Bailey Davis was a Saintsation — a cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints. That is, until she posted a photo of herself in a one-piece lace bodysuit on her private Instagram account.

The Saints fired the 22-year-old this January for violating a code of conduct that prohibits cheerleaders from appearing nude, seminude or in lingerie. It wasn’t the only strict rule that Davis and her former colleagues had to follow — cheerleaders for the Saints can’t have players follow them on social media, must have private social media accounts and are required to leave parties or restaurants if players are there. The company says the rules are in place to prevent cheerleaders from being preyed on by players.

Davis, a native of Ellisville, Miss., had dreamed of become a Saintsation: Her mother worked as the cheerleading squad’s choreographer for nearly 18 years. She resigned after her daughter’s firing.

Davis filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces civil rights laws relating to workplace discrimination, against both the NFL and the Saints. She spoke to NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro about why she became a cheerleader, how she has to recognize thousands of different NFL and MLB players and the reaction her suit has gotten.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Interview highlights

On what the firing represents to her

The players have the freedom to post whatever they want to on social media. They can promote themselves, but we can’t post anything on our social media about being a Saintsation. We can’t have it in our profile picture, we can’t use our last name for media, we can’t promote ourselves, but the players don’t have the same restrictions.

On sexism versus different rules for different employees

The football players have a different job than us, and I completely understand that. But as far as being in the same place as a player, and me being the one who has to be careful about where I’m at, and watch out for them, that’s so discriminating. … If I post something, and I’m in a swimsuit or in a body suit, it’s seen as something sexual, but the players can post shirtless in their underwear and it’s just seen as athletic. …

If I’m [at a place before a player] first, I would still have to leave. And that’s not just Saints players, it’s any NFL team, or NBA. So anybody from the Pelicans could walk in, and I would have to leave, or I’d be fired.

On why she became a cheerleader

I kind of wanted to be a Saintsation as a stepping stone into my dance career, because I knew there was a four-year cap on it. But by my third year, and I knew I had to start looking for another job in the dance world, I wanted to start promoting myself more [on social media] and there was no rule that I couldn’t have my [social media] pages public, for people to find me. When they said, “Well, you need to make your page private so these players can’t find you,” that’s when I realized, OK, [it’ll be] harder for people to find me and for me to find another job as a dancer, because social media is how we market ourselves nowadays.

On the reaction her suit has gotten

My fellow teammates have not been supportive to me. I’ve been told that I’m putting the team in a negative light, and a lot of the girls have been posting stuff on social media, saying that, you know, the organization is great and offers so many opportunities — which is true, and I mean, I [felt] the same way when I was in the organization. We’re told so many times, “There’s a hundred other girls that would do your job for free.” You’re just taught to keep your mouth shut or they’d replace you.

So I think when you’re in the organization, you don’t realize that there’s nothing OK about this.

NPR’s Emily Sullivan produced this story for digital.

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Andre Ingram didn’t know why his exit interview had been bumped up a day. But he had his bags packed anyway. A longtime veteran of the NBA’s minor league, he knew there was no need to dawdle after his season wrapped with the South Bay Lakers in El Segundo, Calif., especially with his wife and their daughters waiting for him in Virginia.

By the end of the meeting Monday, though, it was clear they would need to be coming west instead: For the first time in more than a decade spent grinding in the minors, Ingram, 32, was getting called up to play with the Los Angeles Lakers through season’s end.

Then, the NBA rookie with the gray-speckled hair just went ahead and dropped 19 points on the league’s top-ranked team.

On Tuesday night, playing at LA’s Staples Center before his family and nearly 20,000 strangers, Ingram came off the bench against the Houston Rockets to drain four 3-pointers on his way to one of the best debuts in Lakers history. Only franchise superstars Magic Johnson, Nick Van Exel and Jerry West — “You may have heard of them,” deadpans ESPN Stats & Info — scored more in their rookie openers with the Lakers.

Before the game’s end, the crowd had erupted in chants of “MVP!” — and they weren’t referring the Rockets’ James Harden, this year’s presumptive most valuable player. They were cheering for Ingram.

“From the team warm-ups, the atmosphere — it was electric,” Ingram told reporters in the locker room after the game. “You could feel something in there, and you know, people are going crazy. MVP chants — that’s crazy, man.”

He was at the free throw line when he heard them.

