A Team for the Ages: We Hope!

By Lisa Laskin, Season Ticket Holder, PWHL Boston Team’s inaugural season

From her second row seat at Boston’s first professional women’s hockey game, Laskin, a fellow rower, described what she saw and felt.

Boston wore their home green uniforms

Overall, great experience.  High value: Excellent hockey, good venue, and league is working hard to deliver an exciting experience, and it isn't expensive.  The crowd was enthusiastic and knowledgeable: the roar that greeted the first Boston goal was extremely satisfying.  The announcing of the team was kind of a roll call of great hockey players, culminating with the captain, Hilary Knight, who got a huge cheer.

Hilary Knight, photo by Tanner Pearson, Boston Glob e

As for the game, Boston came out tentative, a little slow, and Minnesota took advantage.  Minnesota was fast and confident seemingly putting pucks on net from the get-go. They figured out immediately how to shoot high on the Boston goalie, Aerin Frankel.  Boston picked it up in the second period, and then really brought their game in the third, which was super exciting. That they ended up losing despite having outshot Minnesota almost two to one is testament to Minnesota goalie Nicole Hensley's skill. It is not for nothing that she is a multi-medalist at both the Olympics and IIHF Women’s Worlds, so good. Frankel for Boston is no slouch but my expert commentator companion suggested that she might have gotten a little rattled mentally when Minnesota’s very first shot went right by her into the net and it is hard to get your head back after that.

The PWHL game is fast and more physical than college hockey. The women can't check on open ice but more body contact generally is allowed and they are taking advantage of it.  Fans who are used to a certain way of calling the games took some time to figure it out.  Someone would get hit or go sprawling, and all the arms of the hockey parents in the seats would go up with sputtering cries for a penalty. But they played on.  There was a lot of satisfying crashing into the boards, exciting if you are right down on the glass like we were.  The final few minutes were frenzied in front of Minnesota’s net. I read that they put four shots on net in the last minute, or something like that.  But as The Boston Globe wrote, Hensley caught the final shot as the buzzer sounded and raised her glove high over her head. That kind of said it all.

Afterwards, the teams had a handshake line (as you do in hockey) and then skated around for hugs and then joined for a great group photo. 

Great game, see ya next Monday for Ottawa. 

Boston Team came together at the net before the game

You could tell the players were just thrilled to be there doing that hockey.  I really like how the PWHL is working to get the word out about the league and teams to local media - lots of good news coverage, and even The Hockey Writers daily Substack newsletter is listing the scores and they NEVER ever talk about women's hockey.  Also nice how hard the league worked at this game to show how this team fits into the local hockey community - from the Cap (Bergy) and his kids doing the ceremonial puck drop, through small Wizards on the ice for the anthem, a lively intermission game from Chelmsford-Billerica girls, and interviews with college players in attendance who'll be in the Beanpot and played with some of the now pros. It feels like this team is being welcomed into the local hockeytariat.  Donny Sweeney from the Bruins was there, and lots of kids in attendance, wearing Boston Pride gear or their own hockey clubs. Boston jerseys seemed to be doing a brisk business.  I got a special PWHL hat for being an inaugural season ticket holder.

I'm told by another knowledgeable source – my brother, former CNN and MSNBC tech director and hockey fan – that the NESN commentary on the YouTube channel was pretty good (high praise from him), although another source told me it wasn't as good as the CBC/TSN for the Canadian games.  The YouTube channel will show the local network broadcast of every game, for free, which is great.  Again, good on ya PWHL.

Only downside: home games played in Lowell. I mean, it's a GREAT rink.  But it is in Lowell which is a bit of a poke to get to on a Wednesday night.  And trying to get into the parking lot before the game was, as my friend put it, a goat rodeo (whatever that means).  Honestly, if they were in Boston or closer to the city, they could pull from the South Shore and would definitely fill an arena.

As a Generation Fades from View, Its Stories Will Endure

By Melissa Ludtke

 I knew my friend Robin was battling ovarian cancer.

I just never thought she’d die.

Of course, I knew her odds of beating this disease weren’t good, but I was unwilling to accept that one day I’d wake up to hear that the first of our groundbreaking crew of women sportswriters from the 1970s was gone. I didn’t want to face this gaping hole.

Last week I clicked on a personal note in Facebook messenger:

“I heard Robin Herman died. If true, a very sad day. You and she were the pioneers.”

Resisting, still, I Googled three words I never wanted to write together: “Robin Herman obituary.”

The Boston Globe confirmed my fear.

Alone, in the stillness of that young morning, I wept.

Then, my phone rang, while social media spread word of Robin’s passing far, wide, and fast.

When I saw Jane Leavy’s name appear my cell phone, I knew the news of Robin’s death had found her.

Melissa Ludtke, Jane Leavy, Robin Herman at Fenway Park, 2018. Photo by Paul Horvitz.

A baseball writer for The Washington Post in the late 1970s, she’s the best-selling author of biographies of Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, and The Big Fella, her most recent one about Babe Ruth. On a chilly night, late in 2018, Jane had come to Fenway Park to talk about The Big Fella, and Robin had come to hear her, with her husband, Paul, and so did I. We sat at adjoining tables as Jane spoke, then after she signed books, the three of us carved out space to be together for what would be our first and last time.

 On the phone, Jane spoke of the specialness of our evening together, and I knew why. To see and hear us that night, gregarious and loud, was to intuit that we’d long been close chums. Appreciating that our time was short, and with much to say, we talked over each other sharing stories for which any of us could supply the ending. We’d bonded intimately, tightly, and unshakably with the glue of emotional fortitude shaped by all of the experiences we’d had separately decades earlier but were imprinted on us. Back then, we were on our own in doing our jobs, steeling ourselves for the possibility of being bullied or hit on, ignored or humiliated, as men tested our mettle. We’d persevered in spite of the barriers – blocking our access to locker rooms while male writers interviewed players – that these same men put up, which made it really tough for us to do our jobs.

 Make it hard on us, they thought, maybe we’d go away.

Robin Herman kept out of the Chicago Blackhawks’ locker room

None of us did.

Soon, Lesley Visser called me with Robin on her mind. I was struck by how each of us had reached out to connect as we did before text and social media came between us. We just wanted to talk, tell stories, and laugh together to ease our collective pain.

Lesley was the first woman The Boston Globe hired to write sports a few years after The New York Times hired Robin to be its first woman sportswriter. That morning, Lesley had said of Robin in the Globe: “When you’re the first, you know you’re doing it for everybody, and boy, she was the perfect role model. … [she was] iron under velvet.  She was lovely, and yet she was not going to be abused.”

Then, I called Lawrie Mifflin, who’d been the first woman hired to write sports by New York’s Daily News, a few years after Robin. Assigned to pro hockey, as Robin was, Lawrie recalled Robin welcoming her, making her feel at home by selflessly sharing all she knew about this team, all the time knowing she and Lawrie would tell New Yorkers about the Rangers ‘ games for competing newspapers.

Robin. Jane. Lesley. Lawrie. And me, the first national woman baseball beat reporter when I worked for Sports Illustrated.

Despite gaps in time and the distance of our separations, we knew to whom to turn that morning. For what each of us endured, what we accomplished together, fills an important chapter in American’s ongoing fight for equal rights. For us, too, Robin’s death signals a reminder of how our generation is departing, and not too long in the future the threads of our collective memory will be untangled, thus rendering parts of this history threadbare.

It's why we tell our stories now.

Robin Herman working in hockey Locker room

Robin fed her blog, “Girl in the Locker Room … and other women’s tales from back then,” so generations after hers would appreciate why she had to “muster Supreme Court-worthy arguments for an inane essentially logistical problem [denial of locker room access] that could easily have been solved by a few big towels.”

Robin Herman’s Blog @ http://girlinthelockerroom.blogspot.com/

Lesley wrote Sometimes You have to Cross When It Says Don’t Walk: A Memoir of Breaking Barriers to leave a trail behind of her extraordinary path-carving NFL broadcast career.

Lawrie stayed in daily journalism for three decades, serving as deputy sports editor at The New York Times along the way, a mentor to so many. 

When Jane writes baseball, she does it with the gift of prose steeped in the game’s history with her woman’s touch, as she writes about in her essay, The Phallic Fallacy.

“When I became a sportswriter in 1977, the unstated goal was to write lean, mean, macho prose. We couldn’t make ourselves invisible in the locker room, so we tried to make ourselves invisible in our writing. How many times did I dare my friends to remove the byline from my stories and try to find any place where my words sounded as if they were written by a girl? We weren’t supposed to acknowledge the differences gender might produce, much less flaunt them. But the truth is, women in the locker room do see things differently–and I don’t mean anatomically. We come to sports with different assumptions and experiences. We are outsiders, which is what reporters are supposed to be. The femininity we sought to hide is actually our greatest asset, our X-ray vision.”

— Jane Leavy

 It’s why I spent years figuring out how to write my book about Ludtke v. Kuhn as a compelling story for younger generations.

Because men dominated the media in the 1970s, they hijacked the telling of our stories about our push for equal access and fair treatment. In those versions, our quest for fairness was transformed into a tale of pesky, immoral young woman wanting to enter locker rooms to leer at naked ballplayers, pretty much ignoring all issues of justice through equal rights.

Robin reclaimed her story later on, leaving us a lasting legacy of her persistence and courage in challenging the men’s rules and practices that made it tough to do that job she loved.

Her story, our stories, are ones I believe younger generations want to hear.

Melissa Ludtke, the plaintiff in Ludtke v. Kuhn, the 1978 federal case that opened equal access for women sportswriters. At the time, she was a baseball reporter for Sports Illustrated, and is writing a book about her legal case.

Summer of 2021: Women, Sports Media, Tokyo Olympics and Mental Health

I am pausing as August takes us to summer’s end to reflect on issues revolving around sports, ones that I think about every day. Daily, though in late August I am on a vacation hiatus until Labor Day, I post stories, along with my thoughts, in the Facebook community I curate, Locker Room Talk. And this summer, I was given a few splendid opportunities to share my insights.

• In May, on the HBO sports magazine show, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel

• In July with a commentary I wrote for WBUR’s Cognoscenti

• In August, during the Olympic Games, E.B. Bartels interviewed me about the 2021 Olympic Games through the lens of women, for Wellesley College, my alma mater.

• In August, Lucas Rodrigues, a sports journalism student at Quinnipiac University, interviewed me, and then published a blog post, including my experiences in being a woman in sports journalism with those of several other women.

Image from my interview with Andrea Kremer on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, May 2021

Out of Bounds

“Andrea Kremer sheds light on the challenges faced by female sports reporters in a male-dominated industry.”

Forty years after they won equal access to locker rooms [due to my lawsuit, Ludtke v. Kuhn], female sports reporters continue to face serious obstacles in doing their jobs, from sexual objectification to abuse. Journalists Rhiannon Walker and Jessica Kleinschmid and Melissa Ludtke sat down with correspondent Andrea Kremer to discuss. Link to the trailer, here, and entire interview can be streamed on HBO Max.

After I tweeted about Simone Biles withdrawing from the Team All-Around Gymnastics competition at the Tokyo Olympic Games, the editor of Cognoscenti asked me to write this essay. It was published on July 29.

Here is an excerpt from my essay about Simone Biles, after she raised the issue of mental health. In writing it, I shared, too, the time in my life when I was challenged by clinical depression.

“Long after the cauldron’s flame is extinguished in Tokyo, Biles’ words will burn brightly. Her Olympic exits – paired with the honest clarity of her explanations – will be in the minds of those who grapple with what it is to feel mentally unhealthy. But given the stigma that still hangs over mental health, Biles’ message requires reinforcement from all of us, especially as her critics use social media to falsely accuse her of hiding behind mental illness as an excuse for her poor performance. It’s not.

Long after the cauldron’s flame is extinguished in Tokyo, Biles’ words will burn brightly.

By her actions and with her words, Biles will empower others to share such feelings outwardly, perhaps for the first time, in seeking help towards recovery. Several decades ago, when I was felled by clinical depression, I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I confided my illness only to extremely close friends and begged them to stay silent about it. After absorbing Osaka’s revelation at the French Open and Biles’ blunt talk at the Olympics, then hearing Phelps in his Olympics commentary say, “It is OK to not be OK … we all need to ask for help sometimes,” I knew I could write for the first time what I just did in publicly revealing my mental health struggle a few decades ago from which I recovered – and grew.”

This 4’ 11” Philippine weightlifter, Hidilyn Diaz, won her nation’s first Olympic gold medal. In my interview, I mentioned her in urging us to not “forget the inspirational stories! I think the most encouraging and exciting stories from this Olympics have been about women, too: Mongolia’s three-on-three basketball team, the cyclist from Afghanistan, the swimmer from Alaska, the young women skateboarders. My favorite is the one about ;the weightlifter from the Philippines winning her country’s first Olympic gold medal.

EB Bartels: How do you think sports reporting has changed—or hasn’t changed—since the 1984 Olympics?

Melissa Ludtke: This year is the first Olympics where they’ve had equal participation across gender in sports. And this year a lot of the stories from the Olympics have focused on issues challenging women, in part because women athletes are finding their voices and demonstrating their desire to control their lives as athletes. Just look at the documentary LFG about the women’s soccer team players taking their own federation to court for equal pay and treatment. There are new mothers speaking out about the unfair rules preventing them from bringing their breastfeeding babies to the Olympics or about how Nike treated athletes while and after they were pregnant. How can the media avoid covering women this Olympics season?

EB: And these athletes can speak for themselves more now too, right? Just look at Simone Biles using her Instagram account to speak about mental health and competition.

ML: Exactly. Women are saying, enough is enough, we’re speaking up, we’re going to make you listen—and they can do it through social media, through the t-shirts they wear. As for Simone Biles, she is the only gymnast who was sexually abused by the former U.S.A. gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar who is still competing at this high level. She felt it was important for her to be a leader this year—and there are so many who have spoken up for her, like former Olympic gymnasts Aly Raisman and Dominique Dawes. And there are many people speaking out against the sexualization of women athletes! There was the story about the German gymnastics team with full-body leotards and the Norwegian beach handball team that wore shorts instead of authorized bikini bottoms and the runner who was accused of wearing shorts deemed too short. The federations and associations that have set these rules were led and run largely by men, but now women athletes are changing these rules by choosing what works best for them to wear.

In his story, “Sports Media’s Gender Gap: Passion, Persistence & Patience Exemplified by Women In Sports,” Lucas Rodrigues, a sports journalism student at Quinnipiac University, used this image to show readers the access to the clubhouse that I’d been given before Commissioner Bowie Kuhn took it away from me at the 1977 World Series.

Lucas Rodrigues began his story about women in sports journalism by telling my story from the 1970s, as he and I connected my experiences to what still happens today.

“Women today, as I did working in baseball, can still be made to feel as if they are outsiders. They can feel as if they are foreigners arriving in a place that is perceived to be a man's world,” Melissa Ludtke said. Ludtke, a pioneer for equal opportunity regarding gender within sports media, is arguably the most important example of passion represented by a woman working in sports media. Ludtke was denied access into the New York Yankees clubhouse during the 1977 World Series due to her gender, despite having a press pass, and later won a lawsuit against the MLB which is one of the most pivotal and impactful moments for women working in sports media.

“Although that is Ludtke’s most known moment working in sports, her career in sports media was always in jeopardy due to her gender and it was thanks to her passion for sports that allowed Ludtke to pursue a career that she truly loved. “Women who are going into sports media are doing it because they have a passion and are resolute,” Ludtke said. …

“It was a mix of persistence, passion and ultimately, postcards,” Ludtke said.

But mainly, it was her passion.

Passion is such an intense and almost overwhelming driving force for anyone pursuing a career. But in sports, and for women who possess passion in this field, it takes more than it should based on the historical truth of the lack of gender diversity in the sports media field. As Ludtke showed, women have always had to prove themselves even more in sports due to historical ignorance and lack of understanding of those innately involved in sports coverage. 

“Women were very much quizzed at the beginning of everything because men were incredibly disbelieving that a woman could know a lot about sports. And I still think that happens today,” Ludtke said.

So, if this is the case, why would anyone want to put up with the hardships of working in sports due to their gender? A seemingly non-issue is evidently paramount in this field given the historical happenings to those like Ludtke and many others. Whether it’s 40 years ago or present day, women have always had it tougher in this specific field. And still, the one ever-present quality embodied in every brave and hard-working woman in sports media, is their passion.

“Most people would ask ‘Why do you want to work in sports?’ To me, it was always ‘Why wouldn’t you want to work in sports?’ I never second guessed it,” Liz Flynn said. Flynn is a recent Quinnipiac graduate with a master’s degree in sports journalism. Her passion started at a young age watching her beloved New York Mets with her family, which planted the seed for a passion in sports that bloomed into a career. However, being a woman and growing up wanting to work in sports is not a commonality in a lot of areas, especially in an all-girls Catholic school in New York, Our Lady of Mercy Academy. To this day, Flynn can recall the comments, questions and overwhelming judgment from her peers and others back home as to why she wanted to work in sports. 

In Love With My New OLD Typewriter

I’ve fallen in love with my new OLD typewriter. And the memories it evokes.

This typewriter belonged to the previous owner’s grandmother. I bought it with memories of my mom.

I grew up hearing the rapid tap-tap-tap of my mom's fingers hitting the keys of her most reliable friend, her black typewriter. It resided on a movable grey metal table in an area of the living room close to the kitchen and within earshot of whatever door we used to enter the house. Though movable, that typewriter stayed put, and my mom always seemed to be typing on it – letters to friends, notes for her academic papers, and lots of letters to all of her kids, as they left home. I first got mine during my senior year of high school when her typed words arrived on light blue airmail stationary since she sent them from Oxford, England to Rome, Italy. By the next year, I eagerly awaited her letters as I stood near the mailboxes in my dorm at Wellesley College waiting for the postman to sort the mail, and there was always lots of it. Then, her letters reached me at my tall apartment building on the East Side of Manhattan, and then, when I became a correspondent for Time magazine, they would be in the outdoor mailbox that I’d stop at on my way from my car to my second floor apartment in Los Angeles. Finally, and to a diminishing degree, her letters flew in through the mail slot of the front door of my three-decker home in Cambridge.

But by then she’d started to use a computer, so while her letters kept coming they didn’t carry with them the lingering smell of ink on paper, and the words seemed flatter on the page due to the absence of her typewriter. For a time my mom kept her typewriter next to her computer, turning to use it when special occasions calledto her to use it.

Back when I was almost a teenager and the nation grieved after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, my mom went to her typewriter in our Amherst, MA home. There, unbeknownst to me, on November 25, 1963, she typed her letter of condolence to her Hyannis Port neighbor and childhood “swimming rival,” Robert F. Kennedy, whom she addressed as “Bob.”

Later when my mom encouraged me to learn how to type, she told me that when I mastered the keys by touch alone, no looking, I would think through my fingers, racing to keep up with my thoughts. She was right, but as years later I read her letter of sympathy to her childhood acquaintance, I grasped that she was doing much more through her fingers –she as feeling. In her letter to “Bob,” my mom shared her own searing, unbearable pain of her loss of her beloved sister, Betty, as she found words to try to comfort him. Even at an early age I knew my mom had experienced in the sudden tragic loss of her sister a burden of grieving that would “never become bearable” for her – “only less unbearable, over time.” I knew this even if I never heard her say those same words to me.

Several years after my mother’s death, my childhood friend, Ellen Fitzpatrick, who grew up with me in Amherst, MA, sent me this letter. She’d discovered in when researching her splendid book, “Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation.”

When my desire to own an old black typewriter hit hard, I sent word to my sister, Betty, who frequently wanders through estate sales and returns home with gems. Last Thursday she called to say she’d found this one in an online marketplace. On Saturday morning, I drove about 40 minutes and bought it from a woman whose grandmother had owned it. Her granddaughter described her as a woman who never worked and who she always remembers as wearing white gloves. It's a mystery, Diane told me, why she had this typewriter, though as she later recalled her grandfather worked at The Boston Globe, so perhaps he’d brought a used one home from the office for her to use. By the time Diane and I shared these stories by text and email and then in person, talking about our moms and grandmothers, she assumed me that she knew her grandmother would want me to have it.

