Mary Garber: Interview #3

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Gentry: When we left off, we were talking about some of the problems you had getting into the dressing room and also getting into the sports organizations. But you had some real advantages breaking into sportswriting when you did, didn't you?

Garber: I certainly did and I don't think I could have broken in in a better way or at a better time because I was on a—I don't think it's right to call it a small paper, it's probably a medium-sized paper. But Carlton Byrd and I were the whole staff. So I had a great deal of freedom and a great deal of opportunity to do a lot of different things. The organization I'm on now—or rather I was on when I retired—was a bigger staff. We had definite assignments and things that we had to do. It was a much more structured setup. I think I'd have had a whole lot more trouble if I had broken in in a situation like that. Carlton and I just sort of had a low-key, loosely organized operation and all I did was tell him pretty much what I was going to do and then I just went ahead and did it.

The dressing rooms were not a problem because even when I covered a college football game, I didn't have to write a story until Monday morning when I wrote the roundup for the Monday evening paper. So deadlines were not a problem. I had plenty of time to wait around until the boys had showered and dressed. I had plenty of time to think about my questions and to go over the game and to see what I was going to write. I just didn't have to write under pressure until I got on the morning paper.

I remember one of the things I used to do on Sunday morning, I'd call Earle Edwards who was then the North Carolina State coach and talk with him. And to show the difference, I had his home phone. Today coaches rarely give you their home phone. I used to call Earle every Sunday morning at 11 o'clock. And very often his wife would answer the phone. And she'd say, "Earle, it's your girl friend, come talk to her." And then we'd sit and talk about football and the game and everything else.

I covered a great variety of sports and that made a big difference. That gave me experience in football, basketball, baseball, track, swimming, cross country, just about every sport our newspaper covered. Working with high school kids made it much easier than it would have been otherwise because I was dealing with young kids who were more tolerant of my mistakes and much more willing to accept me. Also I think it helped working with Winston-Salem State which was a black school. They were tolerant of whatever shortcomings I might have. All in all, it was a much, much better setup, much more low-key situation and a much easier way for a young girl to break in.

Gentry: What kind of hours did you work on the Sentinel?

Garber: We had to be to work at 6:30 in the morning and Carlton and I would do the makeup on the Sentinel. We used to finish—I think the deadline was around 10:30 or eleven o'clock. Then I usually had some free time to do pretty much whatever I wanted to. In the afternoons I would go to high school football practice and they usually started about three o'clock or a little later than that. When I started covering Wake Forest, I went to Wake Forest football practices. I'd get home for supper about six o'clock. Then in the evening, I'd phone high school coaches and talk to them.

Those were long hours but it wasn't really working all the time because I would call one of the high school coaches and we'd talk about the practice that day. Then we'd just talk about what was going on so you

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So I went over there and one of the first things I had to do was what we call a first-half running which means that you rounded up what had happened in the first half and sent that back to the paper so they would have something to go with for the first edition. I had never done a first-half running in my life and I wasn't really sure how to do it. But I got through that okay. But what really ruined me was that the game went into triple overtime. And I was a basket case before it was finished. But I got it done and the big thing that that did for me was to let me know that I could work under pressure and I could handle situations like that.

Gentry: On those stories you did in the press box and under pressure like that, about how long would you have to write it at the end of the game?

Garber: It depended on when the game finished.

Gentry: Like an hour, often?

Garber: Well, sometimes you had an hour, sometimes you had more than that, sometimes you had less than that. It just all depended upon when the game finished. The thing that happened was that a lot of times you'd come back and all of a sudden your mind would go absolutely blank. You wouldn't have any idea of how to begin your lead or where to start or anything like that? And Mal was very helpful. He said, "It happens to everybody." He said, "When that happens and you can't think of something that really hits you to be a good lead, do what we call an AP lead and that's the straight news-type lead that such-and-such a team won and very, very routine. And he said, "Usually when you start that way, then you can relax and you know what to do and you can get your story done."

And it always worked with me. I found that it was sort of like when you took exams and you'd sit down and you'd look at the exam and you'd say, "Holy crow, I don't know anything in this!" But if you just skipped the ones you didn't know and went down until you hit something that you did know, then all of a sudden you're relaxed and you look back and you'll say, "Oh, yeah, I know the answer to that."

