'A test of my morality as a girl': A Q&A with Melissa Ludtke
Excerpts from my conversation with the trailblazing author of "Locker Room Talk."
Forty-seven years ago today, at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, California, the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees 10-4 in Game 5 of the 1977 World Series, boosting the series score to 3-2 and postponing the Yankees’ celebration of their 21st championship for two days. It’s fun to look back at that series not only because we could be seeing a rematch next week, but because the series was the setting for a monumental moment in women’s sports media history.
This is the series when then-MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn officially banned Sports Illustrated reported Melissa Ludtke from reporting in the locker room with her male coworkers, leading to the groundbreaking lawsuit which gave women in sports media equal access to locker-room media availability.
Last week in her wonderful Substack, “Let’s Row Together,” Ludtke published an excerpt from her book, “Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside,” in which she describes the events of October 11, 1977. It’s a must-read.
We’ve already talked about Ludtke’s book a little bit in Power Plays, but in this subscribers-only newsletter, you are going to get to read excerpts from the book event I hosted with Ludtke in Greensboro earlier this month. It was an absolutely fantastic conversation, and I’m so glad to have this platform to share it with a wider audience — even in just the bit I share here, I promise you will learn so much, not only about sports history, but also about American history!
Enjoy!
Ludtke on sexism in the newsroom during her early years at Sports Illustrated:
You had an established system at Time, Incorporated, and that system was really a hierarchy of roles. It was different than a newspaper, and clearly at the bottom of that ladder were a whole bunch of girls. The girls were there, according to the Time editor, who sort of created this notion of what the girl's job would be at the magazine, he said that girls would be the ones who would be fact checking. In other words, finding whatever errors the male writers might have inadvertently put into their story. The girl's job, as usual, was to clean up after them. And that they ought to be very happy doing this role, because that's what girls do. But he warned them that if they did that job, and they thought they did it thoroughly, and it got published, and there were still some mistakes in it, that the blame would go to them.
I say this because it's sort of important in the context I come of age. I'm coming out of college in 1973, and that was a time of great, great vigor in the women's movement. That was when women were