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Melissa Ludtke's Impact on Sports Journalism Continues

The author of 'Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside' sued for access for women reporters at Yankee Stadium in 1978 and won

By Arlene Schulman

When Melissa Ludtke isn't rowing on the Charles River in Boston, she's reserving flights, booking Amtrak seats and toting bags of her books around the country.

Ludtke, 73, arranges her own appearances in bookstores and speaking engagements for her absorbing book "Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside."

She was 26, a reporter for Sports Illustrated in 1977 and the only woman in the country reporting baseball on a full-time basis. A few women covered basketball and hockey for newspapers and magazines with access to locker rooms for interviews. But not baseball.

Two women smiling together. Next Avenue, sports journalism
Suzyn Waldman and Melissa Ludtke  |  Credit: Arlene Schulman

"Personalities sell the sport," said Claire Smith, the first woman to cover a Major League baseball beat full-time when she reported for the Hartford Courant in 1982 before moving to the New York Times as a columnist. "If you can't see the immediate reaction to wins and losses or arguments and you get a sanitized version, and if you're dependent on players once they have decompressed, once the adrenaline rush is gone as they walk out of the locker room, you're not getting the story that male counterparts are getting.

"There's a difference between being there to see Reggie (Jackson) reacting after his three home run game and Reggie and (manager) Billy Martin hugging and being showered with champagne and Melissa being forced to stand outside of the locker room door," Smith noted. "By the time Reggie comes out, he's exhausted. He's already done a million interviews. You're taking the public inside with you and painting a picture of what's behind closed doors. And she was not able to do that and that led to the lawsuit."

She was 26, a reporter for Sports Illustrated in 1977 and the only woman in the country reporting baseball on a full-time basis.

Bowie Kuhn, then Major League Baseball Commissioner, declared locker rooms off limits to women.

"Kuhn always viewed his sport as sort of separate and superior to those. His life was totally lived outside of the understanding that women could be a part of that life and their world," Ludtke said.

She sued for access for accredited women reporters at Yankee Stadium. Her story includes four protagonists: Ludtke, Kuhn, Judge Constance Baker Motley and the 14th Amendment which provides equal protection and due process to all.

Kuhn said he wanted to protect the players "sexual privacy" and that excluding Ludtke and women was in the best interest of the game.

"The ways of the world too often say that the woman was the perpetrator, that somehow she was the one who caused it to happen or in my case, that my motivation was solely so that I could see naked men," Ludtke, a lifelong Red Sox fan, recalled in an interview. "It was an easier thing for people to visualize than a very abstract fight for equal treatment."

"Saturday Night Live," Johnny Carson, sportswriters, cartoonists and sportswriters, including Red Smith, Pulitzer Prize winning sports columnist of the Times, made Ludtke a target of ridicule.

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Melissa Ludtke in the Yankee Stadium dugout  |  Credit: Courtesy Melissa Ludtke

"He (Smith) wrote a column that really set the tone and offered permission because his column was syndicated around the country," Ludtke said. "It opened the floodgates of other columnists and writers following his lead in terms of how it would play out. The case in the court of public opinion was clearly won by baseball and by the men who did not want change to happen. And yet, here was this woman who was going to change that and take away this one place where they wouldn't be dealing with the women's movement or women's rights or changes on the home front. They liked things the way they were."

In the Courtroom

Ludtke, inspired by Shirley Chisholm in her commencement speech at her Wellesley College commencement in 1973, took on the Yankees and Kuhn. Baseball players and sportswriters were divided.

"The myths which suggest that women are too fragile, too emotional to be advanced in our society have been exploded," said Chisholm, the first Black woman in Congress and to run for U.S. President. "Senseless stereotypes, dismissing members on the basis of sex and color to participate fully in the American system have been broken, one by one, especially during the past decade...if I can do it as a Black woman, you can do even more as educated white women."

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Ludtke v. Kuhn was argued in the Southern District Court of New York in 1978. Motley had interned for Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who later became the first Black Supreme Court Justice, on the landmarked Brown v. Board of Education (1954) which declared that segregation based on race in public schools was unconstitutional. She served as lead trial attorney in important civil rights cases, representing Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Freedom Riders. Motley was the first Black woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court when she won James Meredith's case to be the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi in 1962.

