," she said in the 2013 ESPN documentary "Let Them Wear Towels," on the early history of women in sportswriting. "I usually got apologies, excuses or just flat ‘No.’ "
At a pregame news conference in Montreal, a male writer asked coaches Bep Guidolin and Fred Shero if they would allow credentialed female reporters into the locker room.
"The two coaches looked at each other and shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ " Herman recalled in 2013.
Soon Herman and a local radio reporter, Marcelle St. Cyr, walked into the locker room and discovered that they, not the players, were the story.
"I thought I wouldn’t be noticed in the crowd, but I was wrong," Herman said. "The cameras turned, the reporters with their mics came up to me and said, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing? Why are you here?’
"I heard somebody say, ‘There’s a girl in the locker room!’ I remember the mics being right up against my face. ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I’m here doing my job, so will you just let me do my job?’ They were getting in my way."
Herman approached the Islanders’ Denis Potvin, then a 21-year-old rising star, after he scored the only goal in the Campbell Conference’s 7-1 loss to the Wales Conference.
"He said, ‘Robin, what are you doing here?’ " Herman recalled. "I said, ‘I’m interviewing people.’ "
Potvin, wearing a towel around his waist, handled the interview professionally, but during it, the Canucks’ Tracy Pratt pulled off Potvin’s towel. Herman said Potvin simply grabbed another one from behind him and continued.
Three weeks later, Newsday’s Stan Isaacs, a supporter of women’s access, wrote a column about Herman after she covered a Penguins-Islanders game at Nassau Coliseum.
His description of her interviewing Billy Harris outside the locker room reflected the fascination with a radical change in media culture — and a different era in sportswriting.
"Billy Harris, one of the Islanders’ bachelors, a handsome, curly headed youth, came out and talked with Herman, a slim, pert brunette," Isaacs wrote. "He was wearing long underwear, the buttons open to the navel, the top of his jockstrap waistband visible."
Things got better from there, slowly. Incidents of harassment continued through the 1980s and ’90s and into the 21st century, but at least the notion of women in sports media being allowed to work had been settled legally.
Herman left sports in 1979 to cover news for the Times and later covered health at The Washington Post and did freelance work. She also worked at the Harvard School of Public Health as assistant dean for communications through 2012 and wrote a blog through 2014 called "Girl in the Locker Room!"
She is survived by her husband, Paul Horvitz, a former Times editor, a son, a daughter and two grandchildren.
Her death resonated not only with women from her era but younger ones, too.
Shannon Hogan, who covers the Islanders for MSG Networks, said during Wednesday’s Kraken-Islanders game, "Women all over the sports world, like me, owe her a huge, huge thank you for what she was able to do for women in sports."
Horvitz wrote on Twitter that Hogan’s tribute was "incredibly touching" and said Herman "loved her fellow female sportswriters. What an amazing group of intrepid, take-no-prisoners, go-getters."
In the ESPN documentary, Herman read aloud one piece of hate mail from that era that she kept as a reminder.
It read in part: "Dear Miss Herman: It’s hard to address a harlot disguised as a reporter. You cannot do such a thing with impunity. It’s wrong, no matter how many women’s libbers might dumbly applaud it.
"If there had been any real men in that locker room, you would have been kicked out . . . Surely, you shall regret this, and regret it bitterly."
She did not.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
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