I own it now, giving it a new home in my living room.

Soon I will order a new ribbon so again I will hear the tap-tap-tap of fingers, still ones not nearly as fast as my mom's were, pushing down on these keys on my new OLD 1930's Royal typewriter. It will be fun to watch its thin, metal arms rise to meet the paper I roll into this heavy machine, and watch as letters rise off the page, carrying with them that smell of ink.

It was on 1970s version Royal typewriters that I began my journalism career at Sports Illustrated. When I was shown my office at the magazine, a few items were there – a metal desk and swivel chair, a dial telephone, mostly used to call the Time Inc. operator so they could place long distance calls when I was fact checking stories, and a blue metal typewriter on its own stand.

On my office typewriter, in an uninterrupted burst of words, I typed my October memo documenting the events of October 11, 1977, when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned me from entering any baseball locker room to conduct interviews there, as the rest of the reporters did, all of whom were male. My editor, Peter Carry, asked me to write a memo to document what transpired that night at Yankee Stadium, which he told me he’d send to Commissioner Kuhn. This became a contemporaneous record of what happened to me that night, and thus served as evidence in our federal legal case, Ludtke v. Kuhn.

My office at Sports Illustrated. Photo by the Associated Press.

I shared my memo with a few friends at Sports Illustrated, one who returned it with these words in red, referring to me by my office nickname. At that time, I often wore Western shifts I’d bought in Austin, Texas when I’d visit my brother, Mark, who attending the University of Texas in Austin.

The Finish Line

Walter “Bing” Bingham would have turned 90 years old today, August 27, 2020. He passed away on May 13, 2020, a day that should go down in sports history because of all the sports events he had witnessed, chronicled and enjoyed in his decades-long career at Sports Illustrated. His colleague and friend Steve Wulf has written this tribute for Sports Illustrated, and I am sharing it here.

“We score more runs when he’s in there. Everything is better when he’s in there.”

         Yankee manager Ralph Houk on Mickey Mantle, in an article in the July 2, 1962 issue of Sports Illustrated, “The Yankees’ Desperate Gamble,” by Walter Bingham

He was friends with Mickey Mantle, Chris Evert and Jack Nicklaus, but then Walter was friends with just about anybody who spent any time with him. He made a name for himself writing and editing for Sports Illustrated during the Golden Age of sports, but the words he crafted and refined were hardly his only contribution to the magazine.

         It was his spirit, his love of games and people and stories, that brought out the best in us. As former SI managing editor John Papanek says, “His silhouette should be The Logo for Sports Illustrated, just as Jerry West’s is for the NBA.”

         Everything was better when he was in there.

         Walter passed away of chronic lymphocytic leukemia on May 13, a few months shy of his 90th birthday, in Duxbury, Mass. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Betty Bredin Bingham, his sister Frances Kerr, his children Eric, Liza and Amy and their spouses, and four grandchildren.

He also leaves behind a body of work that stands with the best prose SI has to offer, as well as a generation of writers whom he nurtured, a pile of road racing ribbons, and thousands of memories of his acts of kindness and genius. Every year for years, his grace was crystalized in the Bingham Bowls that he and Betty hosted in their Port Washington home on the day after Memorial Day.

         “He had a wonderful life doing what he loved most,” says Betty. “Writing about sports and being an active athlete—those were his great joys.”

Among Betty’s favorite photos of Bing, 2005

         “I can’t begin to list all the things I loved about Walter,” says former SI writer Stephanie Salter. “They range from his pristine memory to his ability to sing every song by Cole Porter to the sheer natural beauty of his running stride. I think of all the lives and careers he touched.”

         Walter would say that his life began when he was hired by SI in October of 1955, but in truth, he had already led a fairly interesting one before he arrived at the Time & Life Building at 50th and 6th. After all, how many people can say that they had a lunch date with Elizabeth Taylor in the MGM commissary, or saw Dr. Benjamin Spock for a bout with pneumonia, or played tennis with Kirk Douglas?

         He was born on August 27, 1930 in Orange, N.J., to Janet and Walter Bingham. and he graduated from The Hill School in Pottstown, PA, where he played center field. He flunked out of Yale after one semester and moved to Los Angeles to be with his mother, who had been remarried to the renowned author Robert Nathan. His novels The Bishop’s Wife and Portrait of Jennie were made into classic films in the late ’40s, but Nathan himself was straight out of the movies—Janet was the fourth of his seventh wives.

         Because his stepfather had become part of the Hollywood scene, Walter could say he spent time with Judy Garland on her 22nd birthday, dined with Gene Kelly and had that lunch with Liz. Nathan also introduced him to his Cape Cod summer home in Truro, the setting for Portrait of Jennie.

         Walter took classes at UCLA and enlisted as a medic in the Air Force, which stationed him in Geneva, NY. Upon his return, he became a copy boy at the Los Angeles Examiner, where he would test his writing skills by doing mock game stories and asking Nathan to compare them with the real ones.

A friend told him that the fledgling magazine Sports Illustrated was hiring, so Walter applied for a job and was hired as a news clerk. Also working at SI at the time was Betty Bredin, who had become a reporter after a brief stint as a secretary. Their first date was a Red Sox-Yankee night game at the Stadium on May 28, 1956—Betty still has the scorecard. The Yankees won 2-0 in one hour and 49 minutes thanks to a five-hitter by Whitey Ford. Mantle scored the second run of the game after leading off the fourth with a single.

         Walter was also at the Stadium for another 2-0 Yankee win on October 6 of that year. That was Game 5 of the World Series, and he was secretly rooting for his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers to break up Don Larsen’s perfect game. Even though Larsen retired all 27 batters, and the Yankees went on to win the Series in seven games, Walter had found his perfect calling.

         His first byline was in the July 15, 1957 Sports Illustrated, under a story entitled “The Oklahoma Kids Hit Town.” It was about the McDaniel brothers, Lindy and Von, who had pitched the Cardinals into contention, and it’s a masterpiece of reporting—Walter spent the day with 18-year-old Von, his fellow rookie, who finds out just before game time that he’s going to start against the Dodgers. After his victory, Walter goes out to dinner with Von and  Lindy:

“Von stared idly at the calloused fingers of his pitching hand. It had been a long day, and he looked tired. Finally he spoke.

”This is the first time I’ve been away from home, and I sort of miss the folks.” He looked at his brother and smiled. “But Lindy says you don’t get homesick unless you don’t like what you’re doing. And we both like what we’re doing.”

So does St. Louis.”

— Walter Bingham - Sports Illustrated

Walter liked what he was doing, and so did SI. He and Betty married that same year and started their family with David a year later. The magazine was just beginning to lose its country club airs and embrace fan-oriented sports, and Walter became a constant source of baseball stories—players gravitated toward someone who looked like them. A few years ago, writing in the Cape Cod Times, Walter recalled an off-season piece he did on the art of outfielding with the Phillies’ Richie Ashburn, who lived in Tilden. Nebraska.

“He said he would meet me at Omaha’s airport… When we met, the first thing he said was, ‘You look awfully young for this.’ I was to learn that Ashburn always said exactly what he thought. We got my luggage, got in his car and started to drive. I took out my notebook and began asking questions.

When a half hour had passed, I asked him how far away Tilden was. He told me 100 miles. He then apologized for being unable to put me up at his house. He had made sure I had a reservation at a nearby motel, but quickly added that I would have all my meals with him and his wife Herbie (Herberta). As Bogie said to Captain Renault in Casablanca, it was the start of a beautiful friendship.”

— Walter Bingham

Walter interviewed Philadelphia Phillies center fielder Richie Ashburn for an instructional series at his home field in Tilden, Nebraska in the late 1950s. Their friendship lasted until Ashburn’s death in 1997.

As the Fifties rolled into Sixties, Bingham was there to chronicle Musial and Mays, Maris and Mantle. He had a very strong take on the home run chase in 1961, when Roger Maris and Mantle were chasing the ghost of Babe Ruth and Commissioner Ford Frick was insisting that Ruth’s record of 60 had to be broken in 154 games, the number that the Babe played in 1927:  “Frick's attempt to protect the record, undoubtedly well-intentioned, is an insult to the man who set it. Ruth was always a man to accept a challenge. He probably would be happy to spot Mantle and Maris a few extra games.”

         When Mantle passed away in 1995, Sports Illustrated published a special tribute book of its stories on the Mick. Walter had three of them.

But he was nothing if not versatile. He brought his eye and passion to other sports, most notably golf and tennis and running. Here he is, describing Ben Hogan’s return to the PGA Tour at the 1970 Champions tournament in Houston after a three-year hiatus:

“Hogan, bad knee and all, still swings at a golf ball in a wonderfully fluid motion. It’s a curious contrast—an old man, puffing away on his cigarette, limping up to the ball, then tossing the cigarette down and swinging like someone 30 years younger. And then having trouble bending down to pick up the cigarette.”

— Walter Bingham - Sports Illustrated

He attended the Masters for 20 consecutive years and became close to Nicklaus, whom he once accompanied on a practice round at Augusta. He was there for the first three rounds of the Masters in 1986, but he had to come back to New York to edit Rick Reilly’s story on Jack’s epic comeback. As it turned out, there was no better place to watch that final round than on the couch in Walter’s office, sharing in his excitement. For the rest of his life, he could recite the finish: “Birdied 9, birdied 10, birdied 11, bogeyed 12, birdied 13, par on 14, eagled 15, almost made a hole-in-one on 16, birdied 17, and par on 18.”

Walter was also a fixture at Wimbledon. Here is his lead from 1971:

“When she came out from under the green enclosure beneath the royal box and strolled onto center court, she appeared to be smiling. Smiling. Now you just don’t do that at Wimbledon, especially for the finals. When you play a match on that hallowed lawn, the knees should turn to jelly and the elbow to stone; you are supposed to look humble and reverent and, above all, scared stiff… So where does this 19-year-old kid, this Evonne Goolagong get off waltzing out there as if she were about to play a practice match?”

— Walter Bingham - Sports Illustrated

 He had also met Chris Evert when she was a teen, and they became friends. When she was named SI’s Sportsperson of the Year in 1976, Walter was invited to the luncheon in her honor. As he recalled, “There were many speeches. At one point, the man sitting beside me handed me a note. It was from Chris. ‘You looked bored,” it said. It was signed C.E. I looked down the table at her and she faked a yawn… Call me sentimental, but Chris would be surprised to learn that in a cabinet next to my bed, tucked among other memorabilia, is the note she sent me at that lunch.”

