New York – from www.nydailynews.com – The Jets took the field for the season opener Monday night – and so did Ines Sainz.
Sainz, 32, dressed in a short black dress and sky-high stilettos, reported on the pregame action from the sidelines hours after accepting Jets owner Woody Johnson’s apology for his team’s chauvinistic shenanigans.
She watched the Jets lose to the Ravens, 10-9, from the press box, but had no plans to interview players in the locker room after the game.
“I don’t want to be the focus,” she told the Daily News.
She offered her first detailed account Monday of how she was subjected to “grotesque” locker room antics on Saturday, saying, “It mustn’t happen again.”
“I believe they are taking it seriously and it’s only going to be one bad experience and no more,” Sainz, a reporter for TV Azteca of Mexico, told reporters outside New Meadowlands Stadium just before kickoff.
Sainz watched pregame warmups just yards from some of the players accused of bombarding her with catcalls, whistles and blatant ogling during practice.
Sainz said she “never heard something sexual” from the players, but noted one called her a “bonita señorita” – a pretty lady.
Johnson assured Sainz that team officials will begin grilling players and coaches today about the startling accusations.
“Right now, we’re working with the league and we’re doing all the fact-finding, checking the facts, doing the interviews,” Johnson said on ESPN Radio.
Johnson said he called Sainz on Sunday, shortly after hearing how his players and coaches treated her.
“We certainly don’t want any kind of allegations like this, or anything like this to happen,” he said. “I apologized to her – if anything happened, what happened, kind of an open apology.”
Sainz, who is heading home to Mexico City Tuesday, said she was touched by Johnson’s overture.
“He was very concerned. He expects all the players to have good behavior,” she said.
Coach Rex Ryan made his first comment on the flap after Monday night’s loss, saying, “We never want anybody to feel uncomfortable around our team.”
Earlier Monday, Sainz talked about the ordeal, saying, such “behavior is not acceptable.”
“Yes, I accept the apologies and I say … thanks to him [Johnson] and for the concern and all the rest of the team because he promised that he is going to make [sure] that everybody on the team respects women,” Sainz said on CNN’s Rick Sanchez show.
“I think the important point is that a woman deserves respect in any profession,” she said.
Sainz went to Gang Green’s practice field Saturday to interview quarterback Mark Sanchez. She immediately drew attention dressed in tightfitting jeans and a white button-up blouse.
When she entered the locker room to interview Sanchez, she said, she was subjected to catcalls and boorish behavior that she tried to block out.
“I feel a little uncomfortable because evidently it’s not easy to be in a locker room and hear and notice that everybody is speaking about you and probably making some jokes,” she said.
She tried to make light of the interview yesterday, joking, Sanchez’s “Spanish is like my English.”
Back story: from www.nydailynews.com – Ines Sainz’s last name sounds like “science,” but everyone knows by now her brain isn’t the body part that ignited the chemistry of athletes and male sports fans alike.
Long before Saturday, when the sportscaster tweeted about feeling increasingly “uncomfortable” in the Jets locker room as players’ antics and murmurs about her body reached a crescendo, she was the object of comments that would make a halfback blush.
You know, jokes about end zones and players hard at work.
Sainz’s pulchritudinous posterior is said to have an entire fan site dedicated to it.
Even her network, the Mexican-owned TV Azteca, shot a ridiculous closeup of her crotch as she tried to report on a Honduras versus Costa Rica soccer game.
Still, does the 32-year-old blond “ask for it” by wearing skintight jeans and teeny tops in a testosterone-charged locker room?
One woman’s come-hither look is another’s muumuu: Sainz, who has posed in next-to-nothing bikinis, posted photos of what she was wearing, calling her outfit totally “appropriate.”
If you watch Spanish-language TV, you know Sainz probably wouldn’t have her job unless she was a sizzler: You’re not about to see Susan Boyle do sports updates on Televisa, or on American TV, home of Erin Andrews, for that matter.
A guy I know who confesses to watching “Levantate” on Telemundo – on mute – says, “Even the woman in the Verizon commercial is hot.”
The sports fan who runs Hogwild.net admits: “For the most part, these women are articulate and knowledgeable about sports. But for the most part, us men don’t care.”
Did she have to wait inside the locker room to interview Mark Sanchez? Yes, say female sportswriters and editors.
One prizewinning female sportswriter said, “Leagues and teams are allowed to set the guidelines: Keep ALL credentialed reporters out, or let them ALL in. So it’s the NFL, NBA, WNBA and the MLB who have decided that is where we ALL do our interviews, though there are also separate interview rooms where coaches and star players are often brought.
“The WNBA playoffs are happening right now, and they’re being covered by plenty of men who do their interviews in the women’s locker room … 99% of the time it works pretty well.”
It is a right, hard-won in 1978, by Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke, who sued Major League Baseball in federal court after Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned her from the Dodgers locker room during the 1977 World Series.
Still, 10 years later, a member of the St. Louis Cardinals shot a jockstrap onto the head of Paola Boivin, the president of the Association for Women in Sports Media, in the locker room.
In 1990, sportswriter Lisa Olson (former Newser, then with the Boston Herald) was in the New England Patriots locker room when players walked in front of her naked and one fondled his genitals.
Sainz told CNN Monday, “When you do your job, it must be a nice place to do it.”
Women sportswriters know that. Let’s hope the players who made asses of themselves over Sainz’s backside learn it fast.