announcer: The following is a presentation
of HBO Sports.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Tonight on "Real Sports"...
It's been called the most dangerous eight seconds
in sports...
- Oh, boy!
- Bull riding.
It's commonly a clash of wills
involving wild beasts and grown men.
So why are little boys,
some as young as eight years old...
- Here goes Isaac!
- Riding bulls more than ten times their size?
- It's not like football.
Running down the field and trying not to get hit,
that's football.
That sucks for you.
You got to at least do something fun.
Bull riding's fun.
- Sports journalism isn't supposed to be
a hazardous profession, but for female reporters,
working the job in a male-dominated industry
can range from difficult to horrifying.
Now some of those women are speaking out
about what they say is a culture of objectification
and sexual harassment.
- He said that I had a great ass for a little white girl.
And half of me was going,
"How is it possibly okay for you to say that to me?"
Another half was going, "There's people around--
Like, somebody's gonna see."
♪ ♪
- Scenes of athletes protesting social injustice
have become commonplace around the globe.
Yet the International Olympic Committee has chosen
to ban all such displays at the upcoming games in Tokyo.
It's a policy that is already being met with disbelief
and derision by some of those American athletes
who figure to make it to the medal stand.
- If it is scaring people,
then that's a good thing, right?
That means there's something important about protesting.
There's something important about speaking
when no one wants to hear what's being spoken.
♪ ♪
- Tommy Morrissey is one of the best
young baseball players on his Florida Little League team.
Not bad for a kid born with one arm.
It's just the latest of many achievements
for a boy we first met
when he was dominating his junior golf circuit
at the age of seven.
- They say you have the perfect swing.
- Well, that is true.
- How is it that
a seven-year-old boy can drive the ball 200 yards?
- I don't know.
♪ ♪
announcer: And now your host, Bryant Gumbel.
♪ ♪
- Good evening and welcome to "Real Sports,"
where we begin tonight with another story
that raises long-standing questions
about what sporting risks
children should be allowed to take,
even with parental consent or even parental encouragement.
Only this time, the story isn't about football or boxing.
It's about mini bull riding,
a rodeo event in which children as young as eight years old
try their hand at doing the kind of dangerous stuff
that is generally reserved for grown men.
While the bulls they ride are smaller than the ones
in the grown-up ranks,
they're still many times the weight of the youngsters,
who, just like the big boys, are asked to risk everything
when the gates open and the ride begins.
Our Jon Frankel has more on some little cowboy wannabes.
- [indistinct PA announcement]
[indistinct shouting]
- Keep riding, keep riding! Hustle!
- It's known as the toughest eight seconds in sports...
[audience exclaims, person shouts]
Man versus bull...
with life and limb on the line.
- Oh! [audience exclaims]
- Those who can complete the ride
are hailed as the world's best...
- We have seen history!
- Celebrated before packed arenas
and national television audiences.
Those who can't...
- Oh. Mm. - Oh, boy!
Insult and then injury. - Oh, no. Oh, no.
- It's a dangerous game, so it may surprise you
that it's not just adults testing their grit,
but kids, too.
- And how about that?
- Welcome to the world of miniature bull riding...
- What an effort!
- A youth sport featuring little cowboys
and not-so-little bulls.
- Oh, oh, whoa!
- Here, children weighing as little as 60 pounds
mount bulls that weigh up to 1,000
and try to hold on for the ride.
Cade, when you get on a bull, what do you think about?
- Once I get on that bull,
all I think about is that eight seconds.
- And, Carson,
have you mastered the bull when that happens?
- Yeah.
Yep, you master him,
or if he bucks you off, he masters you, I guess.
- 11-year-old Carson Rodrigue
and his brother, eight-year-old Cade,
are two of bull riding's rising stars.
- That's okay, that's okay!
- Everybody says football is the hardest sport in the world.
You're not thinking the right way.
You got to think about bull riding a little bit more.
- Bull riding, like, football doesn't even compare?
- Yeah.
It's not like just football.
Running down the field and trying not to get hit,
that's football.
That sucks for you.
You got to at least do something fun.
Bull riding's fun.
- For Cade and Carson,
who train here at the family ranch in Louisiana...
- Hustle, hustle...
- It's more than just fun, it's a way of life.
- Keep riding, keep riding!
- Their big brother, Jay,
is an established star in the sport,
a seasoned old hand at the age of 14.
- Ready? [gate creaks]
Hey, hey, hey, hey! Hustle!
Front hand, front hand!
- And all three brothers are coached
by their father, Eddie. - Keep riding!
I look at it as a way to just keep our family together
and have fun as a family.
- Is that what this is about? This is just--
this is no different than going out to the ballpark?
- That's pretty much it.
When the boys started wanting to rodeo
and they starting doing good, we just got all-in
like a family playing baseball that does travel ball.
- Like families that travel for youth sports,
the Rodrigues and many others
spend nearly every weekend on the road...
- Hustle!
- Competing in one rodeo...
after another.
But the similarities to typical youth sports
end there.
First-place winners are awarded not trophies
but prize saddles and large checks.
Instead of uniforms, these athletes wear chaps.
And forget shin guards.
In this sport, they wear protective vests and helmets
in case a bull stomps on them.
- It sounds dangerous to other people,
but once you've been doing it for eight years,
it don't sound dangerous at all to you.
Since I'm eight years old, I've been doing it for eight years.
- You've been doing this a whole eight years?
- Yes, sir.
- So you must've been 'bout doing that in your dreams.
- [chuckles]
Cade's math might be a little off,
but the Rodrigue boys have been training to ride
since they were toddlers.
Like other little riders, they started not on big bulls,
but with furry, friendlier foes.
What was the first animal you rode?
- Sheep. - Sheep.
[cheers and applause] - Ride, brother, ride!
Sit there, cowboy! Sit there! Yeah, yeah!
- And it don't do nothing much but just run out there.
Just run.
- Once a kid has mastered sheep,
they're ready to move on to the next challenge.
- Then you start calves.
- All right, Cade! [indistinct shouting]
- and then you go to mini bulls.
[cheers and applause]
- And you just graduate from one animal
to the next animal to the next animal?
Of course, as the animals get bigger,
so does the risk.
Once riders graduate to riding mini bulls,
they'll be routinely bucked, spun, kicked,
dragged, even stomped on.
It's not exactly child's play.
[buzzer blaring] - Lord, have mercy!
- I've gotten stepped on many a time.
The only bones I broke was my left and right arms.
And they didn't feel that good.
- It's rough, it's dangerous,
but it's not what everybody makes it out to be sometimes.
- What do they make it out to be?
- Somebody from the city would look at it, they'd be like,
"Man, they doing that? Why they doing that?"
It's just a way of life for the kids,
and they learn a lot of good life skills doing it, you know?
They learn how to be tough.
- Aren't there other ways to teach them to be tough?
- I guess everybody's a little bit different.
- It takes a different type of individual to be a bull rider.
- Gary Leffew is a bull-riding legend,
a former world champion and a hall of famer.
Now retired from competition, he works as a coach,
teaching young riders how to survive
those eight long seconds...
- Keep at it! Keep with him!
There you go!
- And emerge in one piece.
- You practice situational drills.
You got to do these drills over and over and over again.
You know, all the things that create muscle memory
that's gonna happen on that bull,
because once you get on that bull,
there's no time to think.
- So before the riders get on a bull,
Leffew makes sure they're prepared.
First, he teaches his pupils on something tame
so they can learn to control their bodies.
- Lower your belly.
Come back up. Nice.
Beautiful.
You ready? Here we go. [mechanical bull clanking]
- Then he ratchets up the challenge.
- Lift on the way down, push on the way forward,
get your belly down.
- Finally, he puts the boys on the bulls.
[overlapping chatter]
Leffew watches their every move,
then tells them what went right or wrong.
- See how that put you right up in front of that rope?
That's a perfect move right there.
See you got that daylight under the butt?
That's what we want. Got that elbow back.
- Still, no amount of coaching can guarantee a safe ride...
and these cowboys-in-training have the scars to prove it.
What's the worst injury you've had?
- Um, probably when I broke my arm right here.
- Colton?
- Lacerated liver and four fractured vertebrae.
- Vaughan, what do you got?
- Cracked my head open right here.
- Bill?
- I got--a bull stepped on my neck.
- Troy? - I broke my collarbone.
- Is there anything you can think of
that's more dangerous than what you do for fun?
all: No. - Not really.
- We're risking our lives right now.
- Do you look at it that way?
Do you understand that?
all: Yes. - Yeah?
What do you guys think about these injuries?
- A lot of the times in bull riding,
it's either gonna make you, or it's gonna break you.
- Go, go!
- Over the course of a weekend,
we saw the boys endure a little bit of everything.
The good... [cheers and applause]
- Perfect dismount! Perfect dismount!
- The bad... - Oh!
- And the ugly.
[audience groans] - [crying]
- You're all right, Troy! - You're good, Bubba.
You're good. - [sobbing]
- Have you ever gotten to the point
where you've said to a youngster
or, probably more important, to his parents,
and said, "Look, this kid's getting beat up too much"?
- I do. I tell 'em a lot, you know?
Some of them take my advice, some of them don't.
When you got that deep desire, you know,
you're gonna walk through hell for it.
- How tough do you have to be to be a bull rider?
- Um...
[cowbells clanking] - Good boy! Yeah!
[metallic crash] - Ooh.
- That tough.
- Huh? - That tough.
- That's how tough you got to be?
- Yeah. - [chuckles]
- To take a hit like that.
- Isaac Escobedo is one of the best in the bull business.
He's already won 14 titles,
and he's still in the fourth grade.
[cheers and applause] - Come on, Isaac!
Hang tough, cowboy! Stay there!
- But even with his talent,
a routine ride at a competition last August
was nearly his last.
Do you remember the ride at all?
- Well, I was going to jump off,
and the bull felt me going this way,
so he turned around, and then he knocked me out a little bit,
like, dazed me, and then he stepped on me.
- And that's pretty much the last thing you remember?
- Yeah.
- When we got to him, he was out.
- When you say "out," he was unconscious?
- Yeah. He was unconscious.
- Isaac's father, Xavier, brought him to the hospital,
where he was rushed into emergency surgery.
- He was in surgery for 9 1/2 hours,
and, finally, the doctor came out.
He said, uh, he had a lot of internal bleeding.
He tore his intestines in three spots and...
[sniffles, crying] Ruptured his pancreas.
[sniffles]
- Doctors told the Escobedos
that Isaac was fortunate to survive.
For the next six weeks, he remained in the hospital,
enduring surgery after surgery.
What are you thinking as you weigh the two things here?
Your son's in surgery versus bull riding?
- Not worth it. [chuckles]
At that moment, I said, "It's not worth it.
This is crazy. This is insane."
You know, we told him, "Hey,
if you want to walk away, go ahead."
- But that's not Isaac. - He has no quit.
- After your big injury and you were in the hospital,
were you immediately thinking about getting back on the bull?
- Yes, sir.
Every time I would go to sleep, I would dream about it--
being back out there and riding more bulls.
- Doctors suggested Isaac wait at least a year
to get back on a bull.
Instead, after just one month...
- Here goes Isaac! - Keep riding!
- [speaking indistinctly] - Good job, Isaac!
- Ultimately, whose decision was it...
- His. - To let him ride again?
- It was his decision. - His?
And Isaac is... - Nine.
Help me understand the mentality here.
Your son comes very close to death...
and so wants to get back on a bull,
but if you don't stop your kid riding
when he's had that kind of an accident
and that brush with death,
is there any line that you don't cross?
- At this point, um...
it's hard to say, you know, 'cause it ain't over.
So, uh, I know there's more coming.
- Is it unfair of me to sit here
and ask you these questions
because I don't live in your world?
- No. It's a common question.
We hear it all the time.
Why, you know? Why?
- And the answer is?
- He has a passion for it.
[voice breaking] And, uh...
when you're passionate about something,
nothing matters.
- Not even your life?
- Not even your life.
You know?
- Hey, hey! Front hand!
Front hand! Right there! Front hand!
- It's a risk that every rider accepts each time out.
Back at the Rodrigue family ranch in Louisiana,
we saw a routine ride for Jay, the oldest brother,
end in a costly fall.
- Hey, hey, hey! - [groaning]
- Get up, Jay! - Get up. You're good.
- Ow, my back. - All right. You're good.
- [groaning] - Take a breath.
- [breathing heavily] - Breathe.
You good. - [groaning]
- Okay. - [breathing heavily]
I landed on something.
- Come on. - [breathing heavily]
- Go walk it off.
- Has this happened to you a lot before?
- Yes, sir. It's just a part of it.
- Mm-hmm.
How long will this keep you off a bull and out of practice?
- I'd get on one as soon as I can feel my feet again.
- Eddie, does that give you pause at all
when you see those types of falls?
- We'll get him a little Epsom salt tonight
and some ice packs.
He'll be all right.
- Moments later,
it became clear that he wasn't all right.
- I can't. Ah, ah, ah!
Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!
- Turned out,
Jay had fractured a vertebrae in his spine
and would be sidelined for months.
- Hustle, Jay!
- But as we've learned,
there's no quit in these cowboys.
Last week, just two months after his injury,
Jay was back on a bull.
- They said he shouldn't be alive,
let alone riding bulls!
- As for Isaac Escobedo,
just a few months after his brush with death...
- Here goes Isaac!
- He won the biggest event of the year.
What is it about the bull riding you love so much?
- Once you get off and you make it to the eight-second whistle,
it's the best feeling in the whole world.
[buzzer blasting, cheers and applause]
♪ ♪
- And Jon Frankel's joining in New York.
Hey, Jon. How you doing?
- I'm well, Bryant. Hope you're well, too.
- Let me start this off
by acknowledging that you and I are city kids,
so this is out of our bailiwick.
But there was a lot of testosterone in that piece.
We saw, heard dads' point of view,
kids' point of view.
Do moms approve of this?
- They do, as a matter of fact.
I will tell you from eyewitness of running around this ring
and watching these people, mothers just as anxious.
And just the same way you see a mom saying to a kid
who doesn't hit a forehand or strikes out in Little League,
"You get back up on that bull!
"You're gonna get back in there again!
You're gonna do this!"
And so the moms are just as encouraging and enthusiastic.
- Look, criminal negligence is too strong a word for this,
but are there any laws
governing what kids can or can't do
as long as they have parental consent?
- No. It's--you know, if this is what you want to do--
Look, I get it.
And Eddie Rodrigue will say,
"Look, not everything's for everybody."
They may not want to play golf the way you do.
I don't want to play golf the way I play the game.
[chuckles] But you get my point.
- Yeah.
- You know, not everything is for everybody.
This is a way of life for these folks.
- I get it.
So is there an endgame, or is it just something to do
until something else comes along?
- I think for a good number, it is an activity like baseball
or ice skating or anything else is for anybody else's kids.
There are some like an Isaac Escobedo
who would like to say,
"I want to ride as a professional."
And there are a few over the years
who have managed to get that far.
- Again, we're city kids. We don't get it.
[both chuckle] All right, Jon.
Thanks very much. - You got it.
- Let's move on to a very different kind of challenge
in the world of sports.
It's the challenge faced by female reporters
trying to navigate an industry
that is still largely dominated by men.
For years, many women in the sports world
have been given cause to complain about the men
who routinely serve as the sources for
and the subjects of their work.
Fearing reprisal, few have gone public with their problems,
but several recently agreed to discuss their plight
with one of the longest-tenured women
in all of sports journalism, our Andrea Kremer.
- We are here for the NFL Scouting Combine today
in Indianapolis.
- Once a year, the nation's best football prospects gather
at the NFL Scouting Combine
to showcase their athletic prowess
in front of all 32 teams in the league.
The week-long event draws a veritable who's who
from the world of football,
from coaches to scouts to executives,
making it a sports reporter's dream.
- There is a lot of good access to be had
if you just go there and can work the room
and everything along those lines.
And for a young reporter who's really competitive,
that's enticing.
- But for Rhiannon Walker,
a writer for the website "The Athletic,"
the reporter's dream turned into more of a nightmare,
when she discovered that after hours
in Indianapolis restaurants and bars,
the NFL personnel she was courting as sources
had more than football on their minds.
- The really bold ones will be hanging on you
the entire night.
They'll proposition you.
They'll tell you what their room number is and which hotel.
Any tactic you have heard of or thought of,
you will see it there.
- As a female sports reporter, why do you need to be there?
- Get access. - But at what personal cost?
- Well, in my situation,
it was being sexually harassed in a very public forum.
That was my personal cost.
- Walker says it all began in 2019
at a crowded Indianapolis steak house,
when she was approached by a man
whose team she was covering, Alex Santos,
the director for player personnel
for the Washington Football Team.
- He told me I have a wagon for an ass
and that he finds me really fucking attractive,
and he asked me if I wasn't dating my girlfriend,
would he be my boyfriend, or would I be attracted to him?
And I was like, "No.
"You work for the team that I cover.
So, automatically, you're unattractive to me."
- But Santos persisted, Walker says,
telling her that he'd been discussing her looks
with a table full of his staffers,
then, she says, pinching her side in front of them.
Walker says she was furious but remained calm.
- My knee-jerk reaction was...
"Just make sure that
"he doesn't have such a bad taste in his mouth
"so that you're not completely screwed over
in this situation."
- In that moment, you're thinking,
"I have to preserve my job."
- Correct. Yes.
There are people that I talk to within his department.
If I screw him over, then they might not talk to me.
Now I'm screwed out of doing all the things
I need to do with my job.
- What else would you have wanted to say to Santos?
- [chuckles]
Uh...
I wanted to tell him to fuck off, honestly.
"Don't put your fucking hands on me."
- Walker says the experience left her feeling diminished.
- [voice breaking] I felt really small.
And I was so embarrassed.
I was so embarrassed.
And it felt so unfair.
- For those of us
who've long been covering the world of big-time sports,
stories like these are upsetting
but not surprising,
because while the Me Too movement has helped root out
sexual harassment in many industries
across America and beyond,
the male-dominated sports field
has largely managed to keep its dirty little secret.
For the past several months,
we've spoken with two dozen female sports reporters who say
that, from the NFL to the NBA to Major League Baseball,
they are routinely objectified or propositioned for sex
or dates by the very men they cover.
The offenders range from executives to coaches,
from scouts to players.
- I had a player ask me
if I can give him a massage one time,
in text message, too, no less.
I was like, "No. That's not gonna work."
- Do you think this is something that any
of your male colleagues have had to go through?
- No, and I wouldn't wish it on them either.
- Recently, multiple reports emerged
about the harassment of female journalists
by former members of a single team--
the New York Mets.
- The New York Mets firing General Manager Jared Porter
this morning after he sent explicit and unsolicited
text messages and images to a female reporter.
- Then, weeks later, former Mets manager Mickey Callaway
was accused by at least five female sports reporters
of sending them lewd messages and sexually charged photos.
- I get so pissed off and angry for some of these women
who have to deal with all these things.
- Jessica Kleinschmidt knows just how they feel.
- We know he's a power hitter,
but the way he's been hitting, he's actually making contact.
- She now covers the Oakland A's for NBC Sports
in the Bay Area, but four years ago,
when she was covering a team in the minor leagues,
she says she had a similar experience
involving the team's communications manager--
the executive in charge of handling the media.
- He was sending me pictures of his dick, basically,
and both inside of his underwear and outside.
The second one he sent--
I was ballsy, and I said, "Look, dude, not into it.
Not a fan."
And then it must've went over his head
'cause he sent me a third one.
- This is the communications manager of the team
who's sending you these inappropriate pictures?
- Yeah. He was the guy that I had to approach
and say, "Can I talk to this player,
to the manager?"
Or set up an interview or anything like that.
- How concerned were you that he could ice you out?
- Very concerned.
You know, I was freelancing.
So, if I didn't write an article,
I wasn't gonna get paid.
So, if I got anything turned down, I was screwed.
- So Kleinschmidt says that she, too,
kept her anger to herself and continued to cultivate
a warm, professional relationship.
- I hate to admit that, but in the press box,
I would just be like, "Hey, how's it going?"
And I kind of need you in my, not back pocket,
but we need a relationship
because I'm trying to further my career.
And so I was, unfortunately, really nice to him,
which pisses me off to even think about.
- Kleinschmidt's experience was the continuation
of a trend that goes back half a century.
Back in the 1970s, the first wave of women
looking to cover big-time men's sports
were often treated not as reporters
but as sex objects.
- It's what they essentially did to me
when they talked about me, indicating that I was someone
who wanted to be there to leer and look at the athletes.
- "Sports Illustrated" writer Melissa Ludtke
was one of the first female reporters
to cover pro baseball in the 1970s,
but was denied access to the players' locker rooms
due to her gender.
When Ludtke fought back,
eventually suing Major League Baseball,
she and other female reporters were lampooned in the press.
- The cartoonists did a great job of depicting us.
We were always great buxom, and we had great, huge breasts,
which I never had, but, you know, there we were.
This sort of lascivious you know,
kind of vixen that was gonna go in
and victimize these poor ballplayers.
- To do your job,
why do you need the same immediacy of access?
- The same reason the male reporters do...
- Ultimately,
the courts sided with Ludtke and her colleagues,
mandating that female sports reporters
receive the same access as males.
But within the industry,
long-held views were slower to change.
Your lawsuit... - Mm-hmm.
- Changed the law--
equal access for women.
But what about the cultural attitudes?
- Well, those are still in the process of evolving,
I'm sad to say.
I mean, 35, 40 years after
what I went through in my own career
to change things what I thought was for the better,
and now, the women have the access,
but there's the issues of behavior.
There's the issues of attitudes.
There's the issues still of their treatment.
- The treatment persists, in part,
because many female reporters fear they'll be punished
for speaking up.
Rhiannon Walker has heard the horror stories.
- I've had women come up to me and say they got fired
or they got demoted or they got pushed off to the side.
- After having been sexually harassed?
- After being sexually harassed.
- In fact, most of the two dozen female sports reporters
"Real Sports" spoke with
told us they fear making their allegations public
because they worry about their reputations,
being labeled liars, or, worse, being ignored.
It was a fear that pro football reporter
Nora Princiotti says she felt after being harassed
by an NFL executive who worked for the team she covered.
She says he asked her if she would date him
and catcalled her multiple times in team parking lots.
- Once, he rolled down the window of the car
and said that he liked my dress
and that he hadn't noticed
that I had a great ass for a little white girl.
- You had a nice ass for a little white girl?
- Yeah.
And for a little bit, he was sort of, like,
driving alongside of me, and I just was like,
"I want to get out of here so badly."
I just felt dirty.
- How did you respond? - I couldn't speak.
Half of me was going...
"How is it possibly okay for you to say that to me?"
Another half was going, "There's people around--
Like, somebody's gonna see."
- How did it make you feel about yourself?
- Like a collection of body parts.
To feel so excited about your career
and just kind of be smacked in the face with...
there are always going to be people
who are not going to see you that way
was really hard for me.
- But Princiotti says when she consulted her colleagues
about the incidents, they told her
that if she spoke up about what was happening,
it would not end well for anyone involved.
- I did hear that if I went to...
the PR department,
anyone in PR was more likely to get fired
or shut down or silenced than he was.
- Than the man who's actually acting inappropriate
towards you? - Yeah.
- So Princiotti stayed silent,
until two years later, in 2019 at the NFL Combine,
when she learned that another female reporter
had allegedly been harassed by the same executive.
The reporter's name-- Rhiannon Walker.
The executive-- Alex Santos.
The two women had never met, but soon traded stories.
- The thing that...
just blew my mind a little bit was,
you know, he had the same syntax.
Like, he would say some of the same sentences
to both of us.
- But soon, Princiotti was struck by another realization.
- Did you regret it,
that you hadn't spoken up two years earlier?
- Yeah, a lot.
- How does that resonate for you even to this day?
- When I found out that...
it hadn't just happened to me, I just felt...
[voice breaking] I just--I felt crushed.
Like, I just hadn't--I just didn't do anything about it.
And I could've.
- Both women then disclosed their harassment by Santos
to team officials.
What they didn't know
was that the team had received two earlier reports,
dating back to 2016, by two other women
claiming they had also been harassed by Santos.
Yet despite those four reports,
Santos kept his job for more than a year,
until July 2020 when a "Washington Post" exposé
detailed sexual harassment allegations against Santos
and other team executives.
Why did it take for the "Washington Post" to publish
a story for Alex Santos to finally be fired?
- Because the culture there supported it
from top to bottom.
[scoffs] That's why.
That's why it persisted. People didn't care.
- Both Santos and the Washington Football Team
declined to comment for this story,
but Walker and Princiotti are not the only reporters
who say they've been disappointed
in the actions, or lack of action,
taken by the team to which they've reported abuse.
After Jessica Kleinschmidt was sent those obscene photos
by the communications manager
of the minor league team she was covering,
she complained to team officials
and got a response from the president.
And what action was taken?
- He said, "This won't happen again."
- According to the team, the communications manager
was warned to, "Cease any and all unprofessional behavior."
And he did-- at least with Kleinschmidt.
But another woman working in baseball told us
that about a year later,
that same communications manager
sent her the same kinds of obscene images.
Kleinschmidt blames the team for not taking stronger action
after her complaint.
Why do you think that this man did it again
to another woman a year later?
- 'Cause he kept his job.
So he thought, "Well, if I'm allowed to keep my job,
I'm just gonna do it again."
- And it's not just the teams.
Rhiannon Walker says the leagues need
to more severely punish this kind of behavior.
- You have to make it really, really painful for them
to keep people in house
that subscribe to this kind of behavior.
I've seen more serious repercussions
for a ball being deflated than I have for the stuff
that's gone on here in Washington.
And why is that? It's just a football, comparatively.
These are human beings
who have to deal with the long-term repercussions
of what is done to them.
- As for the NFL Combine,
Walker says not much has changed
since her first experience there.
- I still see the same behavior--
people touching women inappropriately
when they go through the room and things of that nature.
They just continue to operate the way that they always have,
because up to this point, they've gotten away with it.
♪ ♪
- And Andrea Kremer is joining us
from her home in Massachusetts.
Hey, Andrea. - Hello, Bryant.
- Hey, Andrea, you're a veteran at this stuff.
Did any of this come as a surprise to you?
- It didn't surprise me, Bryant, sadly.
Look, when I was coming up in the business,
there was no social media, and there were no cell phones.
That's good.
But there was still bad language.
When I first went on camera, producer said to me,
"We want you to look friendly, eff-able, and informative."
You can imagine what my reaction to that is.
And whereas those words would not be used today,
are the attitudes really that different?
- Yeah. In your opinion, do any of the teams,
leagues, sports do a better job of policing this
than any of the others?
- No, not really.
I think they're all equally culpable, if you will.
They have tip lines. They have harassment training.
But until these bad actors are really held accountable
by teams and not rehired--
look at Mickey Callaway.
Cleveland Indians, New York Mets,
Los Angeles Angels, and he's just suspended at this point,
pending a Major League Baseball investigation.
- Would having more women in front offices or organizations
change anything, you think?
- The women that we spoke to
think that is one of the key factors,
that, yes, it would help to have more women
in positions of power.
That will certainly help with the ideas
of respectability for women and also just give new voices,
give new people who can vet these bad characters.
- Andrea, thanks so very much. You travel safely, all right?
Take care. - Thanks. You too, Bryant.
- Let's look ahead.
With the Tokyo Olympics just two months away,
battle lines are already being drawn
between International Olympic Committee, the IOC,
and those athletes who are no longer content
to just shut up and play.
Before we hear from some of those athletes,
here's the crux of the issue.
Quoting Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter,
IOC officials are warning
that no kind of demonstration will be permitted at the games.
But rather than toe that party line,
U.S. Olympic officials have said they'll not penalize
American athletes who participate in demonstrations.
That alone is certainly a break from years past.
Back in Mexico City in 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos
famously lowered their heads and raised gloved fists
to protest racial injustice,
actions that drew widespread outrage
and got them thrown out of the Olympic Village.
Smith told me the events of that evening
have shaped his life ever since.
- I live it every day, and I thought people would see it,
and I thought we'd walk off the victory stand,
get our medals, and look at the rest of the games,
happily come home.
- You really thought that?
Tommie, if my math is correct, by that time,
you were a 24-year-old Black man in America.
By then, you had to know how this country would respond
to what you were going to do.
- It was a quiet backlash.
Coming home and finding silence,
coming home and finding no job,
coming home and finding the wife and son were sad
because there was nothing there for them
because of what their father and husband did
to satisfy a fortitude of hope
for Black folks.
I was there alone trying to do something
that had not been done before in the history of athletics.
This was an athletic movement
that was guided by the racist tendencies
of a nation that did not represent me.
- Basically, the IOC's position is unchanged
from what it was back in '68.
It's over half a century ago.
That it's unchanged--
do you find that surprising, disappointing,
disgusting, all of the above?
What? - It is archaic, very archaic.
I think this is why the younger generation is rising up.
- I'm looking at IOC's Rule 50.
Says, in part, and I'm quoting here,
"No kind of demonstration or political, religious,
or racial propaganda will be permitted."
- Nothing tolerated. No. No, nothing, nothing, nothing.
- How important, Tommie, is it to your mind
that the Olympians do express themselves
and do bring attention to the racism and social injustice
that persists in this country?
- I do think there will be something done.
I don't know what.
People didn't know what back in 1968,
but I do think that there will be some type
of a demonstration.
- So, as someone who's been through this,
someone who is an icon where these matters are concerned,
what would you say to those American Olympians
who are considering raising a fist or taking a knee
to call attention to racism and social injustice?
- I'm not telling an athlete to do anything
because I can't tell an athlete's heart.
The athlete's got to do this for himself.
- Would you tell Olympians who are thinking about protesting
that if they proceed to expect the worst?
- Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
- Tommie, thank you very much.
Let me turn now to some American Olympians
who figure to be in Tokyo this summer.
Gwendolyn Berry is a hammer thrower
who was in the Rio Olympics just four years ago.
She medaled at the Pan Am Games in 2019,
as did Race Imboden in fencing.
Welcome to both of you.
You both protested on the medal stand at those games.
Why'd you choose to make the statement you did?
Gwendolyn?
- Just to bring awareness to what was going on in America
dealing with Black and brown communities
and Black and brown people
dying at the hands of the police.
And so, on the podium in that moment,
I was just like, "I got to say something.
I got to stand for something."
Enough was enough.
- You raised a fist on the medal stand.
Race, you took a knee on the medal stand.
What kind of blowback did you get?
- For both of us, actually, we were put on probation
by the USOC for a year,
which was basically threatening us
to say not to protest anymore or demonstrate anymore
at any events in the sport world.
- Do either of you regret taking the stand you did?
- Absolutely not. - Absolutely not.
[chuckling] Not at all. - No.
- How do you view now the USOPC's statement
that they're going to be supporting any Olympians
who choose to make such a statement in Tokyo?
- They've made a lot of statements,
and I think it's time for us to be skeptical.
And we've been trying to figure out
if they're gonna back these statements up.
We just saw the IOC pass a ruling that says
they will not allow protests and demonstrations
and I think, in particular, the athletes are looking
to the USOPC for protection now if they choose to.
- Let me bring in Tianna Bartoletta.
She's a sprinter and long jumper
with three Olympic golds already on her résumé.
Tianna, you've never protested at the games before.
Are you feeling any pressure to, I don't know,
conform to what's expected of African American athletes?
- I honestly do not.
This is one of those visceral,
like, in-your-soul type of decisions that you make.
And, sure, it'll be maybe a split-second decision, like,
"What will this cost me?"
But in the end, it's your life.
And I think that if you feel moved to do it, you will do it.
- American athletes are pretty, you know, angry.
We feel like we are not heard enough or not taken seriously.
So I feel like most athletes will go in there,
and they'll do what they feel in their heart and soul.
For me, I don't feel any pressure
because I'm gonna do what I want to do.
- Race, why do you think we don't see more white athletes
protesting about social injustice?
- I think that white athletes
are the ones who the Games are built for.
And so what we see is less of them feeling the need
to speak up because it's not affecting them directly.
And a lot of what athletes speak up about
has been about their communities.
And so, for me, it was a time that I was affected
being in New York and watching and being a part
of all the social justice that had been going on,
and so it was important for me to speak up for those people
who I loved and I supported.
- How are each of you viewing the IOC's stated position
on Rule 50?
I'll quote only a part of it, that,
"No kind of demonstration or political,
religious, or racial propaganda will be permitted"?
Your reaction.
- Well, we know that the IOC
needs to protect their investments.
We know that money talks,
so they will do anything and everything
to make sure their sponsors are happy
and they do not put on any type of show
except for the "Olympism Show" come time for Tokyo.
- I'm furious just by the wording, honestly,
of the rule--
"racial propaganda."
Championing equality is not racial propaganda.
So, before we even get to protesting,
I'm just pissed at the language.
- It's history repeating itself.
You know, "racial propaganda" was added as a reaction
to Tommie Smith and John Carlos.
And now you're seeing kneeling and fist-raising added
because of the actions that athletes are taking,
like Colin Kaepernick, like Gwen, like myself,
anyone who wants to protest at these games.
- But it is political when you've got all these flags
and anthems going full-time... - Of course.
- For the entire 16 days of the Games.
- Oh, yeah, and when you're wearing your country's uniform.
Like, it's politics. [chuckles]
You're representing your country.
- You mentioned Tommie Smith.
I asked Tommie directly what his advice would be
to those American Olympians headed to Tokyo
who are considering protesting.
He said, "I'm not telling an athlete to do anything
"because I can't tell an athlete's heart.
The athletes have to do this for themselves."
And when I said, "Would you tell Olympians
"who are thinking about protesting that, if they do,
they should expect the worst?"
He said, "Yes, yes, yes, yes,
yes, yes."
- Yes. [laughter]
- Absolutely.
- Your thoughts on that? Does it scare you?
- I don't think protesting should scare anybody,
because if it is scaring people,
then that's a good thing, right?
That means there's something important about protesting.
There's something important about speaking
when no one wants to hear what's being spoken.
However, I think you should be aware,
but depend on the people who have been supporting you--
your community, your family--
and know that you'll be secure with them.
So the world can't come at you
if you have the support of your people.
- Race, does that make you an outlier in this?
- It doesn't.
I think that you stand with the people that you stand with,
and I would support any athlete who spoke up.
And I do believe that it's important to,
and I do believe there will be consequences for it.
I knew that at the Pan Am Games,
and I know that going into the Olympic Games.
And I think that it's part of what protest means.
It's speaking up when you know there's gonna be consequences
and owning that because you know
that someone else is in a much worse situation than you are.