         Walter caught the running bug after covering the 1963 Boston Marathon, and two years later, he entered it alongside two Sports Illustrated colleagues, Andrew Crichton and Gwilym Brown. He wore Number 60 and finished in 3 hours, 45 minutes and 9 seconds—not bad for a 34-year-old guy in a polo shirt and tennis shorts. Their shared enthusiasm for road racing spilled over into the pages of SI and helped make jogging a part of the American lifestyle.

In his April 16, 2020 column for The Cape Cod Times, Walter wrote about discovering his love of and talent for running. That column’s headline was “Born to run — but not forever.” Here he is running in the 1965 Boston Marathon.

All in all, he ran in five Boston Marathons, three New York Marathons—his best time came in 1981 when he when he was 53 (3:13)—and countless 5K races, the last of which was the Pamet 5K in Truro Mass. just six years ago.

         “He was the captain of our lunchtime run group at SI,” recalls former writer Bob Sullivan. “We were a generation and usually a few yards behind him. I still smile at the camaraderie we shared—and shudder at the cruddy shower on the 20th floor that we had to use. But just being with Walter was worth it.”

         In its heyday, SI was somewhat old school and stratified, but Walter fought against that by encouraging and promoting younger staffers. As John Papanek, who was first hired out of college in 1973, says, “In my earliest months as a reporter, I remember being shocked that a man well into his 40s could so instantly befriend all of us 20-somethings. We would crowd into his office on Saturdays and Sundays to watch football games and golf tournaments like we were packing a college dorm room. He’d laugh at things we said and raise us two jokes.

         “I also never knew an editor with this reliable gift he had of making your story better while making you feel better. He was never stressed or surly, and always friendly and smiling.”

         For a brief time, Walter was SI’s Chief of Reporters, and as such, he hired Ivan Maisel, now of ESPN. “I’m forever indebted to Walter,” says Maisel, “not only for bringing me to SI, but also for those lunchtime runs when his steady patter of SI lore and writing tips made you forget how hot or cold or hilly it was. And for serving as my tour guide at Augusta National and the wonderful dinner conversations during Masters week. And for puncturing  the self-importance and over-editing we sometimes encountered.

         “He used to say a certain SI editor would send back the Casablanca script with this notation: ‘The Germans wore gray. You wore (koming shade of) blue.’”

The SI football pool, which attracted everyone on the staff, was his baby. And then there were the Bingham Bowls. Says former writer Brooks Clark, “They were Walter’s and Betty’s antidote to the regret we felt at having to miss Memorial Day festivities because of our Sunday and Monday closes. So we would all take the train to Manhasset and take part in softball, tennis, and sometimes basketball. Then we would have this wonderful cookout.” On the train back to Penn Station, we would be giddy over friendships deepened and futures foretold.

Bingham Bowl, Mid-1970s

Some of us stayed at Sports Illustrated and realized our dreams, just as Walter had. Others took the lessons they learned from him and made their new homes better.

“After a few years working at Time in New York, I was sent to Los Angeles to be a correspondent on the 1984 Summer Olympics,” says Melissa Ludtke. “Covering Carl Lewis was a thrill, but what truly made those Olympics so special for me was being reunited with Bing, whom Time’s managing editor Ray Cave, who’d left SI shortly before I did, brought in to oversee the magazine’s Olympic coverage. With our shared love of Cape Cod and our families’ histories there, I never lost touch with Bing and his family.”

Walter officially retired from the magazine in 1988, but he continued to freelance for SI, comparing Tiger Woods to Hogan and Nicklaus, waxing poetic about the French Riviera for the swimsuit issue, paying tribute to SI greats who had passed away. His last official byline for the magazine was in 2007—50 years after his first.

But he wasn’t done writing. He and Betty had moved to Truro in 1991, shortly after their son David, an automotive journalist, died of a brain tumor. Bill Higgins, the sports editor of the Cape Cod Times, recalls a phone call he got in the winter of 2002 from someone who took issue with his assertion that Bill Buckner was responsible for the Red Sox losing the 1986 World Series to the Mets. When Higgins asked, “Are you the Walter Bingham from Sports Illustrated?”, and Walter answered in the affirmative, Higgins offered him a regular column.

So for the next 18 years, readers of the Cape Cod Times got to read one of the best sportswriters who ever lived. Walter’s last column, published on April 2, 2020, was a reminiscence about his start at SI.

A few years ago, Walter broke his hip, relegating him to a walker. But as a writer, he never lost a step, as evidenced by this column he wrote on August 24, 2019. It begins,

“I sit at my desk, pondering what to write about the wonderful world of sports that might interest you, when my wife calls from the other room with this cheerful thought: “Don’t you think it’s about time we write our obituaries?””

— Walter Bingham - Cape Cod Times

And it ends, as we will, with Walter’s description of that 1965 Boston Marathon:

“We all finished—a shock to some skeptics. One of us, Gwilym Brown, died nine years later. Andrew Crichton died recently at 93. Until I join them, the closest I’ll get to heaven will have been running downhill to the finish line that year with my whole family cheering.””

— Walter Bingham - Cape Cod Times

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Sunday Morning Surprise

Story about Ludtke v. Kuhn in New York Times Sports Section

In its 2019 World Series coverage, the New York Times editors snuck in this box about my 1977-1978 legal action , Ludtke v. Kuhn, to gain equal access for women reporters, which meant we could fully do our jobs by interviewing ballplayers in the locker rooms, just like our male colleagues had done for decades. This photo is from a book party held in Washington, D.C. (home of my friend Ellen Hume) to celebrate the publication of “On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America.” Maya is pulling on my friend Hillary Clinton’s necklace as my childhood friend Kathleen Kennedy Townsend joins us.

I posted this photo on my Facebook page, accompanied by a brief story of how I’d learned about it from several friends. After a week in which we heard about the demeaning, degrading behavior that targeted three women reporters in the Houston Astros locker room – and saw how the team tried at first to claim that the Sports Illustrated writer, Stephanie Apstein, had fabricated the account – it’s good to see an accurate account of this history of what women have been up against in sports reporting through the decades. Lots of progress seen – hey, terrific women broadcasting games in network booths is one giant leap forward – but then there are these reminders of how this fight for equal treatment goes on.

“My own Sunday morning shocker! First a text from my former Time magazine colleague Claudia Wallis “so cool to come across the article about you and mentioned your “upcoming memoir” as I read this morning’s paper.” What story, I asked myself. What paper? A text back to her led me to The New York Times sports section, and this boxed story on the World Series page. Complete surprise to me. Then, I see an email with the header NYT, and its from Betsy Lipson who rows where I do Community Rowing, Inc. - CRI, and she writes: “I am CRI rower who’s been a fan girl of yours, and I’m so excited to hear you finished your book. Can’t wait to read it.” And like Claudia, she sends me a shot of the story.

Let’s break here just to say that I am not finished writing my memoir, so it will be a while until it is published. Perhaps upcoming is a bit of misleading word, but I am writing it and it will, one day, be published.

Back to this morning, when another text arrives from Ginger Ryan with news that she’d recognized me in the photo before she saw the headline. Well, that’s good since that photo was taken 22 years ago, when my friends Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend joined me at a book party thrown by Ellen Hume at her home in Washington, D.C. to celebrate publication of my first book, “On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America.”

And now I see a tweet from my dear friend Lisa Olson who paid much too high of a price in the early 1990 for doing her job in the New England Patriots locker room.

What I love most about this morning is how the threads of my friendships weave together in a knot of solidarity ... from my journalism days (Claudia), from my rowing life (Betsy), from my Mothers Out Front climate activism (Ginger), and from my sports writing life and our fight for equal rights (Lisa). Friendship means the world to me, and thanks to all of you who reached out to me to share in this reminder that the struggle endures, the fight goes on.”

— Melissa Ludtke, Facebook page

My Bucket List Row … 47 Years Deferred

From Wellesley College’s First Intercollegiate Team to Her First Head of the Charles Race Nearly Five Decades Later

Our intercollegiate Wellesley four made news in the Fall of 1971 with Boston Globe photo and story about women’s rowing. It would be another year before the Head of the Charles permitted women to row eights in its competition, and our cox and each of these rowers, except me, was in that historic Wellesley eight.

Let’s step back a few decades, in fact let’s start this rowing story at the turn of the century.

My grandmother –I called her Nonna – rowed stroke for her Wellesley crew from 1903 to 1907. Wellesley crews in those times rowed only ceremonially on Lake Waban, our beautiful campus lake.

When I went to Wellesley College, the first of my Nonna’s grandchildren to do so, my aunt Esther, who was an education professor at Wellesley and also an Alumna, gave me Nonna’s rowing Sweater. I have it today – with a few moth holes in it, but the - W - remains in place. The following two excerpts are from a story my Aunt Esther wrote after my Nonna died. In reading this memoir years later, I discovered where I got my stubborn streak and perseverance.

Nonna died when I was 15 years old, so she didn’t live to see me attend Wellesley College nor did she get to see me row there. She would have been thrilled by both milestones.

In my sophomore year of college I discovered rowing. Loved it. I was obsessed by it from the moment I rowed one of the lovingly named “Wellesley barges” out of our Lake Waban boathouse. These boats were built for Wellesley rowers for our dorm and class races and rowing classes and designed to slip into their water slots with our oars raised vertically above our heads. Quite different than racing shells where all oars are removed together at the dock after everyone is out of the boat. A part of my rowing story, below, will show you what happens when someone – I was that someone – raises her oar out of its oarlock while we are all in a competitive boat.

Wellesley’s boathouse on Lake Waban with our specially made boats wide enough to stay upright even without the oars in the oarlocks. Photo Wellesley.edu

Here’s what I wrote for Wellesley magazine about the magical day that I stepped into a racing four.

What I wrote for Wellesley Magazine in a 1984 story headlined “Row, Row, Row Your Boat … A Love Affair with a Lake.”

