Melissa Ludtke, "Locker Room Talk" | Part 1, SportsLit S8E14 fan notes
Melissa Ludtke, "Locker Room Talk" | Part 1, SportsLit S8E14 fan notes
Amid VP Kamala Harris running for President, feminist icon Ludtke places her barrier-busting 1977-78 federal case vs. Major League Baseball in the "realm of equal rights" — where it belongs.
(These are companion notes to a new episode of SportsLit, available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Part Two, covering the bulk of the ’sode, is published simultaneously. And, of course, the whole catalog, now 78 ’sodes of SOLID GOLD, is on sportslit.ca.)
Melissa Ludtke was treated as part of an “invasion” simply for being a woman who wrote about baseball. She is the winning plaintiff in a capital-L landmark equal rights case against Major League Baseball. The commissioner at the time, Bowie Kuhn wore the L.
Her long-awaited account, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle To Get Inside is like a batting order. There’s courtroom drama with legal-world heavy hitters such as Judge Constance Baker Motley and lawyer Fritz Schwarz Jr.; personal trauma; drives to the ballpark with legends such as Reggie Jackson, constructive media criticism, and a memoir of being a young woman in 1970s America.
Ludtke evokes other sports-writing women of that era. Think of book dedicatees Robin Herman, Jane Gross, and Alison Gordon. Ludtke’s particularity casts as a parable for 2024: when Vice-President Kamala Harris could get elected President… and yet sexism just assumes new forms and slippery code words.
“The only time that ‘equal rights’ was used by men in the coverage of this story was when they said if I won my case, maybe they could — hah-hah! — go into the women’s locker room and see Chrissie Evert, who was the reigning tennis champion,” Ludtke says in discussing Locker Room Talk (Rutgers University Press, Aug. 16; UBC Press in Canada) in the newest episode of SportsLit.
“Maybe they could see her undress and that would be ‘equal rights.’
“ … So, nearly 50 years later, one of my reasons for writing the book was to have the chance, for the first time in my life, really, to tell the story through the way that I lived it and the way that I saw it,” she adds. “And that’s a story that exists in a long arc of stories of women who fought for equal rights, and have continued to fight for them afterwards — and unfortunately, in our country right now, women are going to have go back and re-fight some of the fights that women of my generation fought for and won in the 1970s.
“It’s a really fitting story, to place it in the realm of equal rights, rather than one that worries about whether men will be naked when they don’t have to be.”
Beyond her place in American history, Ludtke has been a correspondent for TIME. She is also the author of On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America and Touching Home in China: In Search of Missing Girlhoods.
Anyway, the implications of the case and the sheer social history hopefully justify the 129½-minute run time. Ludtke fought the good fight, and details often feeling alone throughout in 1977 and ’78.
She ain’t alone today. Everybody watches women’s sports. Ludtke related that she “signed my books for more than four hours” and “sold every copy” she brought to the Society for American Baseball Research annual conference in August. Her critical memoir has held the No. 1 spot in at least three Amazon categories.
In the interest of everyone’s self-care, Ludtke and I spoke the week of July 22. So that meant eliding current events and really zeroing in one the book.
Quickly, a Coles Notes 1970s timeline, synthesized from Locker Room Talk.
1972: The United States Congress passes Title IX which eliminates sex-based discrimination at schools or education programs that get federal funding. Rep. Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii) fends off attempts to weaken it. Colleges and high schools then begin giving more, if still paltry, resources to women’s and girls teams.
1973: Billie Jean King thrashes Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes tennis match, creating what Ludtke calls “a cultural opening.”
1974: After freelancing for ABC Sports, Ludtke lands a job at Sports Illustrated with sheer hustle and “no clips.” Hockey Night in Canada engages Helen Hutchinson as its first on-air woman to conduct player interviews. Just three years earlier HNIC passed on a candidate for host because it “(didn’t) hire guys with mustaches.”1
1975: At the ’75 NHL all-star game at the Montréal Forum, the NYT’s Herman receives access to a dressing room. So does Marcelle St-Cyr of CKLW 1570 of Laval, Qué. Herman has a rough go post-game when she enters a team dressing room. Years later, St-Cyr will recall that any awkwardness quickly passed.
Basketball and hockey teams begin slowly granting equal access to women media workers. The first two NFL teams to have equal access policies were the Minnesota Vikings2 and Philadelphia Eagles.3 In MLB, the archconservative Kuhn drafts a men-only policy without consulting ballplayers or media workers.1976: Again, at Montréal, women’s basketball is introduced at the Olympics. The United States team, loaded with legends-to-be such as Pat Summitt (née Head), Lusia Harris, and many more, win the first gold medal.
Canada finishes sixth. A British Columbian, Joanne Sargent, was the tourney’s assist queen, including 14 in one game. Multiple alumna players go on to do work that is honoured by having their names on awards in Canadian unibball. It is also not the last time a British Columbia-bred guard leads the Olympic tourney, female or male, in assists.
Then comes October 1977
Over the 1977 American League baseball season, Ludtke, a 26-year-old reporter at Sports Illustrated, is regularly at Yankee Stadium to learn the craft.
Yankees public relations man Mickey Morabito leaves her clubhouse passes for the final two regular-season games, and games in the Yankees-Kansas City Royals pennant playoff.4 No one has a problem.
The Yankees survive the Royals, advancing to the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Players on both teams are amenable to Ludtke coming into their space.
At Game 1 of the World Series, an intermediary from MLB tells Ludtke that Kuhn “banned me from the World Series locker rooms, but then added that the ban extended past the series, as in forever … (The) bottom line was that Major League Baseball’s locker room policy would be what Kuhn said it would be.”5
Some back-and-forth between MLB and S.I. plays out during the World Series. In the aftermath of Game 6, when Jackson hit those three home runs, Ludtke is denied the tools to do a job where women have to do ‘twice as well as men to be thought half as good.’6
And that was A Problem. Yankee Stadium was a public building, so “state action doctrine” was put into play.
The case was before Judge Motley throughout the 1978 baseball season. In ’79, Gordon became MLB’s first female beat writer by covering the worst team in Toronto Blue Jays history … with a press tag reading “Mr. Alison Gordon.”7
Hopefully, that is enough exposition before the episode. Sign up for Ludtke’s Let’s Row Together newsletter, because it is great stuff.
Intro
1:55 The signal-to-noise for Locker Room Talk’s publication was raised by hearing Ludtke appear on Baseball Bucket List with Anna DiTomaso and SABRCast with Rob Neyer.
3:45 That “as pure an act of patriotism” passage by Sec. Hillary Rodham Clinton was published in The Times on July 23.
5:00 The ABC telecast of “the Reggie Jackson game” is available on MLB Vault.
Jackson hit three consecutive first-pitch home runs to seal the Yankees’ first World Series championship in 15 seasons. And Jackson, going off the lore I learned, turned around a fastball from the Dodgers’ Burt Hooton, a breaking ball from Elias Sosa, and a knuckleball from Charlie Hough. And Kuhn’s power-tripping resulted in Ludtke “standing outside of the clubhouse, crushed against the wall” in the game’s aftermath.8
7:30 This sketch on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and Betty White aired Oct. 5, 1978, 10 days after Judge Motley ruled in favour of Ludtke.
8:00 In mainstream comedy, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004, dir. Adam McKay) and Bill Burr’s animated comedy series F is For Family (2015-21) send up 1970s sexism so well.
The way that Kuhn (1926-2007) acted is a prime example of a bad leader never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
In this case, Ludtke writes, “Kuhn created his ban-the-ladies media policy as his game’s father figure protecting his players from women like me. In deposing Kuhn, (counsel for the plaintiff) Fritz (Schwarz) made sure to get him to confirm that he had developed his separate accommodations policy without seeking or receiving input from even one player.”9
It muddied the waters, and normalized harm to women in sports media, full stop.
As a cishet male, two tipping points in 1989-90 put me forever on the side of women who get flak for doing what someone thinks is a male space or ‘man’s job.’ The mass femicide at École Polytechnique happened 29 days before I became a teenager, and in my favorite Canadian city, Montréal. One could not help but want to help.
In sports media, there was the chain of New England Patriots players abusing Lisa Olson, followed by all the random pylons who piled on. The following spring, S.I. detailed how Olson’s life had become a living hell just for trying to do her job. The article noted Olson had “electric red hair and is instantly recognizable.” Nowhere to hide; that’s more than a ginger problem.
12:25 Here is the full context for the wisdom from Hamilton city councillor Cameron Kroetsch:
Good leaders not only accept but embrace meaningful change. They lead us through the tough parts, even when the conversations are difficult and public support isn’t unanimous. They ignore those who fight to entrench the status quo, just for the sake of it, and they move policy and legislation toward justice.
Interview
14:30 The female agency in the seventh-inning-stretch ritual was unbeknown to me till 2022. The Intercounty Baseball League’s Hamilton Cardinals have used a version that mentions, “Nellie Kelly loved baseball games.”
