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Former American Press sportswriter Carl Dubois blogs about the games people play, in and out of sports, and the people you meet between and outside the lines.

Carl is an award-winning reporter and columnist living in the Willamette Valley in northwest Oregon, near Portland. He is sports editor of the News-Register newspaper in McMinnville, Ore.

Dishpan hands holding a football? Oh my!

Posted October 15, 2009 at 10:18 am
Filed Under People, Sports | Leave a Comment

BATON ROUGE — Not long ago I was in Lake Charles doing research at the library, looking at old copies of the American Press on microfilm. One of the most enjoyable aspects of such research is seeing ads, the prices of goods and services many years ago, and the way people talked — and wrote, and thought – in previous decades.

Sports sections were very different in the early 1970s, and in more ways than one. I found a front page that featured a photo of a University of Georgia kicker booting a field goal or PAT on the practice field while a woman, perhaps a college student, held the ball for the placement kick. The look on her face (with eyes closed) suggested she wasn’t entirely prepared for the speed and proximity with which the player’s foot moved through her personal space and — whack! — hammered the ball.

This was part of one of those Football 101 or Football for Ladies seminars coaches and teams put on every year to give women a chance to see behind the scenes and learn some of the finer points about the sport. Vince Dooley, then the coach at Georgia, was in the photo.

A good friend of mine hates those events. She considers them condescending and sexist. There’s a good chance she would have thought the same about what was under the photo. The cutline, what most readers would probably call a caption, explained what was happening — the who, what, where, when and why. The “kicker,” what is best described as a headline for the caption, is what caught my eye.

Frightening as a sink of dishes

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that was written by a man. I’m going to also speculate, with reasonable certainty, you would not find anything like that in a 2009 publication.

For your viewing pleasure:

dishpan