E108: Locker Room Talk

Rebecca Snyder sits down with Melissa Ludtke, the newly published author of "Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside." Melissa shares her groundbreaking journey as a sports journalist who fought for equal access to Major League Baseball locker rooms in the landmark Ludtke v. Kuhn case. Learn how her fight for equality paved the way for women in sports reporting today. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about perseverance and justice.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Case That Changed Sports Journalism
• 8:45 A Woman in the Press Box: Breaking Into Baseball Reporting
• 29:40 A Fight for Equal Access
• 39:30 The Courtroom Battle
• 57:30 The Future of Women in Sports Media

Transcript

0:01

Welcome, everyone. I am delighted to have Melissa Lutke with us in the studio today. She is the newly published author of Locker Room Talk, which you can see if you're watching this, you can see in the background with really, that's a vintage photo right there, Melissa. So welcome to the program and tell us a little bit about that picture and what was going on at that time. know, it's vintage is a good word for it. I buy vintage clothes now, so I guess I might as well be vintage. And I am. It's almost 50 years from when the lawsuit that my book is about that was a federal court case called Ludky v. Kuhn, Kuhn standing for the commissioner of baseball at the time, a man named Bowie Kuhn. That picture is one of the four photographs that the associated came to my office to take because after my complaint was filed with the Southern District Court of Manhattan and the court decided that it would hear the case and assigned it to one of its judges. And in April, 1978 was the hearing that I focus on in this book. The Associated Press was sending out stories on this. People were asking for photographs. to go with columns that they were writing. So the Associated Press came to my office and the photographs that are behind my head in that one are the ones that were on my wall. You know, at the time it's kind of interesting to look back at them because one of them is Billie Jean King who appears over my shoulder. So it was just people and things that I wanted to have on my wall. back in January of 1978. So I was 26 years old. You can tell it's a vintage. I guess in part, maybe my sweater shirt that I have on, but most of all by the telephone that actually has a cord, you know, attaching it. And what people can't see is that just to my right side was the typewriter, you know, that I wrote on. So, And that is in one of the other of the four associated press shots that were taken. One was in color, three are black and white, and people still use these today. Well, and I think, you we laugh and say, you know, that's so vintage. But 1978 was not that long ago. Many of us can remember 1978. So we're not talking the deep past. let's kind of, for our listeners, let's summarize. You were a sports reporter that was barred from access to Major League Baseball locker rooms. Let's jump in our time machine and you filed suit to be able to enter those locker rooms and prevailed. And just like Billie Jean King was the angel on your shoulder there, you've been the angel on the shoulder of many women coming into sports reporting. But let's go in the way back machine and talk about what life was like before you took that stand and why you were doing it. No, no, happy to do it. But Rebecca, gets more interesting in some ways because though my case was always characterized by the male writers who wrote about it as my interest in getting into the clubhouses and their characterization of it went further. They somewhat described me as a very needy young woman who wanted to go to court so I could see naked athletes in the clubhouse. or in the locker room. Actually, my lawsuit did not ask for access to the clubhouse or the locker room. We couldn't, there was no court, no judge in this country that could tell Major League Baseball or the Yankees, both privately owned businesses, what they had to do in terms of their policies, which were internal policies. Mmm. Their media policy was that interviews did take place in clubhouses. That was their media policy. All that we could do by going to court was to ask for the court to order baseball to make their policies gender equal. So it was up to baseball to decide if the court ruled that way. what their media policy would be. In other words, they could have decided that they would take all the interviews out of the clubhouse. And I would never have gone into the clubhouse and they would have quote unquote solved their problem that way. The challenge for them with that is that the male writers would never have stood for it. Right, because that's where you get the great stories, get the banter, get all the color is there in the locker room. Exactly. And that's why we needed to be there as well in order to do the story. But it's a nuance to what you said, but it's somewhat of an important one because this was a legal case in the federal court and there was a limitation on what the court could do and what they couldn't do. So when we went into it, it wasn't really with the demand that they tell me I can go into the clubhouse. It was very importantly an equal rights case, an equal access case, not a particular case saying a woman can go into a clubhouse. That wasn't what they were determining. They were determining if as a woman doing this job, I should have equal access to have the same opportunities that the men did. And in fact, that's what the order is. Yeah, so it's a bit of a difference. But the characterization of my case, if you were to ask anyone who was alive at that time, and there was an awful lot of coverage about it, you know, both in terms of daily newspapers, but in Saturday Night Live did a skit about it. The Tonight Show did a skit about it. Charlie Schultz had it in his Peanuts cartoon. So it kind of jumped the boundary between just being a case about baseball into really a cultural issue. that was out there in the world at the same time that the end point of our debate about the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment was happening. And Phyllis Schlafly was making the very what proved to be an exceedingly effective argument that sort of stopped the ratification process in its, you know, right there short of its goal when she made the argument. based on the ERA that it would mean that men and women would be in the same bathrooms. That is not such a far stretch from how people in the public viewed my case. that's