In 2018, Glenda Carroll, a San Francisco Giants employee, went into depth about how songwriter Jack Norwood got Idea Face for the song while taking a subway that passed the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants. And that’s why we fund public transit!
19:25 The ripples from Sec. Clinton’s 1969 commencement address at Wellesley College was covered on National Public Radio in 2016. It was the first time that the institution had a student speaker at commencement.
Sec. Clinton’s book is Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty (Simon and Schuster, Sept. 17) is out this week.
30:00 Regarding Phyllis Schafly, talk about someone who pulled up the rope ladder. Wedge issues are losing issues.
32:20 The commissionership passed from Kuhn to Peter Ueberroth toward the end of the 1984 baseball season.
Commissioner Ueberroth “acted quickly and ordered all locker rooms in baseball to be open to women”10 when San Diego Padres manager Dick Williams barred the Hartford Courant’s Claire Smith from the locker room after the league-playoff opener at Chicago’s Wrigley Field.
In 2017, Smith became the first African-American woman to win the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award for writers. Melissa Ludtke was there when she was honored.
Score-board!!
Even post-Smith, despotic Toronto Maple Leafs chairman Harold Ballard tried barring all media from the team’s dressing room to keep out women. In the name of Martin Kruze, Ballard and his flunkies should have paid more attention to who was running amuck at Maple Leaf Gardens.11
Part Two was published simultaneously.
Previously on SportsLit
Ludtke’s appearance is part of an arc for this little show. She writes a lot about climate change, and of course, Dr. Madeleine Orr appeared in June to discuss Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport.
Dr. Tiffany Brown and Katie Steele, lead authors of The Price She Pays: Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women’s Sports— from the Schoolyard to the Stadium, also gave SportsLit a lot of time and thoughtfulness during an episode in July.
Please visit sportslit.ca for the back catalog of episodes dating to 2017. The interviewer(s) read(s) every title before speaking to the guest(s).
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
June 17-Sept. 16, 2024
Hamilton, Ont., on traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas; Bath-Odessa-Amherstview-Storms Corners, Ont.
The guy with the mustache was Alex Trebek. Hockey Night installed Dave Hodge and his “football helmet of hair,” as Roy MacGregor channeled it through Felix Batterinski in his cultish hockey novel The Last Season.
Of note to this Minnesota Vikings fan. The Vikings created their policy while the Minneapolis-set The Mary Tyler Moore Show was at the peak of its cultural influence. Vikings coach Bud Grant (1927-2023) was the grandfather of a journalist, Natalie Grant. One of the Vikings beat writers of that era was Jim Klobuchar — the father of U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). And, of course, VP Kamala Harris’s running mate is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Vikings fan.
And, yeah, may they fare better at the polls than the Vikings ever will in Super Bowls.
Melissa Ludtke, Locker Room Talk, pg. 126.
AKA the American League Championship Series, or ALCS. It was a best-of-5 format, and the Yankees and Royals went the distance. The best-of-7 format was added in 1985, the first time the Toronto Blue Jays played in the postseason. Please stick that outcome where Jim Sundberg does not shine.
Ludtke, Locker Room Talk, pg. 126.
That famous line comes from Charlotte Whitton (1896-1975), the first woman to be a big-city mayor in Canada. Two of Canada’s foremost female big-city mayors, Whitton and Hazel McCallion (1921-2023) of Mississauga played varsity hockey at Queen’s University in wartime eras. Hello, someone else’s thesis topic.
The third-year Blue Jays went 53-109 in 1979, 50½ games behind the division-winning Baltimore Orioles. Wanna remember some guys? The ’79 Toronto pitching staff included a 21-year-old converted outfielder Dave Stieb.
Shortstop Alfredo Griffin co-won the American League Rookie of the Year Award; he was a utility infielder on the ’92-93 World Series-winning teams. First baseman John Mayberry is the only player in MLB history to be the first 30-home run hitter for two franchises. Designated hitter Rico Carty was washed by ’79, but he had once on-boarded .454 in a season with Atlanta. That is the highest single-season OBP by any righty batter in the 36 seasons between 1950 Eddie Stanky (.460) and 1987 Jack Clark (.459).
Ludtke, Locker Room Talk, pg. 204. She spoke those words originally during a Today Show interview with Jane Pauley on Jan. 4, 1978. In the interview, I forgot I turned one year old that day, perhaps since I was so young at that time.
Ibid., pg. 122.
Ed Sherman, “Shut out of the locker room with a deadline looming, Claire Smith had a job to do,” Poynter, July 27, 2017.
Tom Fennell, “Maple Leaf Gardens Sex Scandal,” Maclean’s, March 10, 1997.