139. Lady on the Podcast: Susan Fornoff on Reggie, the Rat, and the Locker Room

Reggie Jackson graced the August 30, 1976 cover of Sports Illustrated during the single strangest season of his Hall of Fame career — his lone year as a Baltimore Oriole. Fifty years later, the cover still surprises people who forget he ever played for anyone besides Oakland, the Yankees, or California. Jackson wasn't winding down; he was a superstar in his prime when A's owner Charlie Finley cut his salary 20% while dismantling Oakland's three-peat championship roster, prompting Jackson to refuse to sign and Finley to trade him to Baltimore that April. Even then, Jackson held out for a bigger deal and didn't report for a month, finally signing a $200,000 contract for that one season before moving to the Bronx Zoo in 1977. A decade later, Jackson would wind down his career in Oakland — and the person who watched it happen up close, night after night, was Susan Fornoff. A University of Maryland journalism grad who cut her teeth at the Baltimore News-American and USA Today, Fornoff took over as the A's beat writer for the Sacramento Bee in 1985, becoming one of the pioneering women fighting for real locker room access rather than the token accommodations most teams offered at the time. That fight produced one of the sport's most infamous incidents of hostility toward women reporters. A's slugger Dave Kingman froze Fornoff out of the clubhouse and refused to speak to reporters in her presence after his 400th home run, before escalating in 1986 by sending her a live rat in a box with a tag on it that read, “ My name is Sue”— an act that drew a $3,500 fine from the club but little in the way of contrition from Kingman himself. Fornoff went on to co-found the Association for Women in Sports Media in 1987, and in 1993 turned her experiences into the memoir Lady in the Locker Room: Uncovering the Oakland Athletics, chronicling sexism both in the clubhouse and inside sports departments, with a cast of characters that included Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Tony La Russa, Dennis Eckersley, Dave Stewart — and Reggie Jackson himself. Now Fornoff joins Past Our Prime to bring that history full circle, centering the conversation on Jackson's final major league season in 1987 and offering a beat reporter's view of Mr. October as his career wound down. She talks candidly about the Kingman incident, recalling a gut sense that something was off with him in the days before it happened, and reflects on how, even four decades later, the moment still carries weight for her in ways she didn't expect. From there she widens the lens to where women in sports media stand today, contrasting the hostility she faced breaking in during the '80s with the far more accepted — if still imperfect — landscape now. The author of Lady in the Locker Room is now Lady on the Podcast: Susan Fornoff, on Past Our Prime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices