Yes, Melissa Ludtke is excited for baseball. (Opening day was Thursday.) She easily could have soured on the game she fell in love with as a kid, which turned into a baseball reporter job at Sports Illustrated — before a needless conflict interrupted her career.
During the first game of the 1977 World Series, Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned Ludtke from entering the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers locker rooms at Yankee Stadium.
Forget that she had been inside the Yankees’ domain— interviewing players, capturing color — during the waning days of the regular season and the American League Championship Series. Never mind that Dodgers players had agreed to let her in. Kuhn’s word was law.
For him, this was about protecting the sanctity of the game and the players’ “sexual privacy.” But it kept Ludtke from doing her job like anyone else with a notepad, X and Y chromosomes, and a deadline. She, along with Time Inc., SI’s parent company, sued Kuhn for equal access.
Ludtke, then 26, was thrown into a media whirlwind. It started with one writer, she says now. Red Smith of The New York Times was arguably the most popular sports columnist in America, thanks to the reach of the Times’ wire service. In his Jan. 9, 1978, column, “Another View on Equality,” the Pulitzer Prize winner diminished Ludtke’s suit, dubbing her “Sports Illustrated’s Joan of Arc” and joking that the paper’s male basketball reporter, Sam Goldaper, would not sue to enter a women’s locker room.
“He really set in place the narrative theme to which he gave permission to sportswriters, most of whom were men, to sort of follow his lead,” Ludtke said earlier this month from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We know in journalism how narrative frames get set. It’s the rare journalists who can keep themselves from falling into that narrative frame as they begin to develop their own story.”
Ludtke won. Life went on. More women entered sports journalism. Women’s sports grew in popularity. And the internet became the research tool.
Ludkte, 73, finally tells her side of the story in “Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside.” Though it is a memoir, Ludtke “wanted to tell my own story, albeit years later, in the court of law, where I won the case.” In some ways, Ludtke is almost a secondary character. The fight behind what gave women equal access on the sports beat is documented for all to see.
A story that was once considered a joke by male columnists became an inspiration. It only took decades. Ludtke, who writes a weekly Substack, provides counsel to writers and speaks to classes — more since the book’s release in August.
“It’s a gift,” she said.
Ludtke discussed how her case found a second life, her thoughts on the state of sports journalism for women, and the benefit of giving women space in the sports section. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
Pete Croatto: What struck me when reading this book is why you didn’t write it earlier.
Melissa Ludkte: No one was interested in the story.
There were several decades that went by. Women’s sports was kind of crawling along. And sports media was kind of crawling along. And it was only, I think, when you began to have the internet and you began to have the capacity of young people, in particular, going back and discovering things about the past that they were never taught.
College professors — the teachers in high school were calling me on behalf of students who had found my case online — started calling me. That was news to me: that I was still alive but simultaneously had become history. That perked me up to the idea that there was a new generation, very much removed, who didn’t know about what happened with women in the seventies. They weren’t taught it. They didn’t know about the Civil Rights Movement. And yet here they were with an immense curiosity that came across in their questions, their eagerness to learn more.
When she was in eighth grade, my daughter’s class studied incredibly deeply the suffragette movement. I was driving with she and her friends one day. I had just read a story that had me in the company of Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug. The girls were all sitting in the backseat. Looking in the rearview mirror, I said, “Can anyone tell me anything about Gloria Steinem?” They must have been 13, 14, 15. Never had heard the name. But they could tell you all the women who were part of the suffragettes.
I began to understand that I had a valuable story to tell, and I began to see it through the eyes of my daughter’s generation. And, I thought, I owe the telling of it. I felt an obligation at that point, because people were interested. And then more and more women were coming in to both broadcast as well as what had been print in terms of sports media. And you began to see the rise in women’s sports on the collegiate level, and then with the pros. You began to feel that there was something happening that was related again to the 1970s. It was related through Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs. It was related to the passage of Title IX. It was related in some ways, particularly with the sports media side, to my legal action.
The Baseball Hall of Fame reached out to me. The Newseum also wanted to display things. So, I responded to what I was seeing as the interest in this notion of this having moved from something that happened in my lifetime to being a history for people who weren’t born then, who were now old enough to want to know.