why... Yeah. Exactly. We're talking about it now with transgender. So this is, you know, a case that has relevance in sort of... know, connections to arguments today. But what I try to do in my book is also broaden its context even back then to understand the kind of where it fit in what was really a decade of enormous barrier breaking for women through the courts primarily. And my case was just one of many. You know, you go back to 1973. You know, before that, women had to get permission of their husbands or their father to get a credit card. You know, and so we're not so far away from those court cases. So it was really part of a larger, you know, kind of movement of that time. Absolutely. Well, and I think all of these actually, I'm wondering when you went into news reporting and sports reporting, kind of, what drew you and what was life like on the regular beat and what were you covering and how did, what stories did you feel like you missed out on or how were you able to transcend limitations? Well, I was drawn to sports in a very odd way. had gone to a women's college, had gone to Wellesley College. I'd made sure Morrow in the house over here, so yay, women's colleges. And I majored in art history, know, sort of the art type, all, you know, the Mona Lisa story at the film about Mona Lisa and art history majors, you know, was sort of set at Wellesley College. So I was kind of coming out into the world with that typically, I guess, a degree of a liberal arts college, particularly women's colleges at that time. I had never worked at a school newspaper, either in high school or college. There was nothing that would have said to you then that I would be moving toward journalism. It was really my love of sports, my passion for sports, my knowledge about sports, because, you know, as one broadcaster who helped me out enormously, Frank Gifford, once said to me, for a girl, you know a lot about sports. And I did. So that really became with his assistance a plan B, a fallback plan for a young woman who had graduated with a degree in art history, loved the study of it, but did not see myself working in that arena and did not feel I wanted to go to graduate school to further my studies in it. And so with Frank's help, I did move to New York. I ended up getting a secretarial job. at Harper's Bazaar to kind of pay the rent and keep me in New York. But really, my goal at that point was to meet as many people as I could in the sports media industry. And eventually, I found myself introduced to the person who interviewed people for entry level jobs at Sports Illustrated. And I got rejected the first time and completely understandably, I had not anything on my resume that would give a hint. that I had any experience in anything resembling sports media. And yet that job at the entry level for that magazine, the world's largest sports magazine at the time, was filled with people coming out of colleges, major colleges, who'd been sports editors of their newspapers, had clip files a couple inches thick. So I was up against the best of the best in the country. it turns out that after a summer of doing go for work with ABC sports, again, helped by Frank Gifford, who was a broadcaster there of introducing me to the idea of going out on sites and working with producers and directors and giving me sort of the access to doing that. I wrote a series of postcards from all the sites I went to and kept in touch with the man who hires. And it wasn't three months later that I got another call, did another interview and was hired. So that's a very compressed story of kind of how I make that move towards sports media. And because I had come over from doing this, you know, $25 a day gopher work with ABC Sports, I was immediately assigned after I was trained as a reporter. I was assigned to their TV radio beat. did a column. They actually thought I knew something about TV radio. I knew something, but not a lot. So that was where they assigned me. I was actually a little disappointed not to get a sport. mean, was like, we're going to assign you over here to this weekly column. Really, I mean, in the back of my head, I loved baseball. Love, love, love, love, love baseball. I grew up knowing it from my mother. My mother was someone who grew up with her father going to Fenway Park with him, following the team when they were on the road, keeping scorecards, clipping stories about them. She passed that love on to me. And I loved baseball. So from the moment I got to SI, I was always looking for ways. not to just tell people I love baseball, but to demonstrate that I was willing to put in whatever the grunt work was to show that interest. So even while I was on the TV radio beat, I volunteered, raised my hand and said I would do the kind of daily work of taking all of the information from all the box scores, putting them on these spreadsheets that I would have to make with a ruler. This is long before Excel. And that took several hours a day and there was nothing in it. My paycheck wasn't increasing, but it was demonstrating how much I loved it. And so when the second of the two baseball reporters they had on staff left, I was assigned as a member of the baseball beat. And that's how I was there. And no, they weren't sending me up there. I mean, my job was as a researcher reporter and in the timing hierarchical system of the way that all their magazines work, a reporter researcher was really a glorified fact check. So it wasn't a public facing role at all. was no like, Melissa's out reporting. You can see behind me, if anyone's looking at this, I have two little rectangular cards up there next to a postcard about baseball. Those are up there because that is what I was given by both the leagues because I was officially a baseball reporter, researcher for SI. That gave me access to any stadium, any game, any time with press privileges. And so being a woman who had graduated, you know, in the early 70s, the signals for women there were by the earlier women's rights movement people, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, was we have given you an open field. You take the ball and you run with it. And so I came in with this mentality that if you give me an opportunity, I'm going to take that opportunity and and advance myself and learn and do, cetera. Now, do you feel like that, going to a women's college where it's only women in leadership positions, women are doing everything, how do you feel like that informed your sort of tenacity and sort of go-get-em aspect on this? to get informed in it, think it formed it. Let's take the in off. It formed a sense of a person who felt she had the capacity for leadership, she had the capacity to do what needed to be done. You know, that I just felt like I had in me the resources and if I didn't, I could find them. And so I think that as I look back on it, I might not have known that at the time, I think there's a lot to that. So anyway, with those passes, I would put in my day at work from maybe 9, 9.30 to maybe 4.35, 5.30, depending on what I had to do at work, with maybe doing library research for a writer or fact checking a story. And then I would, every night, go either out to Queens to Shea Stadium or up to the Bronx, depending which team was in town. Mmm. my days were 18 hour days. I didn't get paid anything for being at either of these stadiums. But the dividend for me was extraordinary because it was a learning ground for me. It was a training ground. And even though I was the only woman most of the time, both on the field at batting practice, in the press box, you know, in the dining room before the game, all places that I learned later in history, women had been kept out of. You know, They never been able to go on the field for batting practice. They'd been kept out of the press box. They'd been told they couldn't meet with the male writers before the games. So what it was, was a history of trying to exclude women that had nothing to do with nudity or nakedness. That became the fig leaf. that the commissioner put onto my case for public consumption. But the history within the game, yeah. So I wanted to ask how much of, so it sounds like you went everywhere, you had your press pass, and it almost feels like you were inexperienced enough in the ways of reporting on professional sports to not even recognize that there were these barriers because you're just going in, you're doing that. And I do feel like sometimes you had It feels like you had so much knowledge that at some point that kind of breaks that barrier. But I kind of wanted to understand, I do want to understand from you going into those spaces, how were you received? Was everyone sort of like quietly surprised and then went about their business? you, were you challenged? How did, how did it feel on the, on the inside? Well, I mean, they were certainly shocked to see me. Maybe not shocked the first time, but I think the shock grew as they realized I wasn't going away. Because in the history of the game, as I later learned, know, women didn't stick around. Maybe they came and did a feature story, but it was made so difficult for them because they didn't have even access to the players in these places that weren't even about. you know, a player's privacy, which was, as I say, the fig leaf the commissioner put on. But if you want to go do a story and you're a woman named Diane Shaw in 1972 and you call to get a press pass to come up to Fenway Park in September, as she did, to do a feature story for a magazine and she knows the game. She's she's done sports reporting and other things. And she's basically told by the curmudgeonly older PR person, you know, sort of, yeah, we'll see you. You won't be on the field with the players. You will not have a seat in the press box, et cetera. And they will give you a seat in the grandstand. And she gets her male editor and male lawyer for the magazine to call and arrange so that she can be on the field, that she can be in the press box. What they hadn't understood is that she wasn't going to be able to eat her meal with the other sports writers. I mean, they just didn't think that that was going to be the case. she gets up in 1972, she climbs the steps to go up toward the press box and towards the dining room that's on the roof. And she gets there and they said, no, no, no, you're not going in the dining room. We have a little table over here for you. and we'll bring your food out here and you'll eat here sort of by yourself. And we have a little sign on it that says ladies pavilion, you know, I mean, so this is an early seventies. They're still treating people that way. By the time I get there in 75, 76, these particular barriers that had been in place earlier in the seventies are by now lifted. I can go in the press box. I can go on the field. I can eat in the dining room. I didn't realize that women had been excluded before because I just, there was no roadmap to this history. It only came later that we learned this as we look back. And so the only place that I am, it's clear to me that I cannot go into is the clubhouse. And so then you ask, well, how did that affect the work I was doing? It didn't affect it at all until I really began to get an understanding that I had a level of confidence about myself that I could actually report this game. I would say the first good three or four months were really for me just an observational learning of how the men did this. I just watched them. I hung out on the periphery of sort of the scrums around ballplayers, listened to how they interviewed them. When the manager came out to put up the lineup, I kind of watched through, you know, sort of etiquette class. How do they approach the manager? How does the repartee go? So I was really learning and taking notes, but I was preparing for a different experience because I knew that being a woman made it imperative that whatever question I came up with to ask a ballplayer or a manager to lead off my discussion or conversation with him, had to be one in which I somehow demonstrated a knowledge of the game in that question, because otherwise I wouldn't be taken seriously. So it was, exactly. So I not only, kind of learned the dance that the men were doing and I watched it carefully what players didn't want to be talked to at batting practice, because they were waiting for the players after batting practice, of course, went into the clubhouse. and a parade of the male reporters went in with them where they had 50 minutes to be with the players. So there were some players that just didn't want to talk when they were at the batting cage. So you learn those things and I watched. Yeah. it strikes me though that like that invisibility that you experienced on the field in some ways is such a blessing. And, you know, I think because you were able to get sort of that masterclass, you were able to observe and figure out, whereas if you had been a young male reporter, yes, you would have had access, but you still wouldn't have known what you were doing. And so you would have been kind of thrust right in there. Did you see that? In retrospect, is a blessing or am I just rainbows and kittening here? I don't think so. Only because at that time baseball was a beat on any