In the 1970s, the Dodgers supported fairness for female journalists

Former Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke shares a behind-the-scenes look at her fight for gender equality in her new memoir, “Locker Room Talk.” The Dodgers’ support in 1977 sparked a backlash from the MLB commissioner and paved the way for his groundbreaking lawsuit to ensure equal access to the clubhouse for male and female journalists. The following is an excerpt from his book.

During the fifth inning of Game 1 of the 1977 World Series, Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn deputized for his second-in-command to tell me that the press pass giving me access to the team locker rooms was useless. My press pass said I could be there when the male reporters were there, but Kuhn, his assistant told me, had barred me from entering the Yankees and Dodgers locker rooms. It didn’t matter to him that both teams told me I could. A week earlier, the Yankees’ public relations director had given me a clubhouse pass to use for the final two games of the season, and I showed up in that team’s locker room. No one kicked me out and no sports journalist wrote about my presence there. I had also worked in that locker room during the American League Championship Series, and again, no one complained, kicked me out, or wrote that I was where Kuhn had decided I didn’t belong.

(Rutgers University Press)

With the Dodgers in New York for the World Series, I figured I should warn these players before the Series started because I might be working in their locker room. No one told me to do this, but I knew there were no women covering this team. I did this as a courtesy as I didn’t want to shock the players by entering. At Monday’s practice, I had spoken with Dodgers player representative Tommy John, who listened patiently as I told him about my work at the club. The Yankees locker room. He looked at my press card with my name on it and saw that I had permission to be in the teams’ clubs. Then he asked a few questions before telling me he thought I had a right to be there. But my request was new to his teammates, so he wanted to discuss it with them. They would do a team vote, he said, and he would let me know the result before the first game on Tuesday night.

“It wasn’t unanimous, but we follow the majority and a majority said you have a right to be there,” John said when we met at the backstop after batting practice before the first match.

With the Dodgers’ affirmative vote, my prior experience with the Yankees, and a press pass certifying my right to work at both clubs, I had done everything I could to make sure my locker room reporting worked as well that they could. So, hearing the deputy commissioner prohibit me from entering, I wondered what had happened after my meeting with John to prevent me from entering the locker rooms of both teams.

My response came quickly. After Kuhn learned of the Dodgers’ vote, he decided I wouldn’t go inside. Using his dictatorial power, Kuhn barred me from the locker rooms. Then, for good measure, he had his deputy inform me that I would not work in any team’s locker room as long as he was commissioner. At fifty years old, and only a few years in this profession, he was young and, I imagined, happy enough in his job to stay there for a while.

Kuhn’s reasoning came down to anatomy: mine, above my bra line, and baseball players’, below their belt. The fact that my press pass hung on a lanyard around my neck and rested on my breasts made all the difference. Midway through the first game, Kuhn’s media director told me I had to stay out of the locker room. He reminded me that players’ privacy should be protected even if no player had requested this protection. Guided by his own moral compass, Kuhn stopped me because he could, and in doing so, he robbed me of the first World Series reporting opportunity I had had, and an opportunity for which I had worked hard for two seasons. A few weeks earlier, when Sports Illustrated (SI) editor Peter Carry told me I would be part of the magazine’s team covering the biggest sporting event of the year, I returned to my desk to go on air. with “I made the team” echoing in my head.

Tommy John screams and runs in a black and white photo.

I was delighted.

Hearing Kuhn’s decree, my mind returned to my excited anticipation when I had taken the subway from my office in midtown Manhattan to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx that Monday afternoon. As I approached the 161st Street station, I felt a rush of adrenaline as I imagined myself at batting practice talking with players and managers, surrounded by the hundreds of sports journalists who were in New York for the first two games of this World Series. Before the first game, I had been with the other sportswriters at batting practice, but now Kuhn had dashed any hope I had that this series would be a watershed moment for me as a baseball reporter. Not having had the access I needed to report, I was of little use to SI.

It broke my heart, especially because I knew I couldn’t appeal Kuhn’s decision. In baseball, his authority was absolute. Few have challenged a commissioner’s decision. Team owners were careful not to question his judgment, at least publicly, and those in baseball knew better than to encroach on his territory. That’s the way things have been in this game since the owners signed an agreement in 1921 stating that any commissioner had the authority to act, as he saw fit, in “the best interests of baseball.” This clause has also proven to be a commissioner’s most reliable protection in court.

On October 11, 1977, a Tuesday night, Kuhn believed my exclusion from the locker room was in the “best interest” of his game, so he acted as only he could.

Bowie Kuhn stands in front of a row of microphones.

I was graduating from high school in 1969 when baseball owners elected Kuhn as commissioner of Major League Baseball. Then aged 42, he was the youngest commissioner in the history of the game, as well as the tallest at six feet five inches and the heaviest at 240 pounds. He cut an imposing figure, and with his rise he inherited the singular power to run baseball as he saw fit. As I later discovered, his immense power in professional baseball was not enough for him. In Ridgewood, New Jersey, where he raised his family, he oversaw Little League in his suburban town, enforcing those same beliefs about the inappropriate mixing of girls and sports. At a time when New Jersey girls were fighting in court for the right to play Little League ball, the local Ridgewood News and the Bergen Record quoted Kuhn as saying that “girls playing sports would ruin children’s lives.” boys.” Kathleen A. Doyle, who was an avid sports student at Ridgewood High School in the 1970s and knew about my legal case, emailed me to share her memories. She remembers that Kuhn directed his “venom at young girls in our town who wanted to play sports. …There was a lot of pressure from Bowie Kuhn to denigrate girls who played sports. The girl who wanted to compete in sports, Doyle added, “had to fight after hours on the fields. Only boys’ teams received uniforms and trophies.

Kuhn’s beliefs about girls in sports, and me in particular in her game, would be put to a legal test by a Southern District Court judge. He had inflamed fans with incendiary remarks about me as a rebellious girl harassing his unprotected naked men, but my lawyer was preparing to challenge his discriminatory treatment of me in a way that no commissioner had had known in other baseball court cases. I didn’t work for baseball. I only reported on his games. Even though Kuhn had absolute authority within baseball, we were testing in court whether his power extended to me.

When I went to the Southern District Courthouse on Friday afternoon, April 14, 1978, to hear my lawyer plead my case, I knew that many Americans were against me. In a few hours, we would know better if my lawyer had convinced the judge, who did not like baseball and regretted the day my case was assigned to him, to rule in favor of his client who loved the sport.

Source Link