Mike Penner held what I would consider a dream sportswriting job. He also held a deep-seated secret.
Penner worked for the Los Angeles Times for 25 years. He wore many hats on the sports staff, covering the Olympic Games, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, World Cup soccer and tennis events for the paper. In recent years, he had tended to the Times’ “Totally Random” feature, an outlet for historical and statistical minutiae, along with work as a columnist.
Penner’s secret, however, was eating him from the inside. He sought therapy and gained confidence in himself. He gradually revealed his secret to friends and co-workers and supervisors at the Times.
“I am now happier, more focused and more energized when I sit behind a keyboard,” Penner wrote in the Times on April 26, 2007. “The wicked writer’s block that used to reach up and torture me at some of the worst possible times imaginable has disappeared … That should come as good news to my editors: far fewer blown deadlines.”
On that fateful day in April, Penner made the final step. He revealed his secret to the world in 823 words that momentarily turned sports journalism on its head.
“I am a transsexual sportswriter,” Penner wrote.
“It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words. I realize many readers and colleagues and friends will be shocked to read them.”
Mike Penner would undergo hormone therapy and become Christine Daniels, taking her surname from Penner’s middle name, Daniel. She would take a brief vacation from the paper before proceeding with her usual duties.
Though it’s difficult to gauge the true shock value of Daniels’ confession, two numbers ought to do. Latimes.com accumulated 500,000 hits on the column within half a day, and Daniels received 538 e-mails (only two were considered “negative”). Though she received support for her brave personal admission, Daniels was subject to critiques of professionalism in confessing her transgendered nature. Times Managing Editor Douglas Frantz stood up for Daniels in a follow-up piece by Times staff member James Rainey.
“We thought it best to inform our readers, particularly those who read the Sports section, that the byline would change,” Frantz said. “We also wanted to give Christine the opportunity to explain this decision on her own terms, and the Sports section was the logical place to do that.”
We often come across inspirational stories of athletes overcoming obstacles to achieve some feat of athletic greatness, exorcising personal demons in the process. Sportswriters do not receive that same treatment. Many would argue that they don’t deserve it. They are supposed to be impartial observers, providing factual accounts of games or stories and little else. Readers are not encouraged to acknowledge a sportswriter beyond the byline at the top of the article.
The fact is, however, that sportswriters have stories to tell about themselves. They go about their work differently, and their obstacles rarely stem from ability to throw or catch a ball, run fast enough or jump high and far enough. Stories behind the stories themselves — that which you see in newsprint before you — are often as compelling as the finished product. Glancing at the box score of the game is akin to glancing at the reporter’s account: The athletes and the reporters have left it all out on the playing field, but only so much shows up in the final product.
Daniels’ story, however, did not have a happy ending. In October 2008, Daniels began writing again under the byline of Mike Penner — with no formal announcement or notice by the paper as to the motive. On November 28, the Times reported that Penner had died, at the age of 52, at his Los Angeles home. No formal cause of death has been announced, but it is suspected that Penner took his own life.
Mike Penner overcame quite a few obstacles to become the first openly transsexual sportswriter. The arduous nature of his journey, however, appears to have been far too great to overcome.
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