All I want for Christmas is (access to) you

EVERY now and then Irish sports journalists of a certain vintage get wistful.

They recall the days of open access, of dressing-rooms so open you practically handed the soap to players in the shower; then they add, sorrowfully, that those days are gone forever.

The reason for the closed door is simple — in professional sports like rugby and soccer the dressing-room is sacrosanct, and GAA teams have followed suit.

Not all professional sports are like that, though.

“In baseball, writers have almost too much access,” says Brian Murphy.

“You’re allowed into the clubhouse (dressing-room) all the way up until 45 minutes before game time. That’s part of the contract agreed to by the Major League Ballplayers Association; you leave with 45 minutes to go to let them prepare for the game. Then, ten minutes after the game ends, the doors are opened and you’re allowed back in.”

We’re having coffee in Peet’s — First and Howard, San Francisco — and clearly the surprise is visible on your columnist’s face.

“You guys aren’t allowed in to see the players?” asks Murphy.

And how...

If the name sounds familiar, it’s from Newstalk’s Off the Ball show, where Murphy, usually known as American Murph appears on Tuesday nights to chat about sports in the States.

Given that his great-grandfather came from Bweeng in Cork, he has a good handle on Irish sports, but we didn’t meet up to chat about the All-Ireland final.

Before becoming a star on Murph and Mac, San Francisco’s top radio sports show, he put in the hard yards as a beat reporter for the local San Francisco Chronicle, following the San Francisco Giants baseball team.

I’m still picking my jaw up off the ground at his locker-room access revelations, mind.

“In (American) football you’re not allowed into the locker-room before the game,” Murphy adds.

“You’re allowed in for practice during the week of the game, but not before the game itself.

“You’re only allowed into the locker-room after the game — 10 minutes, again, after the game finishes.

“But baseball, certainly, the access is incredible. Because you’re in the locker-room so much you find that there is a long tradition of baseball writers and players respecting each other because of the grind of the baseball season.

“As a baseball writer, you show up around February for spring training, and if the team does well then you’re all together until October. So while there can be tensions, because you’re with each other so much the relationships between writers and baseball players tend to be closer than those between writers and football or basketball players.”

Being a beat reporter — assigned to cover one team exclusively — is a dream job for many sportswriters in America: you travel with the team, you’re there for the big games, you get to know the heroes of a city.

But it’s not all beer and skittles, as Murphy says.

“There’s a tension,” says Murphy. “There was a time when writers looked the other way and didn’t report on what some players did away from the field.

“That changed with the baby boom generation — and with Watergate, which people don’t realise spilled over into the sports world, where reporters were forced to realise that it was their job to report and not to cover things up.

“The athlete understands, though, that while he sees the beat reporter around all the time, he (the athlete) is only one story away from being burned, so that’s the tension.

“It takes a special player to get past that, who’ll understand that you’re doing a job; most of them take the view, ‘I’m making millions of dollars so I’m only going to trust you so far; I’ll say hello to you at breakfast or in the lobby but I’m not going to tell you everything that was said last night after the game’.”

There are other drawbacks to being a beat reporter, particularly in baseball — a major league team will play 80 away games a year, for instance, a format so family-unfriendly it’s informally known as the ‘divorce beat’ — but Murphy says it’s what a journalist makes of the experience himself.

“I remember one beat writer saying, ‘I wouldn’t cross the road to have dinner with any player’, and I said, ‘that’s a bit absolute, there’s some guys I’d eat dinner with’. He said, ‘you’re an idiot’.

“So it depends on your view of life. I chose to enjoy the people I enjoyed and to avoid the people I didn’t, and I wound up enjoying the heck out of it.”

I’m sure Brian said a lot more besides, but I was still lost in a world where hurling managers and rugby coaches allowed you into the dressing-room ten minutes after the final whistle.

Hey, it’s worked in baseball for a 100 years. It’d be worth a shot.

* Contact: [e-mail] Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx