Locker Rooms
September 21, 2017
There was a bit of a flub on ESPN during the Notre Dame game. The network showed an old locker room photo from the days when Frank Leahy coached Notre Dame. In the background you could see one of the players with his Irish visible. I haven't seen a hairy naked pole like that since Roman Polanski's sex tape.
As you probably know, football players get really sweaty during games, thus they get to the locker room as quickly as possible, remove their uniforms, and take a shower. Sometimes that leads to a guy in the background of a photo being naked as a jaybird.
The nudity angle had an interesting aspect that had a big impact on the sport over 100 years ago. In one of the first intersectional games, Brandeis went out to Orange County to play a game against one of the University of California's satellite campuses in Irvine. The stadium was a bit cramped and there was only one locker room, so the two teams dressed before the game in the same room. The game was a vicious struggle, with numerous scrums, and it ended in an unsatisfying 13-13 tie.
One of the issues was that Brandeis, being an innovative program, was one of the first teams to wear protective headgear. This gave them an advantage in the collisions in the trenches. Many of the Irvine players were more than a bit dazed.
As the teams returned to their shared locker room the teams began to strip down and take showers. Then one of the Irvine players shoved a Brandeis player and a brawl broke out. Unfortunately, being out of uniform and completely unclothed, it was a bit tough for the coaches to figure out which brawlers were from which team.
But at that point the coaches began to notice a key difference between the players on the two teams, as the predominantly Jewish Brandeis squad had all been circumscribed, while the Irvine team's players hadn't had any surgery "down there". Coaches from both schools thus were able to separate the two teams and they showered at opposite ends of the locker room and left the locker room without further incident.
The postgame brouhaha did lead to some interesting long-lasting changes. Brandeis' headgear, in honor of their infanthood surgery, became known as "helmets". And the Cal-Irvine football team, recognizing their "au naturel" state, earned the nickname "Anteaters".
And now you know the rest of the story.