Gentry: So Mal helped you a lot—

Garber: Yes, he did.

Gentry: Wasn't he also quite critical of you?

Garber: He was terribly critical of me when he first came and I didn't like him at all and I felt sure he didn't like me. He was trying very hard to make the paper much better. So he used to write us notes and every morning when we came in, our mailboxes—at least mine would be stuffed with letters, notes from him that this was wrong and that was wrong and I didn't do this well and I didn't do that well. And I know he was trying to help me but newspaper people being what we are, we sort of turned our nose up at it. And we used to get together and I'd say, "I got six notes today, how many did you get?" And somebody else would say, "Well, I got seven, you aren't nearly as good as I am."

Gentry: That's unusual, isn't it?

Garber: Yes, it is, to get that close supervision. He used to sit down with me and go over every one of my stories, line by line. And I'd sit there and just listen to what he had to say. Maybe it's kind of like a parent sitting down and talking with a child, the child listens but he really doesn't hear. One day he was going over one of my stories and I don't know, I just had it. So finally I said, "Mal, I don't think I can please you no matter what happens." And he stopped and he looked at me and he said, "Don't you know why I'm doing this?" I said, "No." And he said, "Because I think you can be good." After that, gosh, I would have done anything for him. And he really, really did help me, he was one of my strongest supporters, he boosted me in

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Even up until right before I retired, in fact, it's happened since I've been retired, they'll call me from the paper and say, "This has happened, we need your help." And I'll get in the car and go back to work and do whatever needs to be done. I think anybody who is a newspaper person is going to do that.

Gentry: Didn't you even work on a vacation sometimes?

Garber: Yes. When I went on vacation, I used to go up at a place called Hendersonville in North Carolina and I always would look ahead and try to think up stories that I could get in that area so that I'd have something when I came back, something to write. I'd go down to Furman and talk to people there. One year the Atlanta Falcons had a training camp at Blue Ridge Assembly and I went up there and spent a couple of days and did some stories on them. I just enjoy doing it because it gave me a whole new area, a whole new group of people to see.

Gentry: You just loved it so much you didn't care if you worked all day and all night.

Garber: It didn't make any difference to me. I liked what I was doing and I still do.

Gentry: On a big sports weekend, say when there were a lot of football games, what would be the typical hours you worked?

Garber: The thing is if you work on a morning paper, you are going to have some real problems. And the guys that are working there do it now. I'd cover a high school football game on Friday night and get in from covering the game maybe at 11:30 or 12 o'clock. Then I'd have to get up the next morning at 6:30 or 7 to drive to cover a college football game. When I was working the consolidated shift and working on the evening paper, Carlton and I still had to go in at 6:30 in the morning and put the Sentinel's page out before we went to a college football game. When I'd get back from the college football game, it was 7:30 or eight o'clock by the time I'd written my story. So it made for long days. The men who work on the staff now work long hours—and I did the same thing—I've seen those kids come in from a high school football game at 11:30 and 12 o'clock at night and discuss whether they were going to drive to Clemson starting then or whether they were going home and get a few hours sleep and then drive to Clemson.

Gentry: So it's not just the old timers that had that kind of loyalty, it's the young kids today—

Garber: It goes with the territory. If you're not willing to do it you shouldn't be there. I know we had one kid who came in and wanted to be in the sports department. We tried him for a couple of weeks and finally he said, "Look, when do I get a weekend off, I can't work every weekend." And we told him, "Hey, baby, if you're going to work in the sports department, you're going to work every weekend." So he quit. And he might just as well have because we would have fired him, anyhow.

Gentry: Are you all paid straight salaries or do you get overtime for those—

Garber: Yes. It sounds real bad but it isn't. It's sort of a you-help-me-and-I'll-help-you. Sure you work long weekends and sure it's hard when basketball games and football games pile up. But then I might go in Monday or Tuesday and work an hour.

Gentry: Oh, I see.

Garber: You see, you just sort of—

Gentry: You don't punch a time clock.

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Garber: I don't know. I'm sure she did. I'm sure she got very annoyed at times but she went ahead and did it, anyhow.

Gentry: I've heard many people say that you've been married to the paper and that your colleagues were almost like family. I think you've said it yourself. Do you think that's a fair statement?

