Parker: The Player Card Series, Volume 2 by Ellie Danes & Katie Kyler

Author:Ellie Danes & Katie Kyler [Danes, Ellie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A sport Romance
Publisher: Ellie Danes
Published: 2017-03-20T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Lily

The feedback coming in all over social media had been a mix of positive and negative so deliciously virulent that I decided to keep quiet for a day. Ignoring the trolls and even the death threats was easy, though a few of the more creative ones tempted me to offer my congratulations. Even more tempting was when a few of my fellow journalists chimed in. The men who were real pros had a way of baiting that was more subtle and that much more effective.

They started coming out with articles—though calling them “articles” gave them far too much credit—which started out taking a well-reasoned, conciliatory tone that was right on the line of deliberate condescension. Anyone who knew what they were doing knew they actually had both feet over the line, but they could parse their own words in self-defense the minute anyone might try to go after them. Every sentence was a trap, leading to a bigger trap, all wrapped around the juiciest trap they could devise. It would have been a lose, lose, lose for me to engage, but they were good, and I almost did.

One of the jackasses even had the balls to try, “Far be it from me to ever use the loaded, completely off-limits word ‘shrill’ to describe my colleague, both during her interview in the tunnel—at which I was present—and in her subsequent article, but I would appreciate it if someone with a sensible head on her shoulders would get me the most recent list of approved language to describe it when someone’s voice makes the whole room’s skin crawl and ears hurt. Even the cheerleaders were looking at her as if she’d scraped a blackboard with her fingernails.”

This drew the ire of one starlet who was either a damn good writer in her own right or had one hell of a publicity pro on retainer. Her short and sweet tweet said, “What kind of man hides behind ‘far be it from me to use’ the word he uses? Ditch the pen and run for office already, candy ass.”

He ‘liked,' retweeted, and linked her tweet on his blog, and his organization did the same in every location they had, including the accounts of their radio station, and his little article got a hundred thousand extra views in the first twenty minutes after her words started to spread.

That was fine. It all poured back to my article. I was going to make it right for Parker, and that’s another reason I didn’t engage. I did, however, do something during the day, after Parker left, that I couldn’t resist.

I had been doing some research over time on cheerleader pay and what those talented, highly trained ladies are expected to do, both to get and keep their jobs.

I had also done the exact same kind of painstaking research on the officials, the referees of professional football, all male. My article led to the obvious conclusion: pay these people more, men and women, give them benefits, treat

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