By my senior year at Wellesley College, I was living in San Francisco with my Wellesley College friend Harriet Milnes, with whom I’d hung out during my first year when she was a senior. As a profile I will post later illuminates, once Harriett and my other senior class friends graduated, every bit of my outside of class focus shifted to rowing. By the way, Harriett’s and my paths that have crossed through the years – she came to my wedding in 1978, met my high school/college boyfriend and dear friend David Conger ,and they were married. I attended their daughter’s wedding last summer. Speaks to the power of enduring friendships.

In the fall of my senior year, the Head of the Charles allowed women’s eights to row for the first time. And Wellesley College – rowers from my class of 1973 driving the boat – competed among 13 other women’s boats of all ages. I will let me dear friend Sally (Brumley) Keller pick up the story of that boat. Just know it’s the boat I wished I’d been in. The one that 47 years later pushed me to row this year’s Head of the Charles as my bucket list race.

Sally (right, with Queen of Rowing Crown) and me, Wellesley classmates, fellow rowers, and Sally rows at a nationally competitive level today. In 2019 Head of the Charles she stroked her 70+ (average age) boat to a gold medal with plenty of time to spare. A dominant row! She stays with me for the Head of the Charles so it was quite fun this year for each of us to be rowing an eight.

Head of the Charles 1972

Fall of my senior year and I’m on the other coast studying Navajo language and education at U.C. Berkeley and rowing for Mills College on Oakland’s Lake Merritt. My friend Harriett was, by then, a graduate student at Mills and she had taken up rowing with Mills, and the crew kindly invited me to jump in. Mills was a West Coast rowing power at that time, so it felt great to be in their boat.

Meanwhile back East, my rowing mates at Wellesley were pulling together an eight to row in the Head of the Charles . Why not? It’s the first time women could row an eight in this race, and so they did.

Here’s a photo of that Wellesley College crew, taken from a bridge followed by the words Sally wrote to me, sharing this memory. You’ll note that she hadn’t forgotten the day when I pulled my oar out after our first row in our wooden racing four – and yes. I was a must less experienced rower than Sally was then, and remain so today.

Sally’s words: Wellesley's W 8+ was 7th of 13 entries in 1972 HOCR, first year there was a W 8+ event (not yet divided into club/collegiate/etc...). First year there were more than a few women racing (scullers).

“We rowed out of MIT’s boathouse, borrowing one of their old wooden boats, as Wellesley didn’t have a racing 8+ at that time, or a coach for that matter... Barbara Jordan was the “water” person - canoeing, swimming, sailing... so she signed when we needed for entries, but knew nothing about crew and didn’t go out coaching us. Did cox us once, which I remember vividly: I was in stroke seat when we came into the dock and Dave said “hand me your oar” to someone on starboard...someone inexperienced (even more than the rest of us!) who took her oar out of the oarlock to hand to him and we flipped right there at the dock. I came up facing BJ and will never forget the surprised look on her face!! (How she fit in that seat, I have no idea...maybe sitting up high enough that she was easily dumped out - good thing)

Happy memories - Sally”

— Sally Keller

Winter 2016

Enter Risa Greendlinger, yes another Wellesley College graduate years later than me, with whom I’d worked on a political campaign in the 1980s. We'd stayed in touch, so she invites me to join her for coffee early one morning, telling me she’s going to be near Cambridge. We meet. She tells me she’s just been on a rowing erg working out at Community Rowing, Inc.. I’m curious. Soon, I’m in, and by the next week I am joining her at 6:00 a.m. to erg.

Thank you, Risa. Serendipity is a big part of my life, as it likely is for everyone. But I always remind younger folks when I speak to them, serendipity only benefits those who recognize it and are ready to act. Go for it.

As winter draws to an end, Risa and I are joining GS 1, a lower level General Sweeps class coached by John Sisk. By March 2016, I am layered up agains the cold morning weather and rowing in the dark in a fiberglass boat (a first) with fiberglass oars (a first), and I am loving it. Can’t wait to be on the dock at 5:25 am, ready to row on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And pretty soon I am signing up to learn how to skull – single, double, quad – and I love that, too. And then I am volunteering to row on Tuesday and Thursdays with para-rowers – rowers with disabilities and by showing up we give them the chance to row, and soon I am bowing quads and doubles.

In the summer of 2018 I returned to Lake Waban for my 45th Wellesley reunion. Each reunion year 1973 returns, the Wellesley athletic department brings our boat – named Spirit of ‘73, in our honor – out of storage. It’s in the boathouse waiting for us. And we get to row it on Lake Waban. We’ve done this at every reunion.

For our Lake Waban Row in June 2018, I united my two rowing families, CRI and Wellesley. Glenda Fishman, Wellesley College 1970, with whom I row in GS Sweeps coxed us around the lake while her husband shoot photos. Sally is stroking, having switched seats with Gigi, who stroked us in 1972. Debbie and I have our old seats in the bow.

If we all make it to 2023, we’ll all be rowing Spirit of ‘73 again. Wooden hull. Wooden oars.

Our legacy. Wellesley College Class of 1973 competitive rowers.

By now, I am obsessively in love! With rowing. And with CRI! Suddenly, I am part of an extraordinary new community where I know everyone by first name. And we are rowing on the Charles River. No better combination possible!

Head of the Charles Practice 2019. This video is one of our early practice for our Head of the Charles Row. Not our final boats. Different mix of rowers, which made it fun. All of us rowed with each other until Anna Jurascheck chose the 3 boats who rowed in the Head of the Charles.

Upstream from CRI, just around the river’s bend, is Wellesley College boathouse. Through the decades, Wellesley kept rowing competitively until in May 2016 Wellesley rowers won the NCAA Division 3 women’s rowing championship. What follows is an excerpt from an Endnote essay I wrote at the time for Wellesley magazine – again uniting my CRI and Wellesley College rowing experiences. If you’d like to read this entire essay – The Girls in the Boat, click here.

“On our first March outing, as we readied our shell, I heard clicking oars on the river. From around the river’s bend, grey-hulled shells powered by blue and white oars emerged. Barely readable in winter dawn’s dim light, I saw WELLESLEY on their hulls.

‘Go Blue. Go Wellesley,’ I shouted, startling my boat mates. From that morning on, shouting to them was ritual. For me it was an invisible tether connecting our baby strokes in the ‘Spirit of ‘73’ to these powerful, polished rowers and their enviable pace.

On the morning of my 65th birthday, when I became a ‘senior citizen,’ I rowed – without a dockside shout-out. Wellesley’s rowers were in San Diego to compete. Midway through our row, we paused and the coach asked if I had a birthday wish. ‘Let’s shout, “Go Blue,” I said. ‘Wellesley’s at the NCAA’s.’ He smiled. We shouted. By the next day Wellesley was the Division 3 NCAA champ, earning the college’s first NCAA win by any team!

Later that summer, my daughter, a Wellesley sophomore, told me that a team rower was a fellow worker at her summer job. ‘I asked her if she heard someone shouting “Go Blue’ on the Charles,” said Maya, who knew about my morning hollers.

’Oh, yes,’ her friend replied. ‘We don’t know who she is, but we love that woman!’

It’s fall now, and Wellesley is on the Charles, rowing from its boathouse upstream from mine. I’m shouting still. Perhaps a few of these rowers know now that I once rowed as they do now, albeit not nearly so well. Decades from now when their NCAA win is lore of aging alumnae, I hope they get to shout, ‘Go Blue,’ to young rowers. They’ll know just how I feel.’”
”

— Melissa Ludtke, Wellesley Magazine, Fall 2016

Head of the Charles 2019

Magnificent October Sunday. I feel the smallest breath of wind off my back porch. Looks like it’s going to be a smooth row in the afternoon. That morning Sally Keller and I settle in at my house to watch the HORC LiveStream of the Regatta before she needs to catch a bus. When she leaves, I eat an early lunch, dress in layers for the race, and I’m at the boathouse with our 3 GS crews by 1:00. Our race goes off at 4:12, but we are Bow # 31 of 35 boats and we’ve got a long slow row ahead of us to get to the starting line in the Charles River Basin near Boston University.

Without these rowers, there’d be no bucket list row for me. All of you are champs in my book. Showing off our CRI red. I wear it proudly. Sort of like Wellesley Blue. Photo taken before our Head of the Charles row.

Here’s a few photo and a video of our row taken by Jeb Sharp, mostly, with one by Matthew McWeeney, who you will meet in a photo at the end.

Bow #31 is on my back.

Emerging from under the Weeks Bridge. About halfway down the 3-mile course.

Weeks Bridge turn. Row hard, starboard. Turn the boat.

Row harder, starboard. Especially you in the bow.

Eliot Bridge turn at the Head of the Charles Race, CRI GS 2-Dory 2019

To the finish. Thanks Jeb Sharp for biking along and catching us here, too.

A huge thank you to all who came out to watch and cheer our boat on and who encouraged me from afar with your many supportive messages on Facebook. Here are Matthew McWeeney, Rose Moss and my daughter, Maya, on Weeks Bridge waiting for us to row under. Photo by Jeb Sharp

The Morning After

On the Head of the Charles Regatta website a profile of me is posted.

"WHY NOT?"

Pioneering Journalist Crosses Big One Off Bucket List

Written by Samantha Barry, a journalism student at Northeastern University, she’s learned about me through a serendipitous conversation I’d had with a Northeastern Journalism professor, my friend Dan Kennedy. Dan relayed my “bucket list” row to his fellow professor who was organizing coverage of the regatta by his students, and presto, Sam and I were sipping coffee and hot apple cider on blustery cold day just before the regatta began. She texted me on Saturday and we turned out to be close by at the Head of the Charles, so she also shot my photo at the Eliot Bridge.

““I’m obsessed with it, completely obsessed by it,’ Ludtke said. ‘I post sunrises, videos, pictures as well, essays about it, so people who know me through Facebook know that I just love rowing.’

Now that she’s back at it, it doesn’t look like she is going to stop anytime soon. In her run-up to his weekend’s regatta, she simply keeping that ‘Why not’ mentality in mind. She might well find herself back at the Head of the Charles; first regattas have an addictive way of leading to second regattas. Either way, she planned to leave it all on the water.