Garber: Yes, I think so. I know that the newspaper has been my life. I have loved it since I first went there and I just think about it all the time. I criticize it and get upset about it when it doesn't do what I think it should do. But I really, really love it and I'm just happy that I had the chance to be with it as long as I have. All the guys who work there and the gals, too, have been my friends.

Gentry: Looking back, do you ever regret working that hard for fifty years, now that it's the fiftieth year?

Garber: Not really. This was something I felt I had to do and I don't think I would have lasted as long as I have without spending this much time.

Gentry: Do you think now that sportswriting would be a tough juggling act for the modern women who wants everything—the home, the husband, the kids and the career? Could they do it?

Garber: I think they can do it but I think you've got to give up a lot and I think you've got to make a decision whether you think you can handle everything. You know the old story of supermom, can she work full-time and still raise a family? And the problem is that if you're working for a sports department, there are a lot of demands on you. Several years ago I met a young lady named Mary Flanagan who was covering the New York Islanders, I think it was, for the New York Daily News. And she was married and had a baby. And she said her husband was very understanding and they had good sitters to be with the little girl during the day and her husband was home at night. But she said that she realized that as the little girl got older and wanted Mommy to go and take part in PTA and make costumes for the Christmas play and do all the things that mothers usually do. She couldn't be on the road ten days a month with an ice hockey team.

And I think this is something that women have to choose. It's a tough decision to make. And I think it's awfully hard for a girl who's dating and interested in a young man to say, "Hey, I'm sorry but I can't go out with you tonight, I've got to go to a football game." That's fine for a while but, you know, the guy gets kind of tired of it after a while. It's a really, really tough decision for a woman to have to make—I think sports people have a lot of problems anyhow in their marriages because they're on the road so much. There are so many demands on them. And I think that probably the divorce rate is pretty high and I would think it would be even worse with the woman doing these things because our society today still doesn't understand that women's careers are important to them, too.

Gentry: Would you have any special advice to a woman wanting to start out in your field today?

Garber: You mean if they're going to try to juggle both?

Gentry: Right. Or any advice. Any warnings?

Garber: Warnings is that you're going to have to work awfully hard and you're going to have to be a whole lot better than the men are.

Gentry: You still have to be better?

Garber: Right. And you're going to have to give up an awful lot of things that other women do and enjoy and you're not going to be able to do them. And it's not just sports, we have a woman who has a six-year-old son. She's the city editor. And she's had to have him in day care ever since he was about three or four years old.

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sort of trailed off. And we found out that the guy who was planning the program had made a mistake and we played the anthem that was the anthem for Romania when they were a monarchy and of course they were a Communist country now. And that was a horrible situation and everybody was very offended.

Later on that day I was in the press room and I was talking with a newspaperman from Romania. He spoke English so we could understand each other. He had been assigned to the United Nations. They had taken him off the United Nations that week and sent him to the Davis Cup because they said the Davis Cup was the important thing going on in the world that week. That was kind of weird for us because all the people covering the Davis Cup from North Carolina were second-stringers. Nobody who was a top sports person was there. They were all off covering football.

So this Romanian guy and I started talking about the mistake in the national anthem. And he said, "And how would you feel if you came to Romania and we played the wrong national anthem for the United States?" And I didn't dare tell him that I would think it was hilarious and we would all have a big laugh about it. But I told him that we were very sorry and that we meant no offense and we were just stupid. And he was equally nice back to me and he said, "You are not stupid. It was just a mistake." So then we went to the bar and had a beer and international relations were very well taken care of.

And then I thoroughly enjoyed international competition covering the track meets that Al Buehler and Leroy Walker put together down in Durham. We had the Pan-African team and we had the West Germans and we had the Russians and it was really a lot of fun because you got to know all the different kind of people. I was down the year the Russians were there, I was sitting down in the stadium and talking to this man. He spoke perfect English. We talked about track and we talked about Durham and he wanted to know where was a good place to eat and all the questions that you ask like that. And then later we had a press conference and this guy got up and spoke through an interpreter. He was the Russian coach and he acted like he couldn't speak English. He spoke English every bit as well as I did and we got along just fine.