“I’m just glad the free throws went in, to be honest,” he said, laughing.

Now, Ingram may be a rookie by one measure — but by another, he is a grizzled veteran: He has been in the NBA’s developmental league since 2007, when he went undrafted after graduating from American University with a physics degree.

But as he told his local Richmond Times-Dispatch more than a decade ago, his eyes have always been on the NBA: “You get more NBA exposure in the D-League — that’s why I chose it ahead of going overseas,” he said at the time.

Since then, ESPN Stats & Info notes, Ingram went on to rack up the most 3-pointers in the history of the minor league, which has at times gone by the names D-League and G-League, and played in the second-most games in league history. But all the while, he just kept waiting on that call from the majors.

As NPR’s Tom Goldman reported in 2016, the life of a minor league basketball player is not a glamorous one. Average pay for a season is about $20,000; players get from city to city by bus and sometimes play in front of crowds numbering in the dozens, not thousands. It’s not an easy road for a father of two like Ingram — and certainly not for his wife, Marilee.

“Obviously,” Ingram said after the game Tuesday, “it’s not a cash cow — so, I mean, if at any point she was like, ‘OK now, you’ve chased long enough, we need to do better,’ what can I say. But she never said that, never even thought it. She kept encouraging me.”

When he called Monday, “I thought he was calling to tell me when he was coming home,” Marilee Ingram said during the broadcast, voice breaking with emotion. “But when he said he was being called up to the Lakers, I literally lost it and started screaming.”

“As soon as he was done signing,” she added, “he called me back and was like, ‘OK, you have to pack because you are coming out here to see these last two games.’ “

She and their daughters came right out. They were on hand to watch him play — and to hear those MVP chants ripple through the arena, even in the Lakers’ 105-99 loss to the Rockets.

In the locker room after the game, Lakers coach Luke Walton presented Ingram with the game ball. And he summed it all up pretty succinctly.

“Ten years,” Walton said, shaking his head. “Helluva opening night.”

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There seemed to be no way Shohei Ohtani could live up to the hype — after all, at just 23, he has been called a modern-day Babe Ruth, a threat both at the plate and on the mound. But so far, Ohtani is delivering: He struck out 12 batters on Sunday, after hitting home runs in three games last week.

It’s still early, but the Japanese star is generating the kind of stats that people in America’s big leagues last saw around 100 years ago. In four starts as a designated hitter, Ohtani has knocked in seven runs, going 7 for 18. He also has two wins as a pitcher.

Making his second start as a pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels on Sunday, Ohtani was perfect through the first part of the seventh inning against the visiting Oakland A’s. He sat down the first 19 batters he faced before giving up Oakland’s first hit — a single by Marcus Semien. Ohtani then walked a batter, but he recovered to end the inning on a strikeout, and the Angels went on to win, 6-1.

“I was conscious of the no-hitter, but I wasn’t really thinking about the perfect game,” Ohtani said, according to MLB.com. “I figured they were going to get a hit sooner or later. Once I gave up that hit, I was going to react and try to reset everything.”

A quote like that about a near-perfect game is relatively rare from any baseball player. Coming from a rookie who also hit homers in three consecutive games, it’s unheard of.

“Ohtani is the first Major League player with two wins and three home runs in his team’s first 10 games since Jim ‘Grunting Jim’ Shaw for the Washington Senators in 1919,” MLB says.

This was the second time the A’s have seen Ohtani in the regular season. A week ago, he gave up three runs and struck out six batters — good enough to earn his first MLB win. This time around, he dominated in front of a huge Angels home crowd, using an assortment of fastballs that topped out at more than 99 mph and split-finger pitches that kept the A’s hitters off balance.

“He just went out there and did what he does very well,” said Angels Manager Mike Scioscia, a former MLB catcher. “That’s as good a game as you can ever see pitched.”

As a pitcher, Ohtani’s record is 2-0, with an ERA of 2.08 in his young Major League Baseball season. He throws right-handed and hits from the left side of the plate.

As a hitter, Ohtani has already sent a home run ball screaming out of the batter’s box at more than 112 mph. And each of his homers has been longer than the last, including a 400-foot blast against Corey Kluber, the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner. While Ohtani confounded Oakland from the mound to finish their series on Sunday, he started this series on Friday night as the designated hitter, smashing a homer some 449 feet.