newspaper and most of it was newspapers then. Could be maybe some radio reporters. But no man ended up going up to do baseball coverage if he wasn't a seasoned reporter. A seasoned. was because baseball was considered the national pastime. It was the beat that if you started out on newspapers, it's what you built up, aspired to become. That's why you saw very few, no other women there, because women hadn't been even hired by newspapers long enough to possibly have gotten up to where they would be assigned to baseball. they were assigned to the NBA and the NHL because if a woman arrived and a lot of women were hired, one at each Metro newspaper in order to avoid a lawsuit against them for gender discrimination, that one woman would never be assigned to baseball because no baseball writer would put up with it. No editor would ever do that in a newsroom. because the storm around that would be enormous. So they assigned these women to the NBA and the NHL. Consequently, the NHL and the NBA had gone along without having to be taken to court in 1975, each of them providing equal access for all reporters to their clubhouses. That was because they were the leagues that needed the coverage to get fans in the seats. And because women were assigned to them first, they were there. Baseball had a superiority complex and refused to kind of go along with that. And in fact, Kuhn in 1975, when he saw what was happening in those other two leagues, sort of secretly came up with a policy that basically said no woman will ever go in a baseball clubhouse and kind of put it in his drawer until he needed it. with me in 1977 and pulled it out and said, we have a policy that says, you know, no. So, yeah. I wanted to ask, know, Sports Illustrated hired you as the researcher and, you know, but did they have an anticipation or a thought that you would one day become a reporter or did they just, you had a press pass because of the work that you were doing in researching and you just kind of expanded your role? as you saw fit without really the knowledge of sports illustrated. was their thought on these things? took the passes and ran. mean, people before me might have had them, but they didn't necessarily arrive with the same attitude I did to saying, I have this opportunity, I'm going to go with it. There had always been tons of women at Sports Illustrated who were fact checking the stories of men, but very few of them by the time I got there had really ever sort of conceptualized themselves as moving out of that role of fact checker and going out to the ball game, bawling out, wanting to do that reporting, wanting to move ahead, wanting to try writing your own stories. You know, I came in without ever having written a story and it was a blessing to end up in some ways on the TV radio column because the man who was writing it was just fabulous. And I would come to him after a while with ideas. you know, meaning that there were ideas for him to do in the column, I mean, just generating them. And he'd say, why don't you write that? And I was like stunned. And I said, well, okay, I will go out and report it and try to write it. Now, not everything I tried was successful, but you you try, you learn, you find a mentor. And in that case, I found a one woman who had started as the secretary at SI and she by then was in a position as a senior editor and she was, she couldn't have been happier to be a mentor to me. And so I just began the hard, difficult struggle of moving from someone who only used passive verbs into trying to, you know, be a sports writer. I was the daughter of two academics. I'd only written two term, know, term papers. And it was a very tough, it was a very tough, tough difference, you know, to be able to try to write in a way that was interesting, compelling, kind of fun as a sports writer. But over time you get better and better and better and better. And, you know, by 1979, was it 1979? I think it was, I had the feature story in the baseball issue for our spring baseball, you know, which issue, which was fat. And I had the prime territory in the back of it because I'd come up with an original idea. I'd spent the whole time reporting it. And I ended up writing it over the winter. And it ended up in the baseball issue. was 78. It was 1978. The story was on the stands when my lawsuit was being waged in court. Well, and so let's get to that sort of you're actively reporting and you had the support of the senior editor who was a woman at Sports Illustrated. You were working with another male reporter that seemed to be a good advocate for you, like a sponsor in some ways. And were you fully into reporting regularly? Had you made that jump by the time you and sort of what What was the turning point to make you decide, I'm gonna file suit on this. This is something that needs to change. Okay. made that decision and then asked me if I would put my name on as the lead plaintiff. You know, it was pretty obvious that they wanted me to be the lead plaintiff. If it was an action taken against me, it would have been rather odd for me to say no. But it wasn't my decision. I couldn't possibly make that decision for them. And I didn't have anything close to the resources to make the decision for myself. So that came about only after many negotiations that didn't involve me, but involved the senior editor in charge of baseball, plus Sports Illustrated's attorney meeting with Commissioner Kuhn and his attorney and going through various attempts to find a solution out of court. No one wanted to go to court. Mm-hmm. And it was only when it became very, very clear to them. Again, I wasn't in the room, but it was said to me that we're at a point, we're at loggerheads. You know, the baseball commissioner believes that by providing so-called separate accommodations for women, that that will be equal for them. And we do not believe that that is the case. We do not believe that separate can be equal. We believe, yeah. harkening back to the civil rights, we're right there. marketing back to Brown versus Board of Education 1954. There's no question about it. The commissioner told people in interviews he gave, he was very clear. He said, we provide separate accommodations for women in which he actually said in his deposition to my attorney that these women should think that this is just the best thing that ever happened because after all, when that player comes out to their separate accommodations and is with them, that's a private interview that they're going to get. Well, if they out, if they come out. So this had sort of a pilot run during the 1977 World Series