’So that’s what I intend to do, I intend to leave nothing on the river in my one and only,”’Ludtke said. ‘I’m going to look at it as my one and only because it may well be, and that would be fine. I’d leave this life very satisfied if this was my one and only Head of the Charles rowing race.’

Editor’s Note: Melissa Ludtke’s CRI boat finished 34th in the Mixed Eight event, in a time of 19:27.”

— Head of the Charles Regatta News, story by Samantha Barry

If you would like to read Samatha’s entire story, click here.

From Wimbledon to the Charles River: Girls, Women, Tennis, NBA, and Crew

Photo from the Underwood Archives

How Empowering Girls to Confront Conflict and Buck Perfection Helps Their Well-Being

Girls, more than boys, are socialized to feel the pressure to please people in their lives, to seek perfection, and to do what they can to avoid conflict, which means they don't learn, as boys do, how to "fight" back in ways that can lead them to constructive outcomes. Here's a story by KQED's Mindshift that presents parents and educators with ways to help young girls to "engage in productive conflict, acknowledge and grow from mistakes, develop emotional intelligence and take responsibility for the role they each play in social situations." By the age of six, girls are less likely than boys to identify their own gender as being "really, really smart." 

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Marriage and Motherhood at Wimbledon

From The New York Times, July 4, 2018

First marriage:

If Serena Williams wins Wimbledon this week, she'll be a married woman champion. That means her name as champion will switch from Miss S. Williams, which is what it's been, to Mrs. A. Williams, though she neither goes by Mrs. nor is Williams her husband's surname (Alexis Ohanian), which are the only two ways that would befit putting a Mrs. in front of it. Tradition dictates, however, that this is how her name would be recorded, just as it was for Chrissy Evert (Mrs. J.M. Lloyd) and Billie Jean King (Mrs. L.W. King). Fortunately, the club has a compendium that logs the marital history of every woman who has reached the semifinals or finals, except for Martina Navartilova who married a female spouse.

“If you don’t know who Mrs. R. Cawley is, you can consult a glossary in the Wimbledon Compendium, an exhaustive record of the tournament’s history. Compiled by the Wimbledon librarian, the compendium also logs the marriage history — husband, wedding date and location — of any woman who has reached the semifinals or final. No such record is kept for the men who have graced the tournament’s final four. Nor does the book appear to include any same-sex marriages, like the nine-time singles champion Martina Navratilova’s 2014 union to Julia Lemigova.”

— The New York Times, July 4, 2018

Now motherhood:

It was nearly 30 years after Evonne Goolagong won the Wimbledon singles in 1980 that another mother, Kim Clijsters, became a Grand Slam champion. She  won the 2009 United States Open, the first of three Grand Slam titles that she collected after the birth of her first child. This year six mothers were in the Wimbledon draw, compared with 20 players who are fathers. Now Serena and other moms are speaking out about having nurseries at tournament sites.

“‘When I was younger, I was thinking by the age of 27 I would be so tired of tennis that I wouldn’t want to do it,’ said Vera Zvonareva, who is now 33 years old. ‘That was the first thought. The second thought was if I have a family, then for sure my career is over.’

Williams and Azarenka, two of Wimbledon’s newer moms, have clout, and no reservations about exercising it. Azarenka, 28, a member of the WTA Player Council, has championed giving top players returning from their maternity leaves seeding consideration at tournaments.

Wimbledon broke with the status quo by granting the 183rd-ranked Williams the No. 25 seeding here, and the United States Open last month announced it would revise its approach to seeding players coming back from pregnancy.”

— New York Times, July 9, 2018

Serena Williams has shared with the public her postpartum depression and what it took to fight herself back into world-class competitive shape. Then, this week from Wimbledon she tweeted about crying when she heard her daughter took her first steps and she wasn't there to see her.

Moms throughout the world empathized with her feelings and tweeted her back with stories of baby and toddler milestones they'd missed, too.

Then, there's the issue of how the media treats motherhood in the context of tournament coverage. When it happened that two moms played each other The Globe and Mail’s headline read: “Serena Williams to play Evgeniya Rodina in battle of the moms at Wimbledon," to which many tweeters replied as these two did:

Huff Post: ‘Battle Of The Moms’ Headline For Serena Williams-Evgeniya Rodina Game Causes Uproar

Finally, the Ball Girls

It was in 1977 that Wimbledon first invited girls to try out to be ball girls. Here's how UPI reported this news:

“The All‐England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon bowed to the women’s liberation movement today and said It would permit ballgirls for the first time at this summer’s annual tennis tournament. The club has agreed to employ 10 girls from schools in the Wimbledon area to help the 70 boys it will hire for the championships. The girls will wear the same purple and green shirts as the boys, but with skirts instead of shorts. The club board’s decision resulted from a campaign by girls at Pelham High School and supported by their games’ supervisor, Liz Kelly.”

— The New York Times, March 26, 1977

Not until three years later did Wimbledon mix ball boys and girls on a team (1980), and five years would pass again before ball girls appeared on Centre Court for the first time.

Wimbledon website

How ballgirls and ballboys are selected today for Wimbledon.

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Gender and Referees:

How two black women referees expanded the conversation about representation in sports

Referees have been left out of the conversation

Lots of eyes turned toward Danielle Scott and Angelica Suffren, two black women referees, when they showed up at an NBA Summer League game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat. It's the first year that the NBA recruited women to officiate at their training ground program like the NBPA Top 100 Camp. In 2017, a third of the referees in its minor league basketball program were women.

Building a pipeline?

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Closer to Home: From Rower to Cox

Gained new appreciation for coxswains who more often than not are women given our lighter weight. In my case, me being cox was not about lesser weight but only because I volunteered to take on this role for a 1,000 meter race on Sunday morning on the Charles River. There is a lot of multitasking involved – the cox is motivator-in-chief, primary steerer, stroke rate watcher, and the person in charge of 8 rowers whose adrenaline kicks in. It's the cox's job to focus them on setting a powerful, sustainable rhythm that means catching together to start each stroke, pushing back with power from their feet/legs, and never losing focus in the competition of a sprint race. Here's photos taken of us during the race and on the dock upon our return:

The Cronwell Cup, July 8, 2018, Charles River

Back home at the CRI dock, Cronwell Cup 8

Play it Again, Sam(antha): Highlights from a Week of Low Lights

A Woman's Work: Home Economics* (*I took Woodworking Instead) drawings and story by Carolita Johnson

The girls in my 7th grade year were the first to be allowed to take woodworking at my junior high school in Amherst, MA. Before us, before the very early 1960s, boys went to woodworking classes while girls went to home economics. There, we learned to sew and cook and about how babies are made, but we did that only when the black shades were fully drawn on basement windows to be sure nobody (the boys) looked while we were being taught what girls needed to know.

Perhaps its why Carolita Johnson's story leapt out, grabbed me, and tugged me in.

Published on Longreads

Carolita never did write about woodworking class, but that didn't matter. With every scene of her tale about her marriage, I sensed I knew precisely what she said she felt. It was as though she was writing what could have been my life. Why not? Our girlhoods – woodworking and lots more opportunities some girls in our generation had – gave us the same running start. Oh, by the way, the first thing I made in my woodworking class was a shoe shine kit for my dad. I still have the shoe shine kit – along with gratitude to my father for always pushing me to live my dreams no matter how unlikely their success or how few women shared them.

My dad and me.

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This is first of what I hope will be my weekly blogs spotlighting stories that stick with me through the week. Focus will be on lives of girls and women and most weeks I'll shoot for having at least some highlight women in sports. I'll annotate each story with my insights and thoughts that come out of life experiences. Hoping you'll comment so we can open up a dialogue about these stories – and events and opinions they bring to mind. 

                    – Melissa Ludtke, author of forthcoming memoir,  "Locker Women Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside"

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Mercury 13: The Women Who Weren't Astronauts

Look magazine cover, Feb. 2, 1960

I was eight years old when this magazine cover was published. The idea of a "girl" going into space seemed unimaginable and I wasn't the only one thinking that way.  Despite passing every one of the tests, physical and psychological, that the Mercury 7 astronauts (all men) passed, Betty Skelton (pictured on the LOOK cover), NASA declared that neither she nor any of the other 13 women who'd taken the astronaut tests would go into space. It would be 23 years before Sally Ride would blast off in the Challenger space shuttle, becoming the first American woman in space.

Betty died in 2011, but many of the Mercury 13 women pilots who tried out to be astronauts share their stories in this magnificent documentary Mercury 13, a Netflix original. 

“SYNOPSIS: Mercury 13 is a remarkable story of the women who were tested for spaceflight in 1961 before their dreams were dashed in being the first to make the trip beyond Earth. NASA’s ‘man in space’ program, dubbed ‘Project Mercury’ began in 1958. The men chosen – all military test pilots – became known as The Mercury 7. But away from the glare of the media, behind firmly closed doors, female pilots were also screened. Thirteen of them passed and, in some cases, performed better than the men. They were called the Mercury 13 and had the ‘right stuff’ but were, unfortunately, the wrong gender. Underneath the obsession of the space race that gripped America, the women were aviation pioneers who emerged thirsty for a new frontier, but whose time would have to wait. The film tells the definitive story of thirteen truly remarkable women who reached for the stars but were ahead of their time. A Netflix original documentary directed by David Sington (The Fear of 13) and Heather Walsh.”

— Film Review: Netflix’s Mercury 13 Shows The Cosmic Cruelty of Sexism

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Women Sports Reporters: Sexism at the World Cup

‘I prefer to hear a male voice’: Female commentators find harsh judgment at World Cup

Washington Post, June 26, 2018

Category: Happens All The Time:

A man complains about the sound of a woman's voice invading what he considers "his" space. Happened again this week when Vicki Sparks became the first woman to broadcast a World Cup game on British TV. Didn't take long a British soccer player to go on national TV to say he didn't think her voice belonged there. Good news: So many pushed back against his comment on Good Morning Britain,  that by afternoon he had to apologize, and he did. So, too, did a few of the men who groped and kissed three on-air women reporters at the World Cup after the women called them out on their gross, sexist behavior.

““Don’t do this! Never do this again,” Ms Guimaraes shouted at the man, who can be heard apologising in the video.

”Don’t do this, I don’t allow you to do this, never, OK? This is not polite, this is not right.

”Never do this to a woman, OK? Respect.””