Before he signed with the Angels in what many U.S. teams treated as a lottery contest last year, Ohtani had already amazed baseball fans in and outside Japan, where he was a power pitcher for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. As a hitter, he once launched “a baseball through the roof of the Tokyo Dome,” as member station KPCC reported in February.

When the 2018 MLB season started, the superhuman expectations for Ohtani had been tempered a bit by his decidedly human spring training, when he endured a deep hitting slump and pitched to a 27.00 ERA. The list of people who are surprised by the regular-season Ohtani seems to include the pitcher and slugger himself.

“Especially how my spring training went, I wasn’t really imagining being this good, to be honest,” Ohtani said, according to MLB. “But I feel better every day. I feel like I’m getting more used to everything more and more each day. It’s just the first week. Everything went well, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to hit a wall somewhere on the road. Once I hit that wall, then that’s where I need to start working harder and figure out how to get past that wall.”

Given his explosive start, some are now wondering whether Ohtani, or the Angels, might have been using some gamesmanship, trying to ease him into the big leagues. Those fans and analysts can be forgiven for thinking that when it comes to Ohtani, nothing can be taken for granted.

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Golfer Patrick Reed was best known for the trophies he shared at the Presidents and Ryder Cup. It’s for his performance at the latter that he picked up the nickname “Captain America.”

But all that changed on Sunday when Reed, 27, won his first major championship at the Masters in Augusta, Ga. Reed is the fourth consecutive Masters champion to capture his first major at that tournament.

On the 18th hole, Reed finished with a 1-under 71 to hold off challenger Rickie Fowler. For Fowler, it was his eighth top-five finish in a major championship and third as runner-up. He’s still waiting to celebrate his first major title win.

From the beginning of play at Augusta National, it was clear that Reed, who’s originally from Texas, was not the crowd favorite. He picked up on that when he and four-time major winner Rory McIlroy, who’s from Northern Ireland, were announced on the tee box — McIlroy got a noticeably louder ovation.

ESPN reports it’s understandable why the fans didn’t want Reed to win:

“It was never going to be pretty with Patrick Reed, the golfer who collected more enemies than most on his stormy rise from boyhood prodigy to college bad boy to self-promoting PGA Tour winner to master of the Masters. Reed was kicked off his University of Georgia team, and nearly voted off his Augusta State team by his schoolmates, for offenses that ranged from alcohol-fueled misbehavior to an arrest for underage drinking and constantly talking down to lesser teammates, as well as alleged cheating infractions. His coach at Augusta State, Josh Gregory, suspended him and warned him that his entire career was about to go up in smoke.”

Reed’s parents live in Augusta but they weren’t at the tournament and it is reported that they weren’t at their son’s wedding in 2012. Despite the estrangement, Golf.com reports Reed’s mom Jeannette and dad Bill hosted a Masters party.

“The Reeds lived and died with every shot on the back nine, hooting and hollering at the TV. When the final putt dropped, they clung to each other like survivors in a life raft. Struggling to catch her breath, tears streaming down her cheeks, Jeannette said, “I can’t believe my son is the Masters champion. It’s surreal.” It was a dizzying mix of pride and pain.”

Reed won’t discuss his family situtation. When asked about it after his Masters victory, Reed told reporters, “I’m just out here to play golf and try to win golf tournaments.”

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Saturday at the Masters golf tournament begins with American Patrick Reed holding a two-shot lead over Australia’s Marc Leishman. Reed expertly handled the tricky, shifty winds and slick greens to post the best round of the day Friday – 6 under par 66.

He’s the only golfer in the field to score both rounds in the 60’s. Now that field has been whittled from 87 to 53 following yesterday’s cut. Saturday, nicknamed “Moving Day,” is when the tournament begins in earnest.

Here are 5 things to know as Moving Day begins.

1. Tiger’s Down But Not Out

Pre-tournament publicity for four-time Masters champion Tiger Woods was off the charts – understandably so considering his improbable comeback from severe back problems that threatened to end his career prematurely.

Huge expectations led to Woods being tabbed one of the favorites at Augusta, even though he hadn’t won a tournament since 2013. But his recent second and fifth place finishes were all Tiger fans needed. Alas, the expectations, so far, have proved too huge – his difficult 3 over par 75 in Friday’s second round left him 13 shots behind leader Patrick Reed. “I hit my irons awful today,” Woods said afterwards. “I didn’t control my distance, my shape, my spins. I left myself in bad spots.”