And then I met a Russian lady shot-putter and I interviewed her through an interpreter. And I know she understood what I was saying because she would react to the question before the lady got through translating it. It was really weird because they'd make a real long answer and then the translator would say, "He says yes." So you knew you weren't really getting the full story of what went on.

Gentry: That must have been very hard.

Garber: It was hard. But you know, it's amazing how much you can talk to each other, between sign language and a little bit of English and if you ever knew any French or other language. It's amazing how much you can talk to each other if you really want to.

Then in tennis, I met a Russian lady who was playing with one of the teams when they had team tennis, she came to Greensboro. She was telling me all about how the junior tennis program was set up in Russia and how she learned and how good it was. She spoke excellent English and we got along just fine. And she said, "The thing, though, is I just hate to practice. I do everything I can to get out of practice." So I said, "Well, you're not alone in that."

And I told her about Brian Piccolo who was just a horrible person in practice and he goofed off all the time. And then there was a Davidson basketball player who told me that when he got up in the morning and thought about practice, it ruined his whole day. So we were laughing and carrying on. All of a sudden she just froze. And she went back and started telling me about the junior tennis program and what it was like, going right over the things she had been over just a few minutes before. I looked over my shoulder and the chaperone on the Russian team had pulled up a chair behind us and was listening. And that girl was frightened. She was afraid that she was saying something she shouldn't.

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long in the same place." And when a guy couldn't hit, he'd say, "He couldn't hit me if I was to run across the plate." I just enjoyed listening to them so much.

Gentry: Did you quote them a lot?

Garber: Right. And the men used to take turns buying the popcorn and the cold drinks that we ate while we were watching the game. And somehow it was never my turn. I would always say, "Well, this is my turn." They'd say, "No, no, Bill's going to buy them this week. He's so cheap, he never pays." So one afternoon I was in Elkin at a baseball game and George Ferrell was the only scout there. So George said, "C'mon, let's go get a Coke." And I said, "Now, George, it is my turn to buy. You have always bought and you won't ever let me buy." So he said, "Okay." But he said, "I'm not going to let you buy. We're going to have a contest. We're going to throw rocks at that tree and whoever hits it first, the other one has to buy the drinks."

So we started throwing rocks and I couldn't get anywherewith the near the tree and we kept moving closer and closer and George kept missing on purpose. So finally I realized, after we'd been throwing for two or three minutes, that he was never going to hit the tree until I did. So finally I hit the tree and he said, "A-a-ah, shaw, now I've got to buy the drinks again." And I never asked again to have somebody let me buy the drinks because I knew they weren't going to let me.

It was an interesting relationship. They accepted me, they liked to have me around, they looked after me, but I wasn't really one of them. I was a lady and they were gentlemen and they knew that. And it was a very interesting relationship.

And then when we had the minor league baseball team here, Jim Wommack who was a baseball nut—we used to go out and play baseball with the Cardinal players. I think I've told that story about how we used to go out and play. And they always threw the ball so I could hit. Even the fast-ball pitchers would lob it in there so I could hit it.

And another thing I did was to work very closely with the wives because after I made friends with them, then I knew that I wouldn't ever have trouble with the manager —and that was true. I remember one wife we had, the manager then was sort of a hard nut to crack and he wasn't real enthusiastic about me. And one day his wife said to me, "Mary, is he treating you right?" And I said, "Well, I have had a little trouble with him." And she said, "Well, you won't any more." And I didn't. I don't know what she did but all of a sudden he started being real nice. I think she told him in no uncertain terms, you'd better be nice to her or else.

What I used to do is when they came to town, I'd always take the wives out to lunch—

Gentry: Oh, that was smart!

Garber:—and we'd sit around and talk. There are more ways to get around things than you think there are.

One of the interesting things I had from baseball was—this was happening just a few years before I retired, I was covering a game and I went down to the dugout to get the lineup. And the visiting manager said, "What would you want with the lineup?" I told him that I was a sportswriter from the paper and I was covering the game. And he sneered and laughed and said, "Ho, ho, ho, so you're a sportswriter." And before I could think of a good answer—and I don't know what the answer would have been—Bill Haywood, who was a pitcher on the team and who had been at Carolina, came over and he said, "Yes, she is a sportswriter and she's a damn good one and don't you ever forget it." Boy, that man's whole attitude changed. He went and got the lineup for me and I never had any more trouble with him. But I don't know what would have happened if Bill hadn't been there.