— BBC News: World Cup reporter Julia Guimaraes' fury at on-camera kiss attempt

Of course, this happens in other realms, too, like politics, really any place a woman challenges the presumed power of men. In no time at all, she's being told about the irritating pitch of her voice. Remember Hillary Clinton and how The Atlantic did a scientific investigation of her sound. 

And Getty Images faced published a photo album, World Cup 2018: The Sexiest Fans” that featured images of only female fans. After receiving a lot of backlash for this photo album, Getty apologized and removed the album, saying that it did not meet “editorial standards.”

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Nudity and Athletes = Women's Empowerment

From Jessica Mendoza's Twitter feed

Once upon a time – back in the 1970s when I was a reporter at Sports Illustrated – my magazine published its swimsuit issue as soon as the professional football season ended. Hey, the guys needed something to look at and women with as little clothes on as possible proved to be the best-selling answer. Now SI's swimsuit issue also features women athletes like Olympic gold medalists Aly Raisman and Simone Biles posing in bikinis and displaying women's muscularity.

Just as I admire today's women sportswriters and broadcasters for speaking up and pushing back against the vile things said on social media about them, I get how showing strength in a woman's body and breaking out of the male gaze expectations is empowering, and I applaud these athletes for pushing boundaries by showing who they are as women. Here's my recent blog post about SI's most popular issue. 

ESPN does, too, in its annual body issue, featuring male and female athletes, all posing nude, with their private parts creatively concealed. See gallery below for photos on Twitter feeds sent out about the ESPN Body Issue, primarily featuring softball star Lauren Chamberlain.

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Toni Stone: Woman Player in Negro League

From story published by Timeline

This woman shattered the gender barrier in pro baseball

When Toni Stone joined the Negro League, she became the first woman regular on a big-league team

“‘There’s always got to be a first in everything,’ Toni Stone told Ebony in 1953. She knew what she was talking about. By that point, Stone had been the first in a lot of things: the first girl on her church’s baseball team; the first on a traveling barnstorming team; and, now, she had just become the first woman to play Negro League baseball, breaking the gender line at the same time Major League Baseball was making strides with racial integration. Stone felt the sting of both racism and sexism in her journey to becoming a professional in the sport she’d loved since childhood.”

— Ashawnta Jackson, writing on Timeline

History is a great reminder that long before women marched for their rights, there were women like Toni Stone, who in doing what she loved the best, was carving paths into places that girls and women didn't usually go. Even nationally syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen took note of her singular success, praising her with these words: “She belts home runs as easily as most girls catch stitches in their knitting, and the sports boys are goggle-eyed.”Here's a video about Toni Stone, narrated by Martha Ackmann, the author of "Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone."

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Trans women migrate to escape violence and stay alive:

Reporter Alice Driver takes on the journey with one of them.

As dawn arrives, Marfil Estrella looks out the window of the bus that will take her from San Salvador, El Salvador to Guatemala City, Guatemala. Photos by Danielle Villasana.

We return to Longreads for Alice Driver's evocative and elegantly written story about the journey north undertaken by a trans woman who will seek asylum in the United States in an attempt to save her life.

“At Mister Donut, I sat across the table from Avelar and asked Marfil Estrella if I could join her on her journey to the United States. Marfil Estrella, who had tried to migrate before but had faced violence, said my presence would make her feel safer. I agreed to accompany her to Tapachula, Mexico, via bus, then she planned to spend a few months there getting her papers in order to legally pass through Mexico. Avelar, who had helped Marfil Estrella in the process of preparing paperwork for asylum, said she remembered that Marfil Estella had said to her when they first met, ‘I want to leave here because the streets right now are a time bomb. I don’t want to be left lying in the street, as so many have been left. I want to seek freedom. I want to seek peace.’”

— The Road to Asylum Trans women migrate to escape violence and stay alive. Alice Driver accompanied one of these women on her journey, byAlice Driver

So Long High Heels: Hello Equality, Once Again

I made a mistake. I wore heels. Not stilettos. Mine weren't even close to high enough that my heel looked brittle enough to snap. Slender at its point, my heels were not so pointy as to render me tipsy or tippy. Instead, I swayed, since I'd soon discovered that the cushiony cover on the heel tip was gone so what met the floor was a thin, metal spike. I felt like a tap dancer trying not to tap but only to remain upright as I walked gingerly across the slippery airport floor. 

Gail Sheehy wrote "Passages" – about the predictable crises of adult life. I don't remember reading about this one, though it's certainly one that could be predicted. Won't there come a time in every woman's life – born out of pain – when her body rebels and she sends a message to Self: "Self, I've worn the last high heeled shoes of my life."

Last Wednesday night, when hobbled by foot pain, I left my plane in stocking feet. I walked through the airport, my shoes dangling from my hand, and then to the the parking lot to await my Lyft ride home, and up the stairs into my room where the shoes fell to the floor, never to be worn again.

My last high heels.

 

It's flats from now on. I never did wear heels all that much, but now I'm really done.

My mid-sixties heels' passage got me to wondering what embodiment of youth I will next throw over to age? Tight fitted waists on pants are fading fast. Bungee jumping is definitely out, though I'm not at all sure that in my younger years I would have done that. Not much else I can think of, yet.

What's comforting about ditching my heels is realizing I'm catching a wave of feminist #MeToo rebellion, and not just among peers. Here's a headline on a story I love:

This Unspoken Rule About Heels Is the Reason Kristen Stewart Ditched Her Shoes at Cannes

“Kristen Stewart made headlines at the Cannes Film Festival this week for taking her shoes off on the red carpet. And if you look back into the archives, you’ll realize she did almost the same thing in 2016 when she swapped her black Christian Louboutins for blue Vans sneakers. Her decision is not just about comfort — it’s about making a statement against the Cannes policy that requires women to wear high heels. Although the policy is more of an unspoken rule and isn’t etched in stone like other parts of the Cannes dress code, it’s become clear that women wearing heels are more welcome than those wearing flats.”

— Popsugar, May 18, 2018

And this one: 

How High Heels Became a Feminist Issue at Cannes

Outrage ensued after a group of women wearing flat shoes was turned away from a Cannes red carpet. Why is the high heel such a charged piece of clothing?

“The controversy at Cannes reflects a longstanding debate about feminism and high heels.

Indeed, the high heel—as the Brooklyn Museum’s Killer Heels exhibition revealed—is fraught with historical baggage.

From Chinese women teetering on foot-binding wedges to Marilyn Monroe wiggling in her stilettos, high heels have symbolized femininity, sex, power, and submission—sometimes all at once.

They can never be neutral. Women who wear them know this, whether they do so to express their own feelings of power and control or to look and feel sexy. ... Still some feminists insist women can’t be taken seriously in four-inch platforms. Writing in the anthology Fifty Shades of Feminism, Sandi Toksvig, the Danish writer and actress, argues that women ‘will never meet men on an equal footing … while they literally can’t stand up for themselves.’”

— Daily Beast, May 19, 2015

After finally ditching my high heels, it's fun to feel part of what's become a broader cultural rebellion in which what women wear (or don't wear) on their feel sends a signal about our freedom.

Here's to flats and freedom!

For a history of high heels – and what they tell us about women's lives, check out this Boston Globe story.

“It may seem somewhat overblown to declare the seemingly trivial act of wearing flats to a formal event as an act of resistance, but the potential impact is truly significant. After all, it’s not that long ago that women were forbidden from wearing pants in public,” says Juliet Williams, an associate professor of gender studies and associate dean of social sciences at UCLA. “By this logic, the expectation (if not formal compulsion) that women wear high heels may be seen as one more shackle that needs to be cast off if women are ever to truly compete, toe-to-comfortable-toe, with men.”

— The history of the high heel – and what it says about women today, The Boston Globe, June 28, 2015

And here is an addendum about high heels from a story in the Harvard Gazette in February 2022 about a scholar who is exploring the perceptions of women wearing high heels.

“For some, heels are useful “power dressing” tools for climbing the corporate ladder that boost confidence and convey authority. For others, they signify conventional notions of femininity that encourage sexual objectification and diminish career prospects. In any case, high heels are still widely seen as the most professional choice for women in many lines of work, from luxury retail sales and the airlines to investment banks and courtrooms, Sreedhari Desai, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, said. In some countries, including the United Kingdom, Japan, and Israel, companies can lawfully fire women for misconduct if they refuse to wear heels. In the U.S., employers can institute dress codes provided they are not overly burdensome on one gender group.”

— Harvard Gazette

Desai’s research is ongoing, but early findings remind me of why I ditched the high heels.

“Time after time, women wearing flats were deemed more capable, more prepared, and earned higher evaluations from both men and women in their 20s through their 50s. In the case of a “masculine” job such as tech manager, the bias against high-heeled women held even when the other candidate’s shoes were not visible to observers.”

— Harvard Gazette

Her Mom Dies and a Daughter's Hockey Play Helps to Heal a Family's Grief

My friend and colleague at Sports Illustrated, Steve Wulf, wrote about Elizabeth, his hockey-playing daughter who is ending a remarkable on-ice career at Middlebury College, and his late wife, Bambi Bachman Wulf, a friend, too, since our days at Sports Illustrated, and Elizabeth's three siblings and other family member and friends who encircled her after her mother died early in her college years. With their presence, they infused her mom's fiercely spirited devotion to sports into the games Elizabeth played – and by gathering at this rink, together they began to heal their grief. 

This story's title – "As Strong As Mom: How sports helped a family heal" – hints at the essence of Steve's evocative tale about loss and the power of sports to knit together his family with newly found strength. Steve shows how his family, holding sports at its core, summons through Elizabeth's hockey the joy of family being together in their deep and abiding love for Bambi, who left their lives through illness much too soon. They settle into the familiarity of family rituals at the rink as Steve, his grown children, and his and Bambi's first grandchild, root for Elizabeth and her team. In their togetherness, woven by the threads of love they share for sports, they honor and remember their missing family member whose spirit resides in them.

Here's how Steve describes the first game of Elizabeth's hockey season after her mother had died during that summer:

“For that first game of the season, Friday, Nov. 17, we descended upon Middlebury from many different directions. John and Abby flew up from Washington, Bo drove up from Philadelphia, Eve hightailed it out of Bristol and my sister Karen headed west from Cape Cod. Me, I was in a such a hurry that I got a speeding ticket for going too fast through Hubbardton, Vermont.

