Chapter 1

Behold: Smashers of Glass Ceilings

Inside the Original Struggle over On-the-Ground Sports Reporting

I loved pro sports growing up. The summer after my fourteenth birthday, I plastered every inch of my bedroom walls with posters and pictures of the Chicago Cubs, covering up the rainbow-and-doves wallpaper I had so lovingly picked out only a few years before. I spent Sundays in the fall with my friend Emily; we'd ooh and aah over which Chicago Bears players were the cutest, but also complain about how far the defense had fallen since Buddy Ryan left for the Philadelphia Eagles. And, of course, there was Michael Jordan, looming over all of it from a poster that took up the entire length of my door.

I don't know why sports journalism never seemed like a serious career path to me back then, but it probably didn't help that I didn't see many women doing it. Secretly, I used to practice calling play-by-play for the Cubs in my head (sometimes, I still do), but when it came time to decide what I wanted to study in college, I told people I wanted to go into journalism, not sports journalism, or law, not sports law. I often wonder if that would have been different if I had grown up seeing as many women covering sports on TV as I do now.

The women I did see covering sports? Legends. I was fascinated by Melissa Isaacson covering the Bulls for the Chicago Tribune. I envied Lesley Visser on CBS TV, on the court after games, getting to talk to all our college basketball heroes. Cheryl Miller got to cover the NBA and its players, not only as a broadcaster but as a peer. Miller, having led the USC Trojans to back-to-back NCAA championships and her USA teams to Olympic and International Basketball Federation (FIBA) gold medals, was already more accomplished than many of the NBA players she covered. By the time the WNBA was announced in 1996, Miller had already moved on to coaching, heading up the Phoenix Mercury for a few years. Miller never got to play in the NBA, but she continues to loom large as one of the greatest Americans, male or female, ever to play the game.

I'd always assumed the first group of women through the door got there because of their preexisting fame. Phyllis George, who smashed through the glass ceiling to work on The NFL Today, had been Miss America; her time in a very different kind of national spotlight gave her unique leverage as she built a career in TV. Cheryl Miller, one of my idols, had ridiculous credentials: She was a college basketball giant, both in stature and in reputation. But there was a group of women I didn't know about because they took up the fight long before Barbies and stuffed animals fell away in favor of soccer balls and baseball mitts in my life. It didn't occur to me then how many "regular" women, who hadn't been superstar college athletes or pageant winners, had fought to make way for the rest of us. It was only later in life, when facing my own challenges as the only woman working at my radio station, that I began to delve into their stories.

It's tough to say who the first woman across the threshold into a pro sports locker room was, as several women were pushing for access in different sports in the mid-1970s. In 1975, Robin Herman, a twenty-three-year-old reporter for the New York Times, had been trying to get NHL teams to grant her access to locker rooms for a year, with no success. Back then, almost all sports reporters were men, and access to the players as soon as they came off the ice was important to every sportswriter. That's when they got the most genuine and emotional reactions from the guys who had just played the game.

Not that being in the locker rooms was always easy or fun. Sports are weird in that they are the only beat in which reporters are expected to interview subjects who are in various states of undress. And the rooms themselves are usually cramped, smelly, humid-definitely not the kind of place anyone would choose to hang out.

For women covering sports, going in the locker room was never about nudity. It was about that all-important access to the players. And, sometimes, also about basic human dignity. At Fenway Park in the 1970s, the women were not allowed to eat in the same area as the male sportswriters, even though they were doing the same job. In 2019, the Chicago Cubs were roundly criticized for putting up a historical press credential outside the press box, presumably to show how times had changed. The credential read no women admitted and had a picture of a pink poodle on it.

According to ESPN's excellent documentary on the first women in pro sports locker rooms, Let Them Wear Towels, it was during the 1975 NHL All-Star Game that everything changed. Before the game got underway, a reporter asked the two coaches at the pregame press conference if they were going to allow women into the locker room. The coaches looked at each other, shrugged, and said, "Sure, they can come in." So into the locker room went Robin Herman and her colleague Marcel St. Cyr.

Herman, formerly an assistant dean of research at Harvard's School of Public Health, wrote in a 1990 New York Times op-ed that, looking back, she was only allowed access that night because "responsibility was diffuse." The All-Star Game meant two coaches managing what wasn't quite an actual game with players they didn't usually coach. Herman believed that the coaches allowed them into the locker room "on a whim," maybe even a "dare." But that whim literally opened the door for women in sports writing.

As soon as the two women got into the room, Herman told ESPN, the cameras and microphones immediately swung in her direction, with someone yelling, "There's a girl in the locker room!" Though she insisted the game, not she, was the story, it was hard to convince her male colleagues that was the case. Said Herman, "The game was boring. A girl in the locker room was the story."

Of course, the response from some of the players was less than ideal. As Herman interviewed player Denis Potvin, another player yanked off Potvin's towel, leaving him completely exposed.

Still, Herman said later, "My post-locker room quotations showed patience and good cheer. I was twenty-three years old and fairly new to my job, and not yet beaten down by the abuse and slamming of doors that would follow this one-time opening."

Unfortunately, the All-Star Game didn't set the precedent Herman hoped it would. Owners and coaches in other cities continued to block locker room access to women, sometimes physically, sometimes using police. But once the barrier was broken, things started to change for women in sports.