"A spin of a wheel ends up with this extraordinary hidden figure of American history as my judge."

"A spin of a wheel ends up with this extraordinary hidden figure of American history as my judge," Ludtke said. "I didn't know at the time that she was the first Black woman ever to be appointed to the federal bench, nor did I know that she was the only woman white or Black to ever sit on the Southern District Court."

Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. (Fritz), who served as outside counsel for Time Inc. (the parent company of Sports Illustrated) argued the case before Motley, noting that Yankee Stadium was built with public funds and leased to the city, which meant that it was required to comply with federal, state and local equal rights laws. His argument was designed to convince Judge Motley to rule based on Constitutional protections tied to the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and due process.

Judge Motley ruled in September 1978 that "the Kuhn policy substantially and directly interferes with the right of plaintiff Ludtke to pursue her profession as a sports reporter."

Telling Her Story

Ludtke later became a correspondent for Time magazine. Before she hit her early thirties, she had won a groundbreaking lawsuit, married, divorced, had an abortion, and was misdiagnosed with a fatal cancer. She adopted her daughter, Maya, from China as a single mother when she was 46.

She wrote two books,  "On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America" and "Touching Home in China: In Search of Missing Girlhoods."

And then it was time to tell her story.

"It wasn't something that people were talking about. I never really spoke about it with people. The difference was that as we got into the last maybe 15 years, it was beginning to percolate in different ways," Ludtke said. "More women in college were going into journalism classes. People teaching sports journalism would often say to me, 'We don't really have any stories to tell them. Would you come in and talk?' That made me realize that there was growing interest by a new generation of young women who had grown up with lives that were really framed by things that I and many others did during the women's movement.

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Melissa and Maya at Fenway Park, 2000  |  Credit: Courtesy Melissa Ludtke

"They knew very, very little, almost nothing, about what had happened in the 70s. It was recognizing that this lawsuit was of interest to a new generation, and that it was now considered history, and people were interested in looking at it through that lens."

Ludtke reviewed court documents and newspaper clippings. "Locker Room Talk" was published in 2024.

The Impact of Victory

Jen McCaffrey, 36, covers baseball for The Athletic. Born 12 years after Ludtke's lawsuit, she studied Ludtke's case in a communications law class at Syracuse University.

"I didn't go into this to be a pioneer and neither did Melissa. I wouldn't have done this if it hadn't been for her."

"We talked about the gender divide, how Melissa fought for her rights and how it subsequently led to women being allowed to do the job we do nowadays. I can't even imagine going through what she went through at 26. I wouldn't have been given the chance to be hired if she hadn't done what she did," said McCaffrey, president of the Boston chapter of the Baseball Writers Association.'

Suzyn Waldman, 78, the first woman full-time color commentator in Major League Baseball, was hired by the Yankees in 1985.

"There are way more of us because of what she did. The impact is monumental," said Waldman, elected to the Radio Hall of Fame in 2022. "They couldn't kick us out. I didn't go into this to be a pioneer and neither did Melissa. I wouldn't have done this if it hadn't been for her."

Claire Smith, 71, the first woman and fourth Black sportswriter to be awarded the Baseball Writers Association of America's Career Excellence Award, noted that "I was able to walk into that (Yankees) clubhouse without any pushback whatsoever from the manager and from the players. By the time I got there, it was a badge of honor that they could look at their clubhouse and say, 'no problems here.'

At the New Rochelle (NY) Public Library, Ludtke reached into her bag for another book, this one for a college journalism student.

When she returns home from her travels, she'll miss Red Sox opening day but will be back on the river and preparing for her daughter's wedding in the fall.

"I'd sum my life up to say that I raised a child who will make a difference in this world," Ludtke said of Maya, 28, who works with education non-profits.

"And I made a difference in this world," Ludtke said, "because my daughter will look at my experiences and the kind of things I fought for, the way that I conducted myself and the risks I took, and that I put myself out there."

Arlene Schulman
Arlene Schulman is a writer, photographer and filmmaker living in Manhattan. She is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed "The Prizefighters: An Intimate Look at Champions and Contenders" and "23rd Precinct: The Job." Visit her at www.arlenesscratchpaper.com She's also on Instagram: @arlenesbodega Read More
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