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Right after the spread offenses came in, the split ends and the wide receivers, a lot of schools were experimenting and doing it in different ways. And Warren Geise at South Carolina had a very innovative spread offense and I wanted to do a story on it. So I called Paul Amen who had since resigned as coach at Wake Forest and was working for the bank. And he sat down with me and went over and explained to me how South Carolina's spread was different from anyone else's and what they were doing and told me all about it. So I called Geise and told him I wanted to talk to him about it. He wasn't too enthusiastic because he figured I didn't know anything. And then when I started asking the questions that Paul told me to ask, he was really impressed and he said, "What did you say your name was?" Then he was really nice. But I didn't tell him that Paul had to spend about two hours trying to teach me all this.

Gentry: And you had him in your hip pocket from then on, I imagine.

Garber: Right.

Gentry: Did you actually go to a baseball umpire's clinic?

Garber: Yes. I went to—the city recreation department had an umpires' clinic. And that was like the football and basketball clinics. But the umpires' was a little bit more interesting because you actually went out on the field. And I remember one night we were out on the field and one of the umpires was supposed to be a player and another umpire was an umpire. The umpire acting the role of the player was supposed to use a whole lot of profanity so you'd know when to throw the player out of the game. And he started off. And he wasn't doing a very good job. He wasn't being very convincing, wasn't being very threatening to the umpire. So the guy that was running it said, "Hey, you can do better than that." And the man said, "Well, I could do better than that, but Mary's here and I don't want to offend her."

Once I graduated from the umpires' clinic, the umpires used to invite me to their picnic. And they always had a softball game and let me be the umpire. And I stood behind the plate. It was very interesting because when I'd start to dust off the plate, they'd take the whisk broom out of my hand and dust the plate off for me.

But one of the things that happened was a player got a hit and he was rounding third base and he missed the bag. I didn't do anything. He came on in and scored. The other team protested and threw the ball to third base and I called the player out, which was what I should have done. And the umpires all crowded around and they said, "How did you know that? We didn't think you saw it when he missed third base but you did and why didn't you call him out when he missed third base?" And I said, "Because I went to umpire school and I know what I'm supposed to do."

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Gentry: You've seen a lot of great changes, I'm sure. One you mentioned was you once had a real easy and friendly relationship with a coach and you could call him any time of the day or night and always had their home phone and that's quite different now.

Garber: Yes. If I wanted to talk to a coach at Wake Forest, I'd stick my head in the office. And if they were busy or if they had something they had to do, they'd say, "Go on, mess around somewhere for about ten or fifteen minutes and come on back." I had their home phones, I would go to their homes, they came to my house, we just had a very close, easy working relationship.

As I said, Bill Hildebrand was always very, very nice to me. He lost his job because the team wasn't doing well. I knew it was going to happen. And I went out there that day and he was over talking with the president. When he came back, I could look at his face and I knew that he had been fired. And I asked him about it. And he said, "I really can't tell you but, you know what has happened as well as I do."

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Gentry: The stories have suffered because of that, too. You don't have that insight—

Garber: I'm sure of it. You don't have the insight as in the old days. In the old days, we went to Wake Forest football practice every day, we wrote what was called practice briefs. So I was out there every day. Nobody had to explain to me about the horror of two-a-days. In case you don't know what they are, before school starts, the teams practice once early in the morning and again in the afternoon and then they have meetings all day long. And I can tell you, there's nothing worse since the Lord made the world than getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning and going out to practice at 6:30. The grass is wet, your shoes are wet, it's just yucky all the way around. And yet I did that—I went to the first practice of Wake Forest football every year for about nine or ten years. And I know full well how bad two-a-days are. Well, we don't cover things like that, we don't cover first practice any more.

Gentry: When did those changes come in the coaches—

Garber: I think television had a lot to do with it, when all the TV people started coming in and more radio stations and more newspapers started covering college football. As Terry said, there were just so many more people. We've cut back because there's just so much, so much more. We've got an ice hockey team, we never had one of those before. Football runs into basketball, basketball runs into baseball, baseball runs into the football season. You just never get done and we've had to cut a lot of things out that we used to do.

