, after that magazine called her “the best fortune-teller in pro football.” Her challenges to the sportswriting establishment were twofold: first, she was a woman, and, second, she refused both reverence and jargon, favoring a gossipy, bright tone that had more in common with contemporary blogs than it did the work of her stodgy peers. Fans treasured Penna’s fearlessness and wit, her willingness to comment on both what other writers wouldn’t think to and what they wouldn’t dare to .
It’s true that sports have changed dramatically over the course of Penna’s life. She was born Elinor Graham Kaine in Miami Beach in 1935, when there were just nine teams in the NFL. She grew up between Chicago and Miami — or between Wrigley Field and Hialeah Racetrack, as she tells it. Her well-off family owned horses, and racing was Penna’s entrée into the ever-entwined worlds of sports, gambling and high society.
Among the monied, cosmopolitan crowd at Clarke’s, Penna’s sports fandom flourished. The Giants would come after home games: Charlie Conerly, Frank Gifford, Dick Lynch, Emlen Tunnell. The panelists of, like Dorothy Kilgallen and Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf, made up another table. “Sunday night at P.J. Clarke’s was really something special,” Penna says, “and with all those people, at least half of them were interested in football.
By the mid-60s, it was a cult favorite: “Religiously read by the George Plimpton set,” as one paper described, though Penna says she never met theco-founder. “The foremost, chicest professional football newsletter in the land … that is becoming the rage of the game’s emerging social set,” said another.called it “the most accurate and interesting inside information about professional football.” It was even called “sexy.
Some of her peers reviled her unorthodox approach. Others, like Larry Merchant, who was a columnist for thewhen Penna came on the scene, relished the way she turned things upside-down. “She had a take on what was going on in pro football that lined up with the direction sportswriting was starting to go into in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” says Merchant.
Soon, she started getting punnily titled spots in papers around the country: “Female on the Fifty.” “Girl in the Huddle.” “Powder Puff Picker.” “From the Weak Side.” “Beauty and the Beef.” The one that eventually stuck was “Football and the Single Girl.
She started doing additional widely syndicated columns just to pick the following week’s games, touted with full-page advertisements insisting “Elinor Kaine can outpick ANY MAN!” while challenging readers to not “let her get away with it.” There was another column for, and racing coverage in the offseason.
Penna got a slew of hate mail — “and they aren’t all love letters either,” she joked at the time. It may have been less profane than the responses women sports reporters get now , but it was certainly no less mercurial. “I get a royal ribbing on how a woman can be expected to know, comprehend or delve into the man’s world of professional football,” she told one interviewer. “They say I ought to get married and go to the kitchen because they don’t agree with what I write.
Penna met a lawyer who offered to file a show cause order in New Haven Superior Court against the Jets, the Giants, Yale, and the New Haven writer who was managing the press box, demanding an explanation for why a registered member of the Pro Football Writers of America was not being admitted to an NFL press box.
“It was the writers who were against me, the teams didn’t give a shit,” she says now. “They didn’t want me in there. No girl. They wanted it just for themselves.” At the time, going into the locker room as a woman was a complete nonstarter, as one might imagine. “Some of the guys said they would come out [of the locker room], the ones I knew — all I had to do was come down and ask,” she says now. “The whole thing about going into a locker room is so overrated.
Penna covers racism and segregation in college football and the pros in frank terms, even explaining it wasn’t easy for Black players in Green Bay to get a haircut. She cites renowned sociologist Harry Edwards’ assertion that “[B]lack athletes have long been used as symbols of nonexistent democracy and brotherhood.
Penna’s a prolific quote-tweeter, particularly when it comes to her longtime home team, the Giants. She speaks — and tweets — with the easy assurance of a born pundit. Her commentary ranges from “terrible snap” to various critiques of players’ and coaches’ hair: Kliff Kingsbury’s hair is too short, Ryan Fitzpatrick’s beard is too long. She likes Andy Reid because he doesn’t have those “Adam Gase eyes.
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