- I think it is scary,
and the people who protest are demonstrating courage.
And as we all know, courage is not the absence of fear.
It's feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
- So I'll close this
in asking each of you to give me a percentage.
The likelihood that if you get to the medal stand,
you will either kneel or raise a fist
or in some way defy the IOC
and make your...
priorities known?
Tianna?
- I think if you ask the IOC,
they would say Tianna, 100%, will burn it all down.
But I would say 50/50 in the moment.
[laughter]
- Race, what about you?
- It's not a statement
that I would choose to make beforehand.
It would be something that's reactionary to what's going on
and what's going on to the athletes
and people that I care about at that specific games.
- And, Gwendolyn?
- I'm with Tianna and Race.
For me, you know, my first protest was a moment thing.
I felt it in my heart and soul.
So of course the IOC will hear from me.
They've been hearing from me,
but I can't tell you what I'll do if I make the podium.
- Hey, thank you so very much for being with,
Gwendolyn Berry, Race Imboden, Tianna Bartoletta.
Good luck. Travel safely.
- Thank you. - Thank you.
- One quick additional note--
although all parties involved
are talking about what will or won't be allowed in Tokyo,
it's worth noting that none are openly talking punishment.
Instead, IOC officials are saying
that all protests that are deemed as violations
will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Stay tuned.
For our last story this evening,
we want to update the sporting exploits of Tommy Morrissey,
a young boy in Florida who was born with only one arm.
When we first met him,
young Tommy was a seven-year-old golf phenom.
These days, he's still stunning onlookers,
only now on a different field of play
and for a very personal reason.
Our David Scott has that story.
- Atta boy, Tommy! Rock and fire, kiddo!
- Ten-year-old Tommy Morrissey
isn't your typical little league all-star...
because he can do more with one arm
than most kids can with two.
- Yeah! [cheers and applause]
- What's your favorite part of baseball?
- The hitting, because you run the bases, which is really fun.
Like, when you hit a home run,
stepping on home plate is just a great feeling
'cause you literally just hit a home run.
And a lot of kids just can't do that with one arm.
- He has a batting average of over .500,
once struck out ten hitters in a row.
[cheers and applause] - Atta boy!
- And when he's behind home plate,
base-stealers beware.
- Nice job! Put it on him! Yeah!
- Do you feel like you're at a disadvantage
having one arm when you're at the plate?
- No. Definitely not.
- At the mound? - No.
- First base? - No.
- Shortstop? - No.
- No? - No.
- No disadvantage? - No.
- Why do you think that is?
- I don't really think about it.
I just prove them wrong.
- All right, Tommy. Be a hitter, kiddo.
- It's a confidence born of a lifetime
of doing just that,
and not just on the baseball field.
- Come on, Tommy! Come on!
- In fact,
it's not even the first sport Tommy has mastered.
When we first met him three years ago,
he was dominating a different game.
He weighed just 60 pounds,
but could drive a golf ball 200 yards--
kind of technique most adults could only dream of.
- Nice shot, Tommy.
- They say you have the perfect swing.
- Well, that is true.
- How is it that a seven-year-old boy
can drive the ball almost 200 yards?
- Um...
I don't know.
- At just seven years old,
Tommy had already won 28 golf tournaments.
- Great shot, Tommy.
- He was regularly beating
the best two-armed young golfers in the country...
- Yes! - Nice putt!
Atta boy! - Boom!
- Shocking those who had never seen him play before
and didn't expect much.
- Here's this one-armed child stepping up,
and they're like, "Oh, bless his heart.
I hope he hits this ball."
- Joe and Marcia Morrissey are Tommy's parents.
- But then they watch him hit the ball, and they're like...
- Go! One!
Two! Keep going!
Three! Keep going!
Four! Last one!
Boom! - Wow!
- And lest anyone forget Tommy was only seven years old,
he rode around the course in a golf cart
adorned with his favorite cartoon character,
with whom he shared something special.
- How's the lucky fin? - Lucky.
- Let's see. - [grunting]
- This is Nemo. - That's Nemo.
- That is Nemo. - This one?
- Yep. - Uh-huh.
And he's got one big fin and one small one.
- Yeah. - Who came up with that?
- Daddy.
- When Joe and Marcia Morrissey
got married in 2007,
they were eager to start a family,
but during a routine doctor's visit,
the doctor informed Marcia
that their son was caught beneath her ribs,
had developed a blood clot, and wouldn't be quite whole.
- He said, "Your baby's right arm did not develop.
He's gonna be born without an arm."
And I immediately started wailing
and crying and screaming.
- All I did was focus on all the negatives.
My child won't be able to go fishing with me.
My child won't be able to go play golf with me.
My child won't be able to have a catch with me.
I wallowed in self-pity.
- But then one day,
while trying to take his mind off of his unborn child,
Joe went to the golf course,
where he saw a 12-year-old boy playing golf,
and when he looked closer, he noticed something.
- I had to do a double take.
And he was missing below his elbow.
And I started asking him questions.
He talked about his sports. He talked about how he did it.
He talked about his ability to field a baseball.
- So, in that 12-year-old boy,
you could finally see your own son's future.
- Yeah. That child just being a boy
changed my life.
- So, when Marcia gave birth to their son,
Joe was ready.
- I held him for the first time,
and I grabbed that short arm,
and I said, "I will always protect you,
"and I will give you 100% of what I have got
to give you whatever it is that you want to do."
- You ready? - Ready.
- Yay! - Yay!
Good boy!
- I did it!
- Tommy, it turned out, wanted to do it all.
From the time he could stand,
he wanted to play every sport he could,
from football...
to baseball...
- Whoa! - Whoa!
- To soccer.
- Whoa. Good one, bud.
- But what he loved most of all was golf
and golf clubs.
- He beat the living hell out of those things.
- He started carrying golf clubs up to his crib,
and he would carry--
however he did it, because he must've done it
while we were not looking.