Gentry: Another great change you've seen is the change in technology, I'm sure. Like when you were first working in the press boxes, how would you send out a story?

Garber: It used to be when I first started covering, you took a typewriter and you wrote your story on a typewriter. And then you took the typewritten copy and gave it to a Western Union lady who was sitting on the back row. And she would send it back to your newspaper by Western Union. Those Western Union ladies saved our necks many, many times because they'd come down and they'd say, "Now, you didn't really mean this, did you?" And of course, you didn't. They were a real help.

Gentry: What was that, forties and fifties?

Garber: Yes, I guess it was. I don't remember the years of when we changed. And then we got into telecopiers where you typed your story and put it on a telecopier and sent it back to the office.

Gentry: What's a telecopier?

Garber: Well, you typed your story out and put it on a round cylinder and then sent it by telephone. Now, of course, we're all into computers. And even the computer's been changed. When we first started carrying computers, they must have weighed fifteen or twenty pounds and now they have them weighing eight or nine pounds. Everything is so much better and so much faster. The only problem is that sometimes computers get contrary and they don't send and then you really are in trouble.

Gentry: Didn't you have one blow out on you?

Garber: Yes, I went to—I think it was Duke, I can't remember which school it was, and they shot fireworks afterward. And for some reason, the fireworks did something to my computer, I don't know what. But I couldn't send and I had to dictate the story.

Gentry: Oh, no. So you use a little laptop now.

Garber: Yes.

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So she suggested that I talk to him about flowers. So after basketball bogged down which didn't take very long, I said, "Willie, how did you get interested in flowers?" He told me that his father had been a landscape specialist and that when he was a little boy, he had followed his daddy around while he worked on the gardens in the community where they lived. And then his eyes just lit up and he said, "One of these companies has offered a thousand dollars to anybody who could grow a black rose." And I said, "Willie, how would you grow a black rose?" Well, then he started into the cross-pollinization of what you would do to get a black rose. And that kid just lost me completely. I didn't know what he was even talking about. And Bill Foster who was the basketball coach at the time stuck his head in the door and he said, "Willie, will you shut up? You have been talking for twenty minutes. Give somebody else a chance." And poor Willie, he was so excited about what he was talking about and so interested, he'd forgotten all about saying uh-huh and huh-uh and I don't know.

Gentry: Did you write a story about him?

Garber: I couldn't do the cross-pollinization because I didn't know what that kid was talking about.

Gentry: I'll bet not many people wrote about basketball players that were growing roses.

Garber: No, I know they didn't.

Gentry: Another thing that I have learned from your writing is that you often are most of the time writing the positive. And in fact, Lib Byrd, Carlton Byrd's widow, told me that she thought your life was almost dedicated to making people feel good about themselves which I thought was a wonderful comment. Is positive writing, finding the positive in a situation, a philosophy of yours?

Garber: Well, as I said, when I started it was. I had to be positive because I didn't want to risk losing my job. But once I got into it, I realized that no matter how big and tough these kids seem, they're really very, very sensitive. You can hurt them very easily. I remember Bob Grant who I think I have mentioned before. He went down to play at Clemson and someone wrote about how he had missed his assignment and he hadn't done well. And he was really upset about it because, as he explained to me, he had done the job he was assigned to do and the play had gone where it had gone, not because he hadn't done his job but because someone else hadn't done their job. He was really hurt by what had happened. And the writer had been inaccurate. He'd been critical when he didn't know what he was talking about. I don't mean that you always have to say everything is great, everything is perfect, but I think that you can present what happened. And if you're going to criticize somebody, show what they did wrong, don't just stick a knife in him. You don't need to do that.

Gentry: But isn't sportswriting today pretty negative and critical of—

Garber: Very much so and I think it's a bad thing to do. At one time, sportswriters were cheerleaders and that's wrong, too. You don't have to say "Go Deacs" or "Go Blue Devils" or "Go Tarheels" or "Go Wolfpack" or "Go" any other team. I see my role as a person who has access to a certain bit of information that you don't have as a fan. And I need to tell you about that. I need to tell you the things you need to know, whether it's good or whether it's bad. But this business of going out and trying to find something that is wrong just to find something that is wrong is not a good thing. That doesn't mean that if there's a bad situation, if something is wrong in a sports program or in a college program, get down to the bottom of it and dig it up. You should do that. But just don't knock to be knocking.