because by game six, remember I had been thrown out or the commissioner had told me I was banned from club houses. in game one. By game six, after negotiations had happened, they actually tried this version that the commissioner did by giving me a male escort, all my own. And the deal was I would meet him at the winning clubhouse door and he would go in and out at my, you know, desire. I would say I would like to talk with so and so. He would go in and supposedly fetch this person. Well, what was kind of interesting is that when I met him at the clubhouse door, there was no separate accommodation for me. I was pushed up against a concrete wall by all of the Yankee fans who had come in the tunnel, even if that male escort of mine, and remember I was only one woman with one specific male escort. So if there had been six women, what would they have done? Had six different men running in and out? I don't think so, but anyway. He was unsuccessful in bringing out to me anyone who had actually played in the game. Well, because he would have been eaten alive by all the fans out there too. You're like squished in with the fans. but you know, there were probably a hundred male reporters in the clubhouse wanting to talk to these people. So I told him that I wanted to talk with Reggie Jackson, who wouldn't? He had just had three home runs to win the game, Mr. October. And of course he wasn't going to get Reggie to be able to come out there. Reggie finally came out an hour and 45 minutes later. And he said to me, Melissa, I've done all the talking I can tonight. I'm going downtown. And was it. But, you know, so it was it was shown that night that this this was a preposterous notion that this quote unquote separate accommodation could be equal. He made it seem as though there was a separate accommodation, which was some other kind of room or location where these people would be brought. There was never such thing in the two years that I was around baseball prior to this 76 season, all through 77. Not one public relations person ever said to me in the press box, would you like us to take you to our separate accommodation after the game and have us bring you players? This was completely. always been specious. complete greenwashing. We didn't have that term then, but that's what it was. And it was for public consumption. But even if it had existed, separate could not be equal. So we were on our way to court. And when Time Incorporated asked if I would put my name on his plaintiff, I of course said yes. And I did it because I wanted to do my job. I wanted to... learn how to do it. wanted to keep doing the reporting and the writing that I had been doing. I just wanted the access so I could do my job. I was very naive in terms of understanding how my request for access to do my job would be portrayed in the telling of what I was doing. I mean, it was just in the late 70s, just far cry from the internet that we have today, but you still were out in front, still a lightning rod for controversy. What is that? I'm interested to know what it's like when you are the lead plaintiff in a suit like that, and you're still trying to do your job at the place that is diametrically opposed to you doing the job in that way. What was that like? You know, I don't remember it as being all that difficult. You know, it wasn't as though I went up to the stadium that next season, the 78 season, while the hearing was happening. And then while we were waiting for the decision to come down, which didn't come down to September. So I had the whole season where I was outside the clubhouse, but yet arguing against, you know, this policy of baseball. I just went about doing my job the best I could. You know, I tried to ask favors of some of the men who were going into the locker room, you know, during that time before the game and saying to them, could you ask so-and-so to come out? I'd like to talk with him. You know, this is before cell phones. So, it wasn't as though we were texting back and forth and I knew whether the player was going to come out. I just had to sit and wait and just wonder, you know, in the dugout by myself. You know, and I just had to figure out, well, when do I just give up? you know, that the player isn't going to come out. And of course, the irony with this, you know, Rebecca, is that if in fact the lawsuit was about protecting the privacy of the ballplayers, if in fact the commissioner's action was to protect those players from my invasive eyes or whatever, if we were to believe him that that was the case. then why wasn't I allowed to go in to that clubhouse with the male reporters for those 50 minutes of interview time, which was incredibly valuable for any magazine reporter. You didn't have the chaos after a game. You didn't have any of that. And no player changed out of his uniform. So there was no issue of, as Kuhn said, protecting players' privacy. So that was a big clue to us. that this was never about that. Because what if the commissioner had said, well, you know what? Here's my feeling that we really don't want this to happen after the game because we are concerned about this, this and this. But we have every belief that you should be able to have the access before the game. There's none of these issues apply. They didn't do that. And they made a very strong argument, you know, in the public as well as in court. that I shouldn't be allowed in then either. So there was such complete hypocrisy, you know, even in the stand that they made. But the public bought it because the public knew nothing about how we do our jobs. And the male sports writers didn't help them to understand that. They didn't mention there's no separate accommodation. They could have found that out if they'd called me or if you talked to the PR people. They didn't bother because that would have interrupted the narrative they wanted to do, which was, you know, this young, attractive girl wants to get in and see players naked. That would have just interrupted that. And that was a far better story for them to tell and a far better story for the headline writers and a far better story. You know, we didn't have clicks back then as we do now, but it sold papers. But the legal argument got in the way. I'm sorry, what was that? legal argument got in the way because it was actually about equal access. Yeah. was it a fairly cut and dried case? the, so it, were there appeals or what's, what did that? it was not a cut and dried case in the sense that it was a two step case that my lawyer had to do. He had to get over the hurdle, wasn't necessarily easy, to prove that the state action