But he would have Joe's golf clubs in his crib.
- A lot of little kids,
they may take a teddy bear to bed
because it makes them feel cozy.
Mm-hmm.
- But for you, it was golf clubs?
- Yep, every new club I get, I sleep with it.
- Wow.
Does it, like, help you dream about golf or something?
- Oh, yeah. - Really?
- I pretty much dream about it every time.
- Even as a toddler,
Tommy would wake up from his dreams
and would mimic players he saw on TV.
Just one problem, though--
they all had two arms.
So he began to figure out what he needed to do.
- I do bounce it off my neck,
'cause when you bounce it off your neck,
it gives you more power to hit the ball.
- You figured that out by yourself?
- Yeah. - Nobody taught you that?
- Nope. - [chuckles]
Nobody could, I guess, right? - Nope.
I just hit the ball. It goes far.
- [chuckles]
- Fore!
- Of course, it's a little more complicated than that.
To learn just how Tommy did it,
we went to PGA National Resort
in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
There we met golf pro Steven Cox,
who had been studying Tommy's swing for two years
using this machine.
Cox found that because of Tommy's missing arm,
he used his legs to push off the ground
harder than any golfer Cox had ever seen.
Do your thing, Tom.
- So you see this huge power move...
at 7.88 times his total pressure to start.
- How does 7.88 compare
to the rest of the golf world?
- That would be anywhere
from four or five times what I typically see.
- Four or five times? - Yes.
- All right, ready? This might go past the line.
I'm going past the line.
- Ooh. - Boom!
Steven, I think I broke the computer.
- But for all his extraordinary physical gifts,
it was the mundane that Tommy struggled with.
Simple tasks were difficult.
He needed his mom to buckle his belt.
And even eating could be a challenge.
- Like, for a snack, it's hard.
- What do you mean for a snack?
- Not opening stuff. - Uh-huh.
- With this arm, I only could push down...
- Mm-hmm. - Into the package.
- Mm-hmm.
So you figured out how to do amazing things...
- Yeah. - With your short arm.
- Yeah. - But there are some things
that are still hard to do.
- Mm-hmm. - Maybe, um...
maybe tying shoes. - Yeah.
I can't even do that. - Yeah.
- I only could wear click shoes
or Velcro.
- But his greatest challenge, it turned out,
was the one none of us could see--
his battle for self-acceptance.
- He came home from school,
and he said, "Mama, can I talk to you?"
And I said, "Sure, baby. What's on your mind?"
"Mama, I don't like myself."
And I said, "What?
"What do you mean you don't like yourself?
You're amazing. You're a great little boy.
What is wrong?"
"I actually hate myself."
And I said...
"Why do you hate yourself, babe?"
And then he just pointed, and he said,
"Because of my short arm."
And he said, "Mama, I just want two hands."
- I want a prosthetic, and I am getting one,
but I just want it, like, right now 'cause...
a lot of kids say, "What happened to your arm?"
And I don't like it.
- Mm.
do they say it in a mean way, or are they just curious?
- Well, they point at it. - They point at it.
- And some people, like, look under.
- Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And it makes you feel uncomfortable.
- Mm-hmm.
- For all the things that made Tommy so outwardly different,
in the end, he was the same as any other kid--
just hoping to fit in,
which may explain what's happened in the three years
since we first met him.
Tommy has traded in golf, a famously solitary pursuit,
for baseball,
a sport where he can be one of the guys.
all: One, two, three, Phillies!
- You like being on a team sport?
- Yes. - What do you like about it?
- With golf, it kind of gets boring
when you have nobody, like, to talk to a lot.
- Yeah. - Baseball, you get to talk
to almost everybody on your team a lot.
[cheers and applause]
- Turns out, it's not just the game that interests Tommy.
It's the friends that come with it.
- He realized what a team sport feels like.
And he now has a tribe,
and they're all working together for that one goal.
And that is far more exciting
than being out there by himself.
- Tommy. - Yeah.
- Dude, can I be on your team?
- Tommy's parents say that the camaraderie
has changed their son,
helping to boost his self-esteem.
Three years ago,
their little boy was eager for a prosthetic arm,
but that no longer seems to be the case.
- It just kind of stopped coming up.
He just kind of dropped it, and he has not mentioned it since.
- I want to ask you,
'cause we talked about it three years ago--
at the time, you were...
you were very interested in exploring a prosthetic.
Has that changed?
- Now I really don't ask a lot, but I used to.
But now that I'm ten, I kind of can do a lot more stuff,
'cause now I found a new method of opening a bag of chips,
'cause that's my hardest thing I've ever done.
- So you don't really think about a prosthetic anymore.
- No.
- Do you think that there'll come a time
where you might again want a prosthetic?
- I don't think so.
- How fast can you throw, Tommy?
- 53.
- These days the only thing that seems to be
on Tommy Morrissey's mind
is his new favorite sport.
Whoo! That was heat!
Nice job, Tommy. - Thank you.
- And he's putting in the work to get even better.
Tommy trains weekly with a private coach,
working on hitting
and pitching...
- And try to, like, really pull those fingers tight
so you can spin it tighter, all right?
- Even using the kind of high-tech training tools
that the pros do...
- There we go.
- With no end in sight.
Where are you going with this baseball career?
- Trying to go to the majors and then to the hall of fame.
- All the way? - Yes.
- You ready for greatness? - Yes, definitely.
♪ ♪
- One quick postscript--
should Tommy's baseball dreams ever come true,
he would not be the first one-armed major leaguer
in baseball history.
Back in the '40s, Pete Gray made it to the major leagues
as an outfielder
after losing his right arm at the age of six.
Jim Abbott, who was born with an incomplete right arm,
pitched for four major league teams in the '90s.
He won 87 ball games and even threw a no-hitter.
That's our show for this evening.
For all of the good folks at "Real Sports,"
I'm Bryant Gumbel.
Thank you so very much for being with us.
Please stay safe and good night.