But.

No one is proclaiming the Tiger Woods’ comeback over. Woods reminds eager reporters it was only six months ago he wondered if he’d ever play golf again.

You scan his face now for hints of a grimace after another violent swing, and it’s not there. You look for a limp or a painful bend at the hip with hands on knees – not there. As long as the back fusion surgery he had last year continues to hold him together, Woods insists he will reclaim the game that once left the sports world in awe.

Can he do it the next two days in Augusta? It’s a very tall order even he acknowledged after Friday’s round. He said he has to shoot two rounds in the mid-60’s, while a bunch of really good golfers fall apart. Probably won’t happen. But as he said following his fifth place finish at last month’s Arnold Palmer Invitational in Florida, “If I can play with no pain and I can feel I can make golf swings, I’ll figure it out. I’m starting to piece it together tournament by tournament and each tournament’s gotten a little bit crisper and a little bit better.”

Woods fans are waiting for “crisper” and “better” in Augusta. If it doesn’t happen, at least there’s this – for the first time since April 2015, he made the cut at a major championship and got to play on the weekend.

2. The Leader

Twenty-seven-year-old Patrick Reed has never won a Major Tournament…but there would be some definite symmetry if his first were the Masters, in Augusta, Georgia. Reed went to Augusta State University, where he helped the men’s golf team win the NCAA Division 1 title in back-to-back years: 2010 and 2011.

As Reed’s professional career has evolved, he’s become known as a fiery Ryder Cup competitor. His duel with Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy was a highlight of the 2016 team event

Reed is paired Saturday with Australian Marc Leishman, also trying to win his first major championship. Leishman’s best Masters finish is a tie for 4^th in 2013.

3. Champions Are Lurking

For the most part, the Masters always brings out the best in the best. Not surprisingly, there’s tremendous talent right behind Reed and Leishman. Henrik Stenson, McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson and Justin Thomas all have won at least one major title and all are considered among the best in the men’s game.

A big part of the Masters’ allure is its tradition (“unlike any other”) and so what would an Augusta National leaderboard be without champions from the past? On this Saturday they are well represented with Vijay Singh (2000), Fred Couples (1992) and Bernhard Langer (1985, 1993) making the cut as well.

4. The Weather Will Be Frightful

Already the weather has had an impact on this Masters – while the Augusta National Golf course has appeared as picturesque as ever to TV viewers, the winds on Friday turned tricky and inconsistent. Players talked about being thrown off by the shifting breezes and how they sometimes had to wait to hit their ball until the winds resumed blowing in the directions that were expected.

But the Saturday forecast predicts even worse, plus rain. According to golf.com, tournament officials say showers are “likely in the morning, but by the afternoon the weather will turn worse with occasional heavy downpours and the potential for thunderstorms.”

Bad news for Patrick Reed and all those others near the top of the leaderboard – their reward for working so hard and doing so well Friday, is a later start on Saturday. Later and, now it appears, soggier.

During Friday’s broadcast of the Masters on ESPN, commentator and former player Curtis Strange, said, with maybe just a shade too much hyperbole, “with the weather forecast for the weekend, anybody who makes the cut has a chance to win. No telling what will happen.”

One potential advantage to the rain – the water should soften up the greens and make them less treacherous. Perhaps meaning fewer putts gently tapped rolling across and off the greens; or maybe players will have an easier time spinning shots and having them stick on the green rather than scoot off. Too bad defending champion Sergio Garcia won’t be around to take advantage of that. Garcia missed the cut after his golf balls did anything but stick on his disastrous 15^th hole during the first round.

5. Who wins? 6 is the magic number

As in six shots behind. According to this chart, players need to be within 6 shots of the lead after Friday to win the Masters. And this 2013 assertion plays out over the following years. In 2014, eventual winner Bubba Watson led after two rounds. In 2015, winner Jordan Spieth led after two rounds. In 2016, winner Danny Willett trailed the leader by 4 shots after two rounds. And last year, winner Sergio Garcia was tied for the lead after two rounds.

So? There are six golfers within six shots of Patrick Reed’s halfway lead of 9 under par. They are Leishman, Stenson, McIlroy, Spieth, Johnson, Thomas. One of these seven men will win the 2018 Masters.

Unless of course Curtis Strange’s prediction comes true, and the rain and wind turn the tournament completely upside down.

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