doctrine applied. The reason he had to do that is the only way he could win my case was going to be on constitutional grounds. But you cannot win a case on constitutional grounds if you are fighting against a privately owned company or business. Constitutional grounds only apply to those where there's government entwinement in that case. So he had to convince the judge, first of all, that there was a government entity entwined in this action. And only if he could get over that barrier could he then make the argument based on the 14th Amendment with the Equal Protection Clause. So it wasn't a straight ahead case at all. a very esoteric argument for something that seems, in retrospect, so straightforward. it wasn't. It was a difficult case in that it's a private business, which, we began talking by mentioning that the judge had no ability to say, hey, you have to open the clubhouses. She can't do that. She can only in our hope, in our hope, rule on due process and equal protection, which in the end she did based on the 14th Amendment. So he succeeded. in his state action argument. And that is primarily because New York City had put in $50 million of taxpayer money to refurbish Yankee Stadium two years before and had developed a 30-year lease with the New York Yankees for their stadium. So the clubhouse is of course in that stadium. So he built the argument based on a precedent on the state action doctrine from racial justice argument back in 1961 that had gone to the Supreme Court. So you're going back to the original use of the equal protection clause in racial justice, finding the precedent there, using that precedent to make the argument in the court in 78, where gender has just been raised for the very first time the year before. in by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her work to raise up gender to what we call intermediate scrutiny under judicial, judicial intermediate scrutiny. Race, of course, always had the highest scrutiny based on this being a post-Civil War amendment for racial justice after slavery. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that it should also apply to gender. and she had spent six years bringing cases before the Supreme Court. And it's not till 1976 that gender gets that increased scrutiny. And here my case comes, you know, filed at the end of 77. It's really the first case on gender discrimination that my judge, who's a woman who had experience in bringing 10 cases on racial discrimination to the Supreme Court and winning them. Mm-hmm. she understands the 14th Amendment very, very well. She wrote the original brief for Brown versus Board of Education. She understands separate but equal. So she has a clear understanding of what my lawyer is attempting to do with the state action doctrine in large part because as an attorney with the NAACP, Legal and Defense Fund, which Thurgood Marshall ran, every time a racial discrimination case was taken to the Supreme Court, there was representation by the attorney who brought the case, but also by the NAACP legal staff. She had been assigned as that attorney to the case that set the state action doctrine precedent. what a brilliant stroke of luck that she had this deep understanding of the nuances of the 14th. know, I mean, so this is why my book really, you know, I say not only does it lay down the context for the women rights struggle, but it aligns it, it connects it to the racial justice struggle that had happened in the preceding two decades, all of which fell under the 14th Amendment. So it really does paint for people who don't know anything about this history. which sadly is most young people in our country because they just haven't studied it, a roadmap through a very personalized story of how these connect almost through my life as a representative of the women's struggle, women's rights struggle, and my judge is a representation of the racial justice struggle of that. on. mean, nothing happens in a vacuum. It's all on a continuum. as it, it, so tell us a little bit. I also want to know what it was like in the aftermath, but we'll get back to that. I kind of want to concentrate on that through line. So, you know, racial justice to gender justice and onwards. So is that partly why you felt like it was time to write this story? What, what made you write it? now. Well, in part, in part, I mean, as I came to be writing it, I understood more clearly this was the right time to be writing it. And I realized that more toward the end of writing it, certainly after the Dobbs decision came down, it was even more crystal clear to me. And as we saw the ascension of women's sports, which we've seen just over the last three, four five years, it also seemed the right time to think about. you know, the question of women on both sides of the equation, both as athletes, but also covering sports. And for those people who might not know the Dobbs decision rolled back Roe v Wade. So just, like to connect all the dots for us. right. And I have a 28-year-old daughter, so I'm watching her grow up in these changing times. And one impetus was that as we started to have Skype and then Zoom come in to our lives, and Google certainly come in or search engine capabilities, you had teachers and professors often getting in touch with me, the teachers in the middle schools and high schools on behalf of students who had Googled and sort of found information about my case and were curious about it. They have these National History Day projects that they do and they would discover it and I would zoom in or Skype in to a middle school class in Georgia. I worked with a young woman up in Alaska. She did a National History Day project. So what I could feel was that there was an interest in a new generation. think sometimes as things, you know, like good wine, you know, if you keep it long enough, you know, there's an interest in drinking it. And I think that what happened here is that there was almost no interest, like a vacuum of just, I didn't hear much about the case. There wasn't a whole lot of conversation about it within classrooms or anywhere else. And then I start gradually hearing it. And the other thing was that I had finally left a position that I'd been at for 13 years at Harvard University being editor of something called the Nieman Reports at the Nieman Foundation. And I had take, I took a half-time job so that I could begin to explore my own papers, which I had donated to the Radcliffe Schlesinger Library on the history of American women. And so I began to make visits. would work two weeks and then I'd have two weeks off. So I built in some time