Locker Room Talk

By Toledo City Councilman Larry Sykes
Guest Column

For most of my young adult life I participated in sports of some sort that caused me to be around or in locker rooms. As a youth, it was at the City Park swimming pool and the Indian Avenue YMCA where I was a life guard, played baseball for Crystal Ellis and basketball for Ben Williams.

Later I was a life guard for the city of Toledo – one of the youngest life guards hired – and I worked there every summer for four years as a life guard and in the locker room as an attendant. I also played high school football and basketball at Scott High School and boxed as an amateur and later as a professional.

My brother in-law played basketball in Springfield, Ohio and went on to play for Miami University for four years. He also played on the 1968 Pan American Basketball team coached by Bobby Knight. After college, he was drafted by the Cincinnati Royals where he played with Oscar Robinson and went on to play for the Detroit Pistons, Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers, Cleveland Cavaliers and the Buffalo Braves before retiring. 
 

Larry Sykes

My son is 6’’10 and played for St Francis High School. He then played in the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), Xavier University in Cincinnati for four years and went on to join the NBA teams in Boston, Denver and Portland. He also played in the Continental Basketball Association (CBA) and overseas in Spain. He has also coached high school and college basketball teams.

I say all of this to say that I have been in locker rooms all over this country and all over the world. I know locker room talk first hand!

As a life guard, it’s more about saving lives, maintaining the pool, being noticed by the girls, becoming the best swimmer and best diver and trying to get out of working in the locker room or working at the gate checking, stopping those trying to go inside without proper swimming attire.

On the basketball team, it was always about stopping the man with the winning lay-up, why you didn’t pick up the man that was loose, who had a better jump shot, did you see that double crossover dribble that I put on him that made him fall on his butt. Did you see that SLAM DUNK that I did? Did you see that move I put on the man who was guarding me? I faked his jock strip off of him!

LOCKER ROOM TALK.

In football, it was always about the fastest runner, best blocker, hardest hitter, best pass catcher, best defense player, who could punt or kick the ball the farthest and last, but not least, who was hurt and wouldn’t be able to play in this week’s game or worse, who was out for the season.  Locker room talk.                                                 

In boxing, it was all about training and getting prepared for the upcoming fight! Under the training of Coach Jim Pettaway and Coach Francisco Reyes, you better not even mention girls! If you did, punishment was running another mile or two, hitting the heavy bag another hour or jumping rope until told to stop. In most locker rooms, there is a creed that certain things won’t be said or done. And as a team, we all would suffer for one person’s stupidity, so we all held each another accountable. All we did was train, train, train and train some more!

It was okay to talk about each other’s mothers and we all played the dozens - I was a master at it! But you didn’t talk or ask about someone’s sister, talk negatively about someone’s girl or discuss sex period. Was there talk going on in the locker room? Yes, there was.  Talk like -

‘Hey, Ray, how’s your mother, did she get those flowers I sent her?’

‘No, she didn’t, but did your mother get that cab fare I sent her so she can come over to clean my house?’

 LOCKER ROOM TALK.

We talked about hitting someone so hard it would knock the snot out of them. We would also talk about our fist as a sleeping pill and “I’m going to put you to sleep, nighty night.”

At Soul City Boxing gym, Ernie (Bola) Davis was famous for his saying, “I will whip you like wonder bread! I will beat you 12 different ways.” Louis Self let his fist do the talking and represented Toledo in the 1972 Olympics, Verbie Garland won a national Golden Gloves title for Toledo and Liddell Holmes won three world titles for Toledo out of Soul City gym, Bernard Benton won the World cruiser heavy weight title. And of course, we recently had Robert (E-Bunny) Easter, Jr. bring home the Lightweight Championship of the World title.

At Bancroft-Kent gym where I fought, the conversation was always about boxing, whipping each other and what we were going to do in the ring. I was known to brag I would say that I would, “throw a punch through midnight and break broad daylight!”
 

I would tell my opponent, “There is nothing in the drug store that will kill you faster than me” or I would say, “If I don’t whip your A.. good, there’s not a cow in Texas.” I was so bad that I would call up Monday to call Tuesday to tell Thursday to warn Friday that Saturday or Sunday better not show up!

LOCKER ROOM TALK.

As a heavy weight boxer, I traveled the country boxing and winning local and state honors. As a national runner-up in the Eastern Olympics tryout in Cincinnati, I lost to Larry Holmes by a split decision in the finals. Over 1,000 fighters were there from around the world: Aaron Pryor, Sugar Ray Leonard, Kenneth Hilmer and many others who went on to win world titles.  Not one of the guys there talked about female private parts, dating or kissing while I was there.
 

 Ask any amateur or professional athlete and she/he will tell you unequivocally that there is no discussion about women and sex in the locker room in the manner in which Donald Trump described in his conversation with Billy Bush. Even Billy said it was wrong. As I stated previously athletes brag on how they played or what and how they did something to a fellow teammate or to an opponent, but never about sexual exploits they were supposed to have been involved in.

As a gym rat (someone who spends more than five days in a gym) I still go to the gym at 6:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 3:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., and even at the fitness center where I go, I have never heard one of the hundreds of males there to work out, by walking, swimming, lifting weights, on the tread mill can be found talking about stupid stuff like Donald said.

“Why would I run for President with all the women that I have been involved with? Can you imagine what would be said?” (Donald Trump, 1998 MSNBC). Trump tried to say that his comments about women were just locker room talk. Well, it was hardly locker room talk because most athletes, amateur or professional, don’t talk like that in locker rooms.  Donald Trump is an insecure male and a paranoid liar. It’s clear that he doesn’t respect women.  He is not fit to be president in a country populated with more women than men.

Either way Donald loses this debate, if he did say it, it is inexcusable and if he didn’t say it, he projects himself to the world as one of the biggest fabricator of a lie this country has seen or heard since the WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION lie.

Donald states that he wants to save and make America great again. Advice is like cooking, you should try it before you serve it to someone else. What Donald is learning is that experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first and the lesson afterwards.

Copyright © 2015 by [The Sojourner's Truth]. All rights reserved.
Revised: 08/16/18 14:12:40 -0700.

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