Croatto: Why do you think there’s still reluctance from people to have women involved in sports reporting?
Ludtke: I think one fairly simplistic observation would be with the advent of social media and the rise of anonymity. The civilizing effect was that people, men, had to have their name on the column. And if they were a columnist, often their photograph at the top. So that was a basic restraint of some sort; it didn’t feel very restrained to me back then. But compared to what women put up with today on social media, often it’s aimed at them for just having the audacity to be having an opinion about men playing sports as though they somehow don’t have the right or the authority to be making such judgments about men.
Croatto: What are the issues you hear from female journalists regarding their job?
Ludtke: If they’re the only one in their sports department or their newsroom or their platform, they still face similar issues that I do. They just can sometimes feel as though they can be sitting around this table giving story ideas and no one really wants to hear theirs. Or they may feel, less so now a little bit, as though they would like to suggest a story that might be about a women’s game, that might go on the front page. And yet that weight is always seemingly falling on them, and that can get exhausting.
The one big thing I’ve left out is the misogyny they face on social media. They must use social media as part of their jobs, but yet social media can be threaded with all sorts of really demeaning comments. And, sometimes, it really escalates, with threats made to them or people giving out their home address. I will say to some of the younger ones, “You’ve got it tougher than I did.” The other thing I’ll say in the last 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of coverage of this come through, is the sexual harassment that many of them had to put up with.
Occasionally, you’ll have newspapers like The Washington Post that have an incredible history of hiring women and putting them in prominent roles. You had a situation with four women assigned to the four major sports. In San Francisco, I saw a front page in which every story was written by a woman reporter. And they’ve got a great columnist, Ann Killion.
I don’t want to be a complete downer because you see great progress, and you see enormous progress in the broadcast area, really within the last five to eight years. But if you think back a decade, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone other than maybe Doris Burke on basketball. And you’d find my dear, dear friend Suzyn Waldman. But those are exceptions. That’s why I can name them.
Croatto: Are you optimistic the numbers will improve?
Ludtke: I am. I’m reminded now of the time in the seventies where — because of gender discrimination cases that were being filed then by women at places starting at Newsweek with Lynn Povich, and then moving through Time Inc., ending with Betsy Wade at The New York Times — every newspaper realized the legal consequences of potentially not having a woman on their sports pages. Every paper wanted one.
Always, the most difficult thing then was to say, “OK, you’ve got one, but will you have two, three, four?” And, I have to say, that was a lot slower to come. I think what we’re seeing now is the same test at this moment on the broadcast side. You’ve got one in places. You’ve got Melanie Newman at the Baltimore Orioles, and you’ve got Jenny Cavnar with the Athletics. But there’s an incredible pipeline of female talent on the minor league level in the broadcast booths. Where are they going to go? Is that second and third and fourth going to be hired? Would you ever imagine that you might have two women in a broadcast booth together other than at a woman’s sports event?
Croatto: What do you hope men get from your book?
Ludtke: That we’re capable (laughs). That we can do these jobs. And if we can’t do them, then we shouldn’t be there, and we won’t be there. I wasn’t going to last at Sports Illustrated if I couldn’t do the job. But if you can do that, then why would you put barriers in the way to make it more difficult? We act as though there’s just this one pie. And if I take a slice, that means that these slices aren’t going to be there for the men who deserve them; they were waiting at the table for them. Well, just bake more pies.
There ought to be room for people who have the passion, the knowledge to do a job and can show that they can perform at it. If you don’t want to support them, certainly don’t tear them down. Don’t block the opportunities. You will learn something from the next woman that you see on the field. Maybe forming a friendship or a connection is going to teach you something about the game that you didn’t see.
The one feature story that I did for Sports Illustrated, I saw a story develop in front of me that no man had ever written about. And I saw it, I think, because of the way that I’ve been socialized as a woman to think about things sometimes much more relationally than men do. I got captivated by the game within a game that was taking place between the catcher and the umpire. You might learn something, you might open up a new perspective, a new way to see broader stories. Just as I began to see stories that I might not have seen by watching the questions that the men asked and the kinds of stories that resulted from those.
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