to begin doing research to figure out whether I felt there was a story in all of this material that I hadn't looked at for probably close to five decades. And then my attorney told me that there were five more boxes, huge boxes, of material that had been kept by the law firm. So I began to go down to New York and do the same thing there. And that took a lot of time just to do the research, to literally go through and read every scrap of paper, you know, take pictures of them, put them in files, organize the material, get the timelines down, read the transcripts. I mean, all of that. And my lawyers have put together a bound volume with every affidavit in the case, every deposition, the transcript from the hearing, all of the, you know, all of the paperwork that was filed with the court. So I had a record, but it was this thick, you know, I mean, it just took a long time to go through and begin to take down the notes and the information, organize it so I could access it and use it. It just was a long process. So that was probably a couple of years. And then I started to write it. And the problem was that I didn't take the time I should have. to really think about once I'd done all this research and thought I had the notes, I wrote what I would call Memoir 101, which was sort of starting and just doing kind of a chronological telling. But, you know, I was bored by writing it and I looked at it and went back through it and I thought, this is not the book I set out to write. And when I pulled back from that and thought about it, I realized that if I was going to write a book, about this. I wanted to write a book in which I reclaimed my own story because my story was told by others in the 70s and it was primarily told by men who didn't want me there and their stories were about a person I didn't know, a person they wanted me to be, you know, this, as I said, sort of an attractive woman who just wanted to do this sport so she could go and look at naked men and be around baseball players. You know, I mean, it was really, that was what I was going to retell that story if I was just doing it chronologically and talking about what was happening. Exactly, was just going to tell their narrative all over again. And I thought, no, no, no, no. So I almost was kind of at the point where was getting toward the end and I just literally put that book in a folder and I said, no, no. And that's when I changed my mind and said, no, I'm going to write this story and this book, and it's going to be about the two and a half hours of this hearing. And I'm going to go in and out of it. I'm going to tell you what it was like to be up at the baseball fielding. And I tell you some of the things that I encountered. I'm going to tell you how it impacted me personally in my life and some of the bad decisions I made, perhaps because of the notoriety and the rest. It became a much more difficult but much more exciting book for me to try to write. The structure of it was much more complicated than just doing a this happened, then this happened, then this happened. What it enabled was for me to really tell a character driven story and those characters sort of began to draw you into the context of those times. Because you're right. mean, I had an extraordinary judge, Constance Baker Motley. know, Katanji Brown Jackson has said that if not for the time and circumstances of her life, she would have been the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court of our country. It's phenomenal, you know, justice. And I can then tell her story and take us back through the racial justice struggle. And then my attorney is a man named Frederick August Otto Schwartz Jr. The short for it is FAO Schwartz, Jr., the great-great-grandson of the man who founded FAO Schwartz, but also a man of an extraordinary legal record. mean, just extraordinary legal accomplishments. And then I become a character as sort of a backbencher watching this hearing, responding to what I'm hearing and sort of taking the reader, driving the reader through it. And the fourth character, I believe, in this book is the 14th Amendment. Mmm. So that became a much more exciting, as I say, book to write. And that's the book that I finally, you know, really feel good about having produced. It's a book that tells a story that was never told in that time. No man, no male sports writer, even though the hearing was open to the public, showed up to listen to the argument. you? I mean, I just am having this visual of this pack of male reporters, nobody being like, hey, Melissa, know, like, how you doing? Cause I've seen you every day for two years kind of thing. Now, there were a few. mean, the younger ones who were more my age, you know, I can name them on my fingers and many of them wrote affidavits on my behalf. So there were some and I call them out, you know, in the book. But, you know, they were in the minority because most of the baseball reporters were sort of older men who really wanted nothing to do with me and said nothing. you know, fortunately, I found a few good friends. It's all you need in life. You need a few people that couple. Exactly. they're glad to see you. They'll eat dinner with you. Among the older ones who did, you know, take time to get to know me and I got to know him was Roger Angel with the New Yorker. And he's the one who wrote probably the best article on women in sports media of that time. was an article in the New Yorker called Sharing the Beat, which came out in the spring of 1979. And that was that. still stands as the best story of that time. And I quote liberally from it in my book because he interviewed just about everyone you could imagine you'd want to interview and, and told the story just absolutely beautifully in the New Yorker. That story ran over a total of 52 pages in the magazine. Now I say that because many of them were one column of a story in a two column ad because Magazines had tons of ads back then, but still it was an extraordinary piece and it's in one of his books as in his collections of essays. So Roger and I would often sit next to each other. We'd often be assigned to sit next to each other during playoff games, et cetera, because we were both in the magazine section. you know, so yeah, I mean, Roger Kahn, who wrote The Boys This Summer, I went out with him for two weeks as a reporter assigned to him from Sports Illustrated. And Roger wrote an op-ed in my favor and was just terrific. So it's not exclusively that breakdown, but generally speaking, the older, more, you know, people had been around that beat for a long time and Roger talks to them