At the same time that Herman-the only woman in the sports department at the New York Times-was breaking the NHL barrier, Jane Gross was doing the same with NBA teams while covering the New York Nets. The daughter of a sportswriter, Gross admitted in Let Them Wear Towels that she likely got her job as the result of nepotism, but her timing was astute. In 1974, women filed a class action lawsuit against the New York Times, titled Elizabeth Boylan et al. v. The New York Times. It's well worth reading the whole story behind the lawsuit in Nan Robertson's excellent book. The Girls in the Balcony. Robertson wrote:

There were forty women reporters to three hundred and eighty-five men reporters, and eleven of those women were in family/style. Of twenty-two national correspondents, not one was a woman. Of thirty-three foreign correspondents, only three were women. There was only one woman bureau chief, just appointed to Paris. In the Washington bureau, with thirty-five reporters, only three were women; the number had not gone up in nine years, although the staff had nearly doubled in that time. There were no women photographers. Of thirty-one critics in culture news, only four were women. Reviewers of drama, music, movies, television, and books were all male. The sports department had one woman and twenty-three men. There were no women on the editorial board, which had eleven members. There were no women columnists. Of the seventy-five copy editors on the daily paper, four were women. Almost all the lower-paying, lower-ranking jobs were confined to women.

That suit was eventually settled in 1978, and the Times was forced to hire more women. Reading the writing on the wall, other newspapers began hiring women as well, and some of those women wanted to write about sports. Major League Baseball's obstinance aside, by the mid-1970s, newspapers were resigned to the fact that they had to hire women reporters across the board, and that led to the hiring of some of the true giants in the industry, women like Christine Brennan, Lesley Visser, Claire Smith, and Michele Himmelberg.

But back to the locker rooms. To this point, no one had challenged MLB to open up their locker rooms to women. Enter Sports Illustrated's Melissa Ludtke. Melissa grew up in a family of five children, with a baseball-loving mother and college-football-loving father. In 1977, Ludtke was assigned by Sports Illustrated to cover the World Series between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers. Concerned about having access to players immediately following the games, Ludtke had been slowly and quietly lobbying the players for access to the locker room in the World Series. She had secured permission from the Yankees, and then Dodgers pitcher Tommy John took Ludtke's case to the Dodgers' locker room on her behalf. John told Ludtke, "I'm not going to tell you it was unanimous, but we know you have a job to do, so come on in."

John, an affable guy who loved to tell stories, tended to minimize his role in helping women break through the literal barrier of the locker room door. When I asked him about Ludtke, he said, "I was a player rep for the Dodgers, and I was the union guy. We're in the World Series, and they came and said, 'Would you guys have a problem if Melissa Ludtke comes into the locker room?' My question to the people that asked it, I said, 'Is she licensed? Does she have credentials?' And they said, 'Oh yeah.' I said, 'Then why not?'"

John told me he took the case to his teammates, asking, "'You guys, would you have a problem if there is a female reporter in the locker room before and/or after the game?' and they said, 'No.' But then everybody was panicking in the Dodger front office: 'Oh, we've got to get cover-ups. We've got to get a wraparound for all you guys.' I told the general manager, and I told Peter O'Malley, 'Peter, I don't walk around in front of my teammates naked, so why would I do that with somebody I don't know?"

It's worth noting that, until this time, women sportswriters, typically made up of a grand total of one at any given game, were forced to wait in the hallway outside the locker room while their colleagues talked to players immediately following the game. The women had to request access to players, then wait for a team PR rep to bring the players out to speak to her, usually quite a long time after the player had spoken to male sports reporters. And after they had already told their story at least once to other reporters. As Betty Cuniberti, the first woman in the Dodgers' press box, said in Let Them Wear Towels, "Half the human race was shut out of this profession for no good reason." She went on to point out that, at the time women were trying to gain locker room access, there were no women in the US Senate and no women on the US Supreme Court. Any room with any kind of power at all was usually all men.

John, who played for the Dodgers off and on for six seasons, agreed that keeping women out of the locker room was nothing more than sexism. "People feel that baseball is a man's sport. No, it's not. It's a people sport," he told me.

Yankees manager Billy Martin had been allowing Ludtke to enter the locker room through a side entrance and sit on the couch in his office, which Ludtke later described as being like having a bleacher seat to what was going on at the players' lockers.

In Let Them Wear Towels, Ludtke said the 1977 Yankees locker room was filled with drama and large personalities, like Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, and Reggie Jackson. The ongoing name-calling and war of words was the story in 1977. And all that was taking place in the locker room-making access to the players immediately postgame vital to covering the team. In a 2018 podcast interview, Ludtke told me other women had been in NHL and NBA locker rooms by 1976, saying, "Both professional hockey and professional basketball had very much moved further down the line, due to their commissioners pushing those leagues to provide equal access to women who were reporting on sports."

MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn got word that Ludtke had been lobbying teams for access. Even though MLB hadn't been directly challenged on their locker room policies, it was clear they'd been thinking about how to handle it when they were.

To back up a second, Ludtke already had a relationship with the Yankees, and she'd been taking baby steps to slowly work on getting the same access to the players male sportswriters had. "I spent a lot of time around the Yankees and, by the end of the season, I had worked under the radar very, very closely with the PR people at the Yankees," she told me. "So the last two games of that year, 1977, the Yankees left me a clubhouse pass for the last two games. I had made enormous progress by taking a sort of gradual approach.

"So when we get to the '77 World Series and the Yankees are in it, I feel I'm all set with the Yankees, this is no longer an issue," Ludtke told me. "I went over and wanted to make an effort with the Dodgers, because I had never covered them, to be sure they knew I might be coming into their locker room after [the game]. I had a pass that said I had access to the clubhouse. I was going above and beyond what I needed to do, but it's what I felt I should do, just prepare them and sort of get ready. So in doing that, the Dodgers ended up taking a team vote, a majority of them said, 'Listen, we understand she has a job to do, fine. We get it.' And that is what led to me being banned from the locker room."

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Excerpted from Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America by Julie DiCaro
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