Greg Olsen breaks down a wide-open NFC South
Greg Olsen is very familiar with the NFC South after playing 9 seasons with the Panthers and explains why this year the division is completely wide open.
Sports Seriously, USA TODAY
Shannon Eastin, the first woman game official in the NFL, describes in her new book, Lady Ref: Making Calls in a Man’s World, one of the ugliest scenes of workplace sexual harassment I’ve ever heard. It happened before her appointment to the NFL but it’s remarkable in its disgustingness, and also instructive because she’s likely far from alone in facing discrimination as a woman game official. She’s just one of the few women to publicly talk about it.
Eastin writes about a man she calls “commissioner of officials for a local association” who was her boss. He has since died, she writes in her book. She does not identify who he is. The act happened during a break at a high school officiating clinic and in a hotel lobby. It was early in her officiating career and in front of a number of her officiating colleagues, she says. The man grabbed her by the arm and neck, she writes, and forced her to bend over the back of a couch in the lobby. This is what she writes happens next:
“My boss was a big man, and he pressed my nose against the backrest, the crown of my head brushing the seat. I fought to lift my head, first instinctively, then deliberately, but the more I did, the more it hurt, and I knew pushing harder could damage my neck. So I stayed down, shorts riding up, with my butt over the top of the couch.
“Then this guy who was my boss held me down and slapped my behind − hard − three times in front of everyone there in the lobby. Only then did he let go, letting me up. ‘Your birthday spankings,’ he explained.
“And he started laughing.
“I had to straighten my shirt since it’d ridden up too as he held me over the couch. He’d caught me so off guard. He actually thought this was okay?
“I shook my head to clear it. ‘What are you doing?’
“My words echoed through the lobby. Everyone had quieted. Everyone there was looking at us. At me.”
She adds in her book: “I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to stay. I practically ran over to the stairs, straight up to my room, and I shut the door and locked it, and I pressed myself against the door. I was shaking all over. The way he yanked me over the back of that couch replayed in my mind again and again. I was devastated, humiliated, and shamed. And where he slapped me still smarted. I wiped the tears from my face, and as I blew my nose, absoluteanger seeped in.”
Eastin notes that minutes later after the assault there was still a red handprint on her neck where the man had forcibly grabbed her.
Lady Ref, due out in September, is a remarkable book that is ostensibly about Eastin’s life as a game official, but parts of it is really about power. In some cases, men using theirs to keep women either out of officiating, or attempting to diminish their impact. Or, like the violent incident she describes, men simply abusing that power.
Eastin’s rise to the first woman game official is a complicated story, and highly controversial one, but it doesn’t take away from what she overcame along the way. Her story is one of perseverance that until now you probably knew nothing about. There are, without question, elements of heroism throughout her story because she overcame that moment and continued to live an impressive life. She’s officiated for over 20 years, started her own officiating business, and is now the director of officials for the Canyon Athletic Association.
“The main thing I want people to know is that you can battle through things,” Eastin told USA TODAY Sports.
In 2012, Eastin became the first woman to officiate an NFL game, but her appointment happened during the lockout of game officials. In effect, she crossed a picket line. Later, in 2015, Sarah Thomas became the first full-time woman official in league history.
Does Eastin have any regrets about accepting the position while regular officials were locked out?
“No, none,” she said. “I would not have done that if I wasn’t truly ready.”
And that part of her story doesn’t totally define her. What she overcame, in that horrible moment in the hotel lobby, is a bigger part of who she is. It takes strength to come back from that and she proved she has plenty of it.
It’s also important to note that Eastin takes the reader behind the scenes of officiating (from high school to the NFL) which is often unnecessarily secretive. These are often the best parts of the book. I’ve covered the NFL for 30 years and I learned things about officiating by reading her book, and some of the personalities involved with it, that I had no clue about.
Another incident Eastin recounts shows the remarkable ignorance and sexism she faced at times. She describes a scene arguing with another official after a meeting. When this occurred, she wasn’t yet in the NFL.
“’Some of the guys have a problem with you,’ he said, ‘because you’re a woman!’ That did it. ‘Some of the guys?’ The gall he had. ‘You’re (expletive) one of them! At least have the balls to say it to my face!’
“‘Well, I’ve been discriminated against my whole life in officiating for being fat,’ he said.
“I couldn’t believe the stupidity of what he was saying. ‘There’s nothing I can do to change my gender,’ I said, ‘but you can lose weight!'”
What happened to the man who allegedly assaulted Eastin? There was an investigation by the association’s governing body and, Eastin writes, the man was eventually fired.
But before leaving, he was able to give the officials their playoff assignments, and Eastin’s officiating crew, she writes, was left off the list. It was, Eastin believes, the man’s way of retaliating on his way out of the door.
But in the end, he didn’t win. Eastin won.
And she still is.
