Melissa Ludtke Brings Her Book, ‘Locker Room Talk,’ to NC
Photo Credit: Stan Grossfeld
By Meg Hale Brunton
In the mid-1970’s when very few women were sportswriters, Melissa Ludtke was a Major League Baseball reporter for Sports Illustrated, the most widely-read sports magazine. As a trailblazing woman journalist, her 1978 federal court legal battle against Major League Baseball, Ludtke v. Kuhn, advanced gender equality in sports media and opened doors that generations of women sportswriters, broadcasters, photographers and producers walked through.
In her new book, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, she reclaims her story after male journalists shaped its telling in the 1970s. She recounts events that led to her taking Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn to court to gain equal access to interview ballplayers like her male counterparts did. Ludtke won in court, though she’s well aware that she lost in the court of public opinion. She was mocked on TV, derided on radio talk shows, and male writers and cartoonists opined that she took legal action so she could look at naked athletes in locker rooms. “With few women writing sports then, the men had the megaphones to tell my story,” Ludtke observes. “The men feared that if they let one woman in, then many more would follow, and they would lose their boys’ club. It was like being in their treehouse when they were young and pulling the ladder up to prevent girls from climbing up.”
Ludtke set out to write this book four decades after Judge Constance Baker Motley ordered Major League Baseball to give her equal access. At that time, her daughter, Maya, was a teenager, and Ludtke hoped that telling her story would give Maya’s generation an opportunity to learn how women secured equal rights, especially since some rights fought for in the 1970s must be fought for again. “I always thought about writing this book for Maya,” she says. “I feel it’s important for them to know what brought about these changes and learn about women who played a part in this struggle that has made a huge difference in their lives.”
Despite the recent surge in interest in women’s sports and women’s expanding presence in sports media, Ludtke is disheartened by the gender disparities she sees still in play today. “Men continue to dominate sports. It’s not right that women athletes and women who cover sports still contend with sexual and verbal harassment and abuse,” she says. Ludtke is frustrated, as well, by female athletes’ very low salaries and lack of visibility compared with the men. “Such gender inequity exists beyond sports, of course, but sports is a gathering place for Americans to see it. I want people to understand what’s happening with women in sports in its broader societal context.”
Growing up in Amherst, Massachusetts, Ludtke loved to play sports and competed on all of the teams she could. Her dad taught her football by taking her to university games and her mom, who’d been her own father’s seatmate at Fenway Park, passed her love of baseball on to her eldest daughter. Soon after graduating from college, Ludtke was seated with ABC Sports broadcaster Frank Gifford at a dinner party. After they talked sports through dinner, he complimented her sports knowledge and said that he’d introduce her to people at ABC Sports if she came to New York. Ludtke decided to take Gifford up on his offer. Then, after spending a few days in New York City with people who worked in TV sports, she returned home with “a vision that this is what I want to do with my life.”
A few months later, she moved to New York where she freelanced in TV sports media before being hired at Sports Illustrated. There, women held most of the entry level researcher-reporter jobs, while the vast majority of writers and editors were men. Her primary responsibility was fact-checking stories written mostly by men. Since she hadn’t worked at her college newspaper or attended journalism school, Ludtke learned journalism doing this job she loved. “I was in heaven; this was what I was meant to do!” she recalls. “I was going to games every night. I thought it was the best job you could have!”
After a few years, she became Sports Illustrated’s baseball researcher-reporter. Baseball was a prized assignment at newspapers, so the writers at the ballparks were men. Occasionally, a woman showed up at a game to write a story, but rarely did she stay around. “I didn’t go away,” Ludtke says of her three seasons of baseball reporting. “It wasn’t easy but I liked taking on this next challenge. It took me a long time to feel comfortable around baseball’s men, most of whom didn’t want me to be there, but I’d been given this opportunity, so I ran with it!” Not long after winning her court case, Ludtke was hired at Time magazine, and a few years later was assigned to cover the 1984 Summer Olympics as a correspondent. After that, she moved away from sports to focus on issues affecting families, women and children.
This October, Ludtke’s national book tour for Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside is bringing her to four cities in North Carolina, a state where she has many close friends (several of whom will serve as moderators at her book talks). On her North Carolina ‘friends tour,’ as she calls it, Ludtke will do book talks in Asheville, Charlotte, Chapel Hill, and Greensboro. She hopes the legal and social topics she raises in her book will spark discussions. “I hope my book inspires people to talk about the struggles that remain for women to participate fully in the lives that we strive to have,” she says.
For more information on Melissa Ludtke, visit her website: https://www.melissaludtke.com/
Here is a schedule of the book tour for Locker Room Talk:
Monday, Sept. 30 at 6:00 pm at Malaprops Book in Asheville, NC, moderated by Elizabeth Leland
Wednesday, Oct. 2, at 6:30 at Park Road Books in Charlotte, NC, moderated by Mary C. Curtis
Thursday, Oct. 3 at 5:30 (sign books), 6:00-7:00 at Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC, moderated by Professor William A. Darity
Friday, Oct. 4 at 6:00 at Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC, moderated by Lindsay Gibbs
