“I’m so used to being tolerated that being celebrated is a unique experience!” New York Times columnist Karen Crouse led off her talk ‘Lady in the Locker Room: The Bare Truth’ with an honest and humble insight.

Think she definitely deserved and received more than a polite golf clap. A bit about Karen:

Karen Crouse has been a sports columnist for The New York Times since June 2005. Prior to joining The Times, she worked as a sports columnist for four years at the Palm Beach Post.

Ms. Crouse is a graduate of the University of Southern California, where she majored in journalism and was a member of the Trojan women’s swim team. She grew up in Santa Clara, Calif., and started her newspaper career in Savannah, Ga., at the Savannah News-Press.

Karen led with a personal reflection on the quote we’ve heard several speakers share, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you realize why.”

She shared her lifechanging moment, when as a 13 year-old she realized the power of the written word, and how they could positively impact someone she looked up to.

Rather than trying to summarize her amazing story, I’ll link to this  great column she penned for the New York Times about it: Inspiration for a Swimmer and Writer

We build up the athletes and see what we want to see, we don’t see what is really there – and that’s the crux of a responsibility Karen feels to really tell the true stories, like those of Amanda Beard – For Champion Olympic Swimmer, A Simpler Time

I look at it as less of a sports assignment, but being an anthropologist who’s been assigned to this patriarchal tribe called golf. This is the last male bastion of chauvinism and sexism, the country club golf set.  I feel like I have to try and changes these people’s minds one person at a time. And that leads to Augusta…

Here is Karen’s column on the Masters: Touchy Day at August National Men’s Club

And then, this happened: New York Times reporter says she’d skip Masters to protest membership policies Karen shared the difficulty of covering the Masters that week and the tension in her newsroom in the days and weeks that followed.

But within the next year, August announced the admission of two female members. Karen noted, “I’d like to think that in some small way the discomfort I put myself through at Augusta was not for nought.”

We don’t only have to talk the talk but walk the walk – and that means not only participating in but supporting women in their endeavors in the sports realm.

If that means clicking on tht woman’s golf story so it gets one more page view, please do it!