Falcons tight end Jacob Tamme says his locker room is different than Donald Trump’s locker room.
Tamme was among the scores of athletes who took to Twitter this week to react unkindly when Trump classified some of his lewd, 11-year-old comments as merely “locker room talk.” In previously unreleased audio from more than a decade ago, the Republican presidential candidate spoke graphically of trying to become sexually involved with a married woman and of how his celebrity status would allow him to do anything with women, including grabbing them by the genitals.
Expanding on his series of Tweets on the subject from Seattle, where the team is preparing to play the Seahawks on Sunday, Tamme tried to straddle propriety, politics and sports.
“It’s not really a political thing for me,” he said. “My main point is not a defense of the locker room. My main point is that I don’t like calling it any type of talk. I think that is an attempt to dismiss it.
“I don’t think that is what everyday man-speak is or should be. It’s not how I was raised to speak about women. It’s not how the men that I respect speak about women. It’s not how my sons speak about women. And it’s not how I want my daughter to be spoken about.”
Trump’s opponents have since seized on the comments — “This is horrific,” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declared — and support within his own party buckled. And Trump, as he did when asked about his words during Sunday night’s presidential debate, took cover behind a male stereotype.
“Yes, I’m very embarrassed by it. I hate it,” he said. “But it’s locker room talk and it’s one of those things.”
As he employed the phrase four times during the debate, “locker room talk” suddenly became a part of the national election lexicon. It evoked a commonly held image of athletes sitting around, scratching themselves and grunting about their various conquests. It perpetuated the notion that when secure in their own company, men can’t help but to go lewd and crude, even if that might take them to the border of boasting about potentially criminal contact.
While such talk might happen anywhere — a bar, a golf clubhouse, a frat house, in the office break room — those who actually spend a good portion of their lives in locker rooms took exception.
As did their wives. Kyle Korver’s wanted to immediately go to Instagram and register her protest.
“I told her nope, we don’t post about politics on social media,” Korver said.
But the Hawks shooting guard would comment the old-fashioned way: verbally.
“I have never spent time in his locker rooms, but I know in our locker room we don’t talk like that,” the veteran of 14 seasons and four NBA teams said.
Added teammate Kent Bazemore: “Some of that stuff we know not even to talk about, any of the negative stuff, anything demeaning to anyone. It puts a bad cloud around your teammates and yourself. Karma is real. We stay clear of any of that stuff.”
We never will know exactly the tenor of locker room discourse, given that one of the most sacred maxims in sports: “What is said in the locker room stays in the locker room.”
And it certainly isn’t all enlightened banter, worthy of a sit-down with James Lipton. In fact, it was Hall of Famer Charles Barkley who once declared on air, “The language we use, sometimes it’s homophobic, sometimes it’s sexist and a lot of times it’s racist. We do that when we are joking with our teammates and it’s nothing personal.”
Yet, the pitcher who cracked open the clubhouse door in his 1970 book “Ball Four” says the talk inside didn’t reach the level that Trump suggested. Politically, Jim Bouton, 77, living in Massachusetts, is a staunch Democrat and a one-time delegate for George McGovern.
Lifting from his book, which at the time was vilified by players for supposedly violating the sanctity of the clubhouse, Bouton explained his idea of locker room talk:
“Gary Bell would say to Ray Oyler (1969 Seattle Pilots teammates), ‘Hey, Ray, could you pick my socks up. I left them under your bed last night.’ It was players putting each other down and trying to be funny about it. If you can’t be funny in the locker room, you can’t make it in the locker room. You keep your mouth shut.
“What (Trump) said was not funny.”
“The first thing Jim said to me when we were talking about it,” said Bouton’s wife, Paula Kurman, “was that the locker room was crude but it usually was more creative than Trump was.”
What exactly constitutes locker room talk is fairly wide ranging.
“Oh, I don’t know, football?” laughed Tamme. “Table tennis. We have a lot of good smack talk about table tennis.” (The Falcons installed a table in the locker room this season.)
“Locker room talk can range from anything from kids to politics to cartoons to video games,” Bazemore said. “It’s a vague term. Rap battles or the football game last night. A super vague term.”
That’s not to claim that none of them have said anything within the cloister of the locker room that, if repeated, would come back to embarrass them should they happen to run for president one day.
But there is one difference, said the Falcons tight end.
“Have I ever said anything like Donald Trump said on that tape? I don’t think I ever have because I do not view women as objects,” Tamme said.
“Have I said something I would regret? Certainly. I would attempt to apologize for that without dismissing it.”
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