Gentry: Another trend that I see in some of your stories is that you write about people who are not always the stars of the game or the stars of the team. And maybe you would call them the benchwarmers.

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Carl Eller I knew when he was in high school and then he went on to Minnesota. And I didn't realize this but he told me that he came back right after he had been made All-American at Minnesota and came by to see me. And I was busy and I said, "Carl, sit down. I'll be with you in a minute." And he said he couldn't understand. In Minnesota everybody could hardly wait to talk to him and here he comes back to his home town and this little slip of a girl says, "Sit down. I'll be with you in a minute." But as I say, Carl and I went back a long way.

He went on and played with the Minnesota Vikings and when they were in the Super Bowl, I wanted to talk to him to do a story and so I called him and he did not call back. Everything, of course, had to go through their publicity department. When he hadn't called back, I called the publicity department again and I said, "Would you give Mr. Eller a message?" And the man said very icily, "Oh, yes." And I said, "You tell Carl that he's ruining my reputation." And Carl called back in about five minutes and said, "I don't want to ruin your reputation. What do you want?"

After Doug Moe was made coach of the Denver Nuggets, I called him and wanted to talk to him and of course he had a million interviews and he didn't have time, either. Doug had come to a basketball clinic and Larry Brown and he and I had gone someplace to eat. We sent Larry up to the salad bar to get us salads and when he came back, he had tomatoes on Doug's salad. And Doug said, "Larry, don't you know I don't like tomatoes. Don't ever put tomatoes on my salad." So we scraped them off of his and Larry and I split them up. So when I couldn't get through to Doug, I asked his secretary to deliver a message and she said she would. And I said, "You tell Doug that I'm going to put tomatoes all over his salad if he doesn't call me back." And he called me back in about a few minutes. And it's that touch of knowing these people and sort of knowing where to kid them a little bit, that helps.

Gentry: So you can go through and get to the coaches when some people can't.

Garber: Yes. I hope I can.

Gentry: I know your publisher was telling me that sometimes when there was a real sensitive story that a number of people needed to get for the paper, or a scandal or something, the men would choose you to go in and get the interview because they were afraid they wouldn't get it.

Garber: I don't know why they wouldn't get it. I remember one time we were down at Duke. And I was covering a track meet, I don't remember what it was. But that was when the story first broke about one of the State point-fixing scandals. And Vic Bubas who had been at State when these events occurred was then the basketball coach at Duke. So as I say, we were all down covering the track meet and we looked at each other. And one of the guys said, "Well, one of us has got to go up and talk to Vic Bubas." And everybody said, "Not me, not me, not me, I'm not going up there." So finally they all agreed that Vic would be much less likely to punch me in the nose than to punch any of them. So I was unanimously elected to go up and talk to Vic. And I went in there and asked him the questions. He looked at me and he said, "Aren't there a lot of other writers down there?" And I said, "Yes, there are." He said, "And you're the only one who had the guts to come up and talk to me?" So I told him that I had been elected to come.

Gentry: Did you tell him why?

Garber: Yes.

Gentry: You talk a lot about fairness being important in sportswriting. What's your philosophy on that?

Garber: My philosophy on that is that you have a responsibility. What you say goes to a lot of people, and people—believe it or not, I know they say the newspapers don't do anything, but people believe if they see it in a newspaper, it's true. And so you have to be very, very careful what you say, that you're accurate in what

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Garber: No, I don't think women write any differently than men. Several years ago I spoke on women sportswriters at an American press institute, sports editors seminar. And that was one of the questions they asked. So I went through the state newspapers, including ours, and I clipped stories, some that were written by me and there were a couple of other women writers at the time. And some of them were written by men. I cut the by-lines off of them and I must have gotten fifteen or twenty stories. Then I said, "Okay, here are these stories. You guys go through and tell me which ones were written by men and which ones were written by women." And they couldn't—a lot of the times when they thought they were written by women, they were written by men, and the other way around. And the only one that really caught on was Mal because, as he said, "I recognized your hand, your style, right away. I knew which ones were yours even though I hadn't read them."

