“To do my job, I had to be there too.”

Guest post: Melissa Ludtke on the pain and struggle to get into the club(house).

In 1977, Melissa Ludtke was a 26-year-old sportswriter for Sports Illustrated. Bowie Kuhn was the utterly disastrous commissioner of baseball. Obviously, something astonishingly stupid and wrong was going to happen.

And it did happen during the World Series. Ludtke just wanted to do her job, and doing her job then—and now, but even more so then—required going into the clubhouse after games to interview everybody. Melissa wasn’t looking to break any barriers. She wasn’t trying to change the game. She just wanted to get an interview with Reggie Jackson or Steve Garvey or whoever else.

She already had an understanding with the Yankees, so she approached the Dodgers to make sure that she could get in. Tommy Lasorda said it was OK with him, but he said that she’d better clear it with the team’s player rep, Tommy John. Then Tommy John went to his teammates, and while they were not all happy about it, they generally agreed that, hey, whatever, she needed access. It all seemed clear enough.

And then, as you’ll read, Bowie Kuhn stepped in.

It’s truly astonishing how often Bowie Kuhn was on the wrong side of history. But you do have to say this about him: He was never shy about being on the wrong side of history; he was always arrogantly on the wrong side of history.

This is your periodic reminder that Bowie Kuhn is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Anyway, I’ll let Melissa take over from here, and tell you a little bit about her fight for equality and the toll it has taken on her life. The book is Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, and if you order it from that link at Rutgers University Press and type in RUSA30 at checkout, you’ll get 30 percent off!

I didn’t set out to challenge Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in the late 1970s, when I was the rare woman covering baseball. Still, I ended up as the named plaintiff in the groundbreaking 1978 court case, Ludtke v. Kuhn, which changed the course of sports history by giving women sportswriters the equal access we needed to interview the ballplayers, manager and coaches in the locker room. That was where male reporters had talked with baseball players for decades.

To do my job, I had to be there too.

In Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, I tell what it was like to be a 26-year-old single woman who was mocked and parodied in print and on TV for taking on what the men claimed was my “silly” fight. Back then, the men held all the microphones on the airwaves and typed all the stories about the games men played. So, their views of me prevailed. It didn’t take long for me to know I’d lost my case in the court of public opinion, but within the year, I won in a court of law, and that made all the difference.

In Locker Room Talk, I bring readers into the New York Southern District courtroom for my case’s hearing, as they follow the vigorous legal argument that ended with a win for me. Then, they find out what happened to me in the wake of that court decision.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of stories have been written and broadcast about me and my case. None of them has—or could—portray what it was like being the young woman in the crosshairs of public ridicule for wanting to do her job. The emotional toll that this case took on me was intense, painful and long-lasting. The lessons from this experience are echoed in what I see happen when women continue to push back against unfair treatment in male-dominated institutions.

During Game 1 of the 1977 World Series, which I was sent to cover for Sports Illustrated, Kuhn banned me from going into team clubhouses. His edict, I was told, would last long past the World Series. As in forever, or at least as long as Kuhn ran Major League Baseball. He was then relatively young and not long into his tenure, so forever seemed like quite a while.

The commissioner was steadfast in his intent to separate me from the male writers; he claimed that baseball teams provided “separate accommodations” for women writers, implying he had a place where I could wait while male runners brought players to speak with me. Those “accommodations” were a figment of his imagination, but the sporting press mostly went along with this fantasy. Even if such places existed—and make no mistake, no PR person with any team ever suggested I wait in such a place to interview players—Kuhn’s separate-but-equal approach demanded a challenge. His approach was all wrong—and illegal—as our case’s judge, Constance Baker Motley, told Kuhn in her ruling. She reminded him of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education in which the justices agreed that keeping people separate, based on difference, whether racial or gender, would never be equal.

In reporting baseball as a woman, I had no roadmap to follow, no mentors to turn to, no one to talk with who’d understand what I was encountering. So, I had to figure things out on my own. At first, naturally, I did what I saw the men around me doing. I didn’t want to stand out any more than I did. As the only woman working in a sea of men, I was deferential to them, acting more like a “Mother, May I” girl than a rebellious woman plotting to charge through closed doors.

I found that my behind-the-scenes, gradualist approach worked well with the Yankees, the team I was around most often. Midway through the 1977 season, Mickey Morabito, the team’s PR person, started to expand my interview access, first by arranging to meet me at a clubhouse’s side door and escort me into Manager Billy Martin’s office after each home game. For the season’s last two games, he left me a clubhouse pass granting full clubhouse access before and after the games.

During the American League Championship, I reported in the Yankees’ locker room. No one tried to kick me out. No sportswriter wrote about me being there, even though a few players vocalized distaste for my presence among them. But I knew this was their place, not mine, so I absorbed what they said and went on doing my job.

I finished that assignment feeling like my take-it-slow strategy was working.

By the time the World Series began, I felt I’d earned the respect of the New York Yankees press corps and the team’s media folks. But with the Los Angeles Dodgers at Yankee Stadium for the Series, I thought I should let that team know that my World Series credential gave me access to their clubhouse. I knew they’d never had a woman covering their team, so out of courtesy, I told their player representative, Tommy John, that I might be reporting in their clubhouse. John called a team meeting to discuss this, and when the ballplayers took a vote, a majority of them agreed that I had the right to work there.

With the Yankees on board, and the Dodgers signaling okay, I felt I’d done all I could to prepare for the World Series. So, I took my assigned seat in the grandstand’s auxiliary press box and sat there until the fifth inning, which was when Kuhn’s media person summoned me to the main press box. There, despite the two teams agreeing on my access to their locker rooms—and my press credential declaring that I could work there—Bob Wirz, Kuhn’s media person, informed me that “permission had never been granted.” Only Kuhn could grant me such permission, Wirz told me… and Kuhn never would.

During the World Series, Sports Illustrated’s baseball editor and the magazine’s lawyer met with Commissioner Kuhn and his attorney to talk about getting me access to simply do my job. By late November, it was clear there would be no meeting of the minds; baseball was not going to amend its media policy so women sportswriters would be treated the same as our male peers.

On December 29^th, Time Inc., the owner of Sports Illustrated, filed its complaint of gender discrimination with the Southern District Court in Lower Manhattan. The court took the case, and assigned Judge Motley to it. The case became known as Ludtke v. Kuhn.

Locker Room Talk tells the story of what happened in the courtroom, in press boxes, on baseball fields and in dugouts, as well as in my personal life, as I became fodder for men’s stories and commentaries about why I didn’t belong in the job I had. Readers also discover why, nearly 50 years later, it matters that I took on this fight for equal rights and paid a high emotional price in doing so.

The national book tour for Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside is here. And, as mentioned, if you order the book on Rutgers University Press website, you will receive a 30% discounted price and free shipping. Use this code, RUSA30, to get the discount.