about me and they don't say nice things in his story. So he captured them very accurately in terms of how they felt about me. They know. I mean, they didn't want to talk to me. It also strikes me that people who are really embedded and deep in that beat may have seen it as giving up of power to include someone who hadn't paid their dues, hadn't done this, hadn't come up through the system. Whereas I think we all can recognize that there's enough news to go around. There is enough coverage to happen. So just no one gives up power willingly in the. up power willingly and I think when they saw me arrive and stay... They substituted me for some vision of like a herd of 50 women, you know, kind of all of a sudden descending on it and, you know, kind of changing their boys club. You know, it wasn't going to be that anymore. And they were seeing outside of their world of baseball, so many changes happening so quickly. This was kind of a fortress mentality. This was kind of a place they didn't expect they'd have to change. Things were changing perhaps at home, they were changing in other workplaces. Women were doing this, doing that. The Libbers were marching in the street. And I think they felt that when they came to the ballpark, they should at least have their ballpark to themselves. Yeah, something, leave us something. So I represented to them a future possibility they did not like. And I want to close with what that future is because, everyone is standing on the shoulders of someone who's come before. And if you look at sports reporting now, there are a tremendous number of women. They're on the field and in interviewing roles, they're in the locker rooms. How do you think your experience really changed the trajectory of sports reporting for women or did it? Well, now women tell me that it changed it. When I was with Susan Waldman the other day doing a book event in New York near Westchester where she lives in the off season, she's going into her 21st season of actually a radio broadcaster with the Yankees, 39 years in sports media in New York. And she said that night to the people who had come to hear us talk about my book. She said, without Melissa, there isn't me. So I am not the one who makes the statement. I don't think I would make it as boldly or as clearly as she made it. And I keep thinking in my mind when I hear that, well, if it hadn't been me, it would have been some other woman. He would have stopped and there would have been a lawsuit, whatever. history marches on. I happen to be the one who ended up doing everything I thought right. mean, both teams had okayed it. It wasn't as though I was, you know, kind of bursting, you know, through a door uninvited. I had, you know, checked off all the boxes. The players had in fact voted, you know, on the Dodgers team. And this was their first, would be their first experience having a woman in the locker room. And they had taken a team vote. And even though they said they might be uncomfortable with it, they understood I had a right to do it and should be there. So I checked off the boxes. had done the things that, you know, the mother may I kind of things. And so that was the sort of irony of it is that the commissioner later had to admit when my lawyer did a deposition with him that in him saying to the world that he was doing this to protect his own players, you know, from this onslaught of this woman coming in and he liked to say, disrupting their sexual privacy. I don't know what he meant by that. Certainly wouldn't disrupt any sexual privacy in the 15 minutes before when they had their uniforms on. But that was his way of thinking about it. But in the deposition, my lawyer pressed him to the point where he had to admit that he'd never spoken with one player. about this. That was on the record. It was under oath in his deposition that prior to making my life very, very difficult by putting down this policy against me, he had never spoken with one ballplayer to ask how they felt about it. Well, I think it's just such a magic of sort of the tenacity and single mindedness that you brought, you know, from the moment you decided, hey, I could do this. You you put the time in, you didn't take any shortcuts, even if it would have been perhaps easier. And I think sometimes that tenacity, you have to have the sort of strength of mind and temperament to go through all the BS. and all of the hoops that you have to jump through to make that tangible change because you know you're going to be put up as the lightning rod, as the controversial figure. But if you can point to, look, I've done all these things, I've done everything you've asked, there's no other excuse except that the commissioner does not want this to happen. I think that does. that does make a huge difference. at Women's History Month, which we're recording in March, I think it's a wonderful testament to not only what can happen through tenacity and grit, but also why it's important now. these issues are still being played out when we started and we're talking about, you know, who's using what bathroom and where people can go and who has the right to do a job. Those are all things that are coming up today. So thank you for sharing your story with us and talking to us about the book, which is tell us the title and where they can get it and all that good stuff. Locker Room Talk, A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside. And you can get it almost anywhere. You can Google it. You can get it through my publisher, is Rutgers University Press. You can get it at all the traditional places. You can get it, I would hope actually, at independent bookstores in your local community. That would be my hope. But I think there's an awful lot of places that can be found. or hopefully it could be found in your local library. And if it isn't in your library, I've had people who have emailed me and said, we wanted this book in our library. So we called the library and said, please order copies of this book for our library. And they did. So, you know, just like they say, if you call, know, five people call their local representative, it means something that they actually pay attention. And they actually do pay attention. If you call your local library and say, this is a book I've heard about it, I'm eager to read it, would you please get a copy in the library? They'll probably do it. So that's another way to do it. Great, all right, so locker room talk. Melissa, thank you so much for spending time with me. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you, Rebecca. I really enjoyed talking with you. Thanks so much.