Gentry: Do you think the players have told you things over the years that they probably wouldn't tell a male reporter?

Garber: I don't know. I don't know whether they would have told a male reporter. I think that in a lot of cases they knew I was interested in them and, as I say, I spent a lot of time with the players so they knew me and I knew them. And they were more likely to talk to me. I remember one young man at Wake Forest, he was a basketball player and I asked him what he was going to do, he was going to graduate that spring. And he said that he would have to go into the army—that was when there was draft and you had to go into the service after college. He said that he didn't mind doing that, he didn't mind going into the army, but he thought he was probably going to be sent to Vietnam and he was afraid he was going to be a coward.

Well, I knew I had to say something to that young man and I really didn't know, I've never been a combat, I don't know about being under fire. But I knew he needed help, he wanted somebody to tell him something. So finally I said, "I've never been under combat and I really don't know but I would think that"—I said, "Aren't you always nervous before you go into a game?" And he said, "Yes, I always am." And I said, "But once you get into it, you forget about being nervous, you forget about being scared and you just play." And he said, "That's right." And I said, "I think that probably combat's pretty much the same way, that everybody's scared before they go into combat and then when you get in there, you sort of do the things you're trained to do." And I hope it comforted him. I think it did.

Gentry: Did he come back from Vietnam?

Garber: I don't know. He left and I never saw him again. I don't know.

And then there was a Wake Forest football player, he was one of the first black players at Wake Forest. And in those days, freshmen weren't eligible so your first chance you got to play was when you were a sophomore. And this guy got a chance to start. His name was Butch Henry. And he was going to be a starting wide receiver on one of the first Wake Forest games. So I heard about that and I went up to him after practice and I said, "Butch, aren't you excited about playing and starting." And he said yes, he was, but he said, "Mary, I am so afraid because Coach"—and that was Bill Tate then—"says that sophomores make enough mistakes to cost a team the victory. I just don't want to get in there and mess up and cost Wake Forest the victory." And he looked—this great big old six-foot-three, two-hundred pound player—he looked so sad and so upset. I said, "Well, Butch, I'll tell you. I'll promise you that you are not going to mess up, you're going to have a great game." Well, of course, that made him laugh and we both stood out there and giggled and laughed at it.

They played in Roanoke and he went up and played against Virginia Tech. And he had an absolutely great game. He caught more passes than any Wake Forest college player had ever caught up to that time and when he left, they gave him a standing ovation. So I couldn't wait to talk to him on Monday. And on Monday after practice, I went to see him. And I said, "Tell me about it, Butch." And he was talking about the game and he said, "You know, when we were riding to the game on the bus," he said, "I was so nervous I was just

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Garber: Women are always going to have to prove themselves.

Gentry: Disappointing. You probably think that you had some real advantages coming into the business when you did in the 1940s, then. It's even rougher now in some ways.

Garber: I think it is. I think it's a lot rougher for women breaking in now because there's so many more of you, things are a lot more structured. When I started out, I'd go to a press conference and I'd be the only woman in twenty-five or thirty men. So the new coach or whoever was holding the press conference would spot me right away and they'd ask, "What are you doing there?" So it was a whole lot easier for me to get known.

And another thing, when I covered sports, the rules were definite. I knew I couldn't go into the dressing room, there wasn't any question about it, so I knew I had to work around it. But now even though women are supposed to have equal access and a lot of progress has been made, you still sometimes run into the problem if you go down to the dressing room and some yahoo says, "We don't allow women in the dressing room." And then you've got to make adjustments that you didn't realize you were going to have to make. And it's a whole lot harder to do it at the spur of the moment than to know when you went down there that you had to make the adjustments. When everybody was barred and you knew you couldn't go in and you were the only one there. Sports information directors and coaches and people were much more likely to help you. Now they're much more likely to say, "Well, you want to be a woman sportswriter, that's your problem." It's a whole lot harder.

Gentry: So the role of the woman sportswriter has really changed quite a bit in those years.

Garber: Yes, I think it has. As I say, there are some really good ones. I think a lot of them have earned acceptance. But it's still a rocky road and I think it's going to be a rocky road and it's going to be a long time before there is really equality all the way. And maybe it will never be, I don't know.