Bo put a HERE WE ARE placard in the seat adjacent to Bambi’s. We waited for the introductions of the starting lineups and heard announcer Liza Sacheli summon “No. 7, from Larchmont, New York, Elizabeth Wulf” out to the center spot. She fist-bumped goalie Lin Han first, then the rest of the starters.

What was different about the introductions this time was that the players all had stickers affixed to the backs of their helmets. On them was a beautiful logo designed by Maddie Winslow’s mother, Olivia — a heart with wings and the initials JBW, Jane Bachman Wulf.

After the anthems, we scurried to the other side of the rink, to the less comfortable concrete steps on the offensive end. It’s a routine borne of both superstition and a better view of Elizabeth at work. Not so weird, really. What is strange is that we don’t sit together, I guess because we don’t want to contract each other’s anxiety.”

— ESPN W, As Strong As Mom: How sports helped a family heal

A bit later in his story, Steve delivers us to the team's championship game.

“Kenyon Arena was fairly packed on Sunday to see if Middlebury could win another NESCAC title, Mandigo’s 10th, and the team’s third straight — a feat that had never before been accomplished in NESCAC. I savored Elizabeth’s last spin around home ice. (Sigh.)

She later told me that just before they took the ice for the introductions, Mandigo tugged on her ponytail and said, “Bambi’s gonna help us out today.”

For one final time at Kenyon Arena, we listened to “from Larchmont, New York,” and watched her touch the other starters with her glove. Then, like hardwired birds, we made our roosts on the concrete seats at the other end of the rink. The Mammoths came out strong, dominating the first half of the first period. But Lin Han made some clutch saves, and Middlebury revived itself. At the end of the first period, the score was 0-0.”

— ESPNW, As Strong As Mom: How sports helped a family heal

I urge you to read Steve's story to find out how this game ends – and Elizabeth's role in its score.

To end my own blog post, there is only one image to share. Its words speak volumes about the young woman I knew at Sports Illustrated when we worked together in the 1970s. Known to us as Bambi, she was Jane at birth, and in her happiest days she was known as Mom.

This is the seat where Bambi always sat in to watch Elizabeth warm up on the home ice of Kenyon Arena.

I choose to have Steve"s opening paragraph end my blog post: 

“A few hours before the opening game of the 2017-18 Middlebury College women’s hockey season, a senior center for the team sat in Kenyon Arena’s Seat 7, Row AA. It was the same seat that her mother liked to sit in while watching warm-ups, and the coach of the Panthers, Bill Mandigo, had just shown her the plaque he had affixed to it in tribute to her mother, who had died between last season and the one about to start. The plaque read: ALWAYS WATCHING.”

— ESPNW, As Strong as Mom: How sports helped a family heal

In Memory of Christina-Taylor Green: A Girl Who Loved Baseball

Christina-Taylor Green watched over her younger brother, reading to him as a big sister does. in her memory, this sculpture was dedicated and stands in sad remembrance of this girl who was born on 9/11, who died from when bullets aimed at Representative Gabby Giffords hit her. That was on a morning when Christina, who was nine year old, awakened feeling excited that her neighbor was taking her to meet a woman she admired in politics.

Christina-Taylor had just been elected her class president at Mesa Verde Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona. Her plans were to start a club at her school to help her less fortunate classmates. I knew none of this about her or much about her aunt Kim Green, when in my last blog I shared the photograph of Kim as a girl wearing a baseball glove who then was just about the same age as Christina when she died. Kim had tried to play on her town's Little League Baseball team, but she couldn't because she was a girl. When Christina was nine, she was the only girl playing baseball on her Little League team. She put her glove on to play second base.

When Christina was nine, she was the only girl playing baseball on her Little League team. She put her glove on to play second base.

Christina-Taylor Green

Two days after I published my blog, "Play Ball," this comment arrived from Perry Barber. I didn't know Perry then, but I know I lot more about her now – and this tells me why she wrote to me about Christina-Taylor. More on Perry later. Now the words Perry shared with me:

“Kim Green, the little girl shown in the photo from 1974, is the sister of Roxanna Green and aunt to Roxanna’s daughter, another baseball-loving little girl whose name was Christina-Taylor Green.

Christina was murdered in the same Arizona shooting that severely injured then-congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords back in 2011. Christina was honored at the very first Baseball For All Nationals tournament in Kissimmee, Florida in 2013; the more than two hundred baseball-playing girls from all over the globe who participated in the tournament, organized by BFA founder Justine Siegal, wore armbands with Christina’s initials in her memory. Christina’s spirit continues to inspire other girls who play and love baseball the way she did, the way her aunt and her whole family has done for generations. ”

I wrote these words to Perry: 

“How remarkable, Perry Barber, for you to introduce me to Christina-Taylor Green and to share her remarkable life with me – a life of such extraordinary promise, beauty and heart, a life which so sadly was shortened by the violence that’s all too horribly visited on children in America today. And to learn from you about her love of baseball, how Baseball for All honored her at its National Tournament, and how the girls playing in it wore armbands in her memory. Your words are leading me to write another blog post that I will be sharing soon, words of mine in honor of Christina-Taylor, a girl I wish I’d had the pleasure of meeting, a girl whose memory will stay within me forever. With gratitude for you enabling me to know her. Melissa”

And then I put Perry Barber's name into Google search and before long I knew why Perry toook the moments she did to write to me about Christina-Taylor. With this girl and woman, baseball became a shared passion.

Perry Barber, MSBL umpire

Soon, I came upon this story, "Perry Barber: Renaissance Umpire," published by the Men’s Senior Baseball League (MSBL)/Men’s Adult Baseball League (MABL), and is my introduction – now yours – to Perry Barber:

“Perry Barber is a very extraordinary lady. This 61 year old dynamo is a Jeopardy game show champion from 1972 when Art Flemming paved the way for Alex Trebek and is also a musician who’s talent took her to the same stage as the ‘Boss’, Bruce Springsteen, as his opening act. She is also an MSBL umpire in her third year of working the MSBL World Series down here in the warm sun of Arizona.”

— Perry Barber: Renaissance Umpire

How remarkable that by reading about a threat allegedly made about an 11-year old girl who wanted to play baseball in New Hampshire, I start this magical chain reaction with stories of girls and baseball. How magnificent, too, that Justine Siegal, who in 2009 was the first female coach of a Major League baseball team (the Oakland A's) after she'd founded Baseball for All at the age of 23, was the person to introduce me to Karen Zerby Buzzelle, the mom who'd founded the all girls baseball team, the Boston Slammers. So when the 11-year old girl from New Hampshire came to scrimmage with the Boston Slammers and inspired me to write a blog post about her, I came to learn about Kim Green's long-ago passion to play baseball and how in 1974 her mom Sheila made it happen for Kim and lots of other girls, as moms like Karen still do. Then, I thought about how 1974 had been the year when I followed my passion for baseball and other sports to becoming a researcher and reporter at Sports Illustrated, and in this job I'd become the first woman to cover Major League Baseball full-time and four years later in 1978 I'd win a federal court case to give women equal access to report on baseball.

For Perry Barber to be the one to introduce me to Christina–Taylor, this girl who loved baseball, is fitting. Feeling Now connected with Christina and with the youthful Kim and her childhood friend Alice, and with Perry, makes me wish for the day when our shared passion won't be a story told only by a few of us who love this game and possess the inner drive to want to share it with others. Instead, my dream is that one day, soon, when more girls and women play baseball that the crowds cheering them on and the media telling their stories will be the equal in size and yes, in passion, to those who gather to watch and report on the boys and men.

Now in my mid-60s I'm writing this blog, my first, and I am writing my memoir, Locker Room Talk, about the time in America's history when I was in my mid-20s and women in America marched to fight back against gender discrimination. I want my 21-year old daughter Maya to know how I was able to play a small role in this social movement for gender equality by opening the baseball's locker room doors to the girls and women whose job it was then – and one day would be – to report on baseball.

These doors, I am happy to say, are ones that many women have walked through. 

Play Ball!

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about an 11-year old girl who loves to play baseball. In New Hampshire, where she lives, she ended up in the midst of a controversy created by adult coaches, after a coach allegedly threatened to "bean" her as a tactic to get her to quit playing.

Here is that girl at bat in a scrimmage of the Boston Slammers, an all-girl baseball team. After the Slammers' coaches heard about her situation with her New Hampshire league, where she was the only girl in her age group, the Boston Slammers invited her to play on their team. On Sunday afternoon, she did. Her father, Dan, drove her an hour and a half from Southern New Hampshire to Boston to practice with the Slammers, and while expressing his gratitude for their invitation, he told me that until the Slammers called he hadn't known that all girls baseball teams and leagues existed. Instead of being the only girl on a team, his daughter is now surrounded by girls her age who love playing baseball as much as she does.

The girls' bats, backpacks and batting helmet.

Meanwhile, back in New Hampshire, the Oyster River Youth Association, who oversees sports activities for youth in this three-town region of Southern New Hampshire, completed their own "independent" investigation of the alleged coaches' threat – that they said they would instruct a player to “bean” this player.  Other coaches had brought this information to the attention of the girl's father. After the association president claimed in a newspaper was false, he arranged for the investigation to take place. On May 2, the association released their findings.  The coach found to have made a comment regarding wanting this player to quit – though he denied proposing that any physical harm be done to her – was dismissed.

Still pending is what will happen in the wake of these investigative findings. In Durham, one of the three towns whose youth play sports through this association, the town council voted to withhold funds until the report was issued.

“The town council in Durham unanimously adopted a resolution Monday night [April 16] that withholds already approved funding for the Oyster River Youth Association pending the outcome of an investigation into a claim that a baseball coach threatened to have a child ‘bean’ an 11-year-old girl.”

— New Hampshire Union Leader

For now the Boston Slammers are this 11-year old's new team.

On first base in her first scrimmage with the Boston Slammers.

On May 18 the Boston Slammers, fielding two full teams, will travel to New Jersey for the regional Baseball for All tournament named after Maria Pepe, whose 1974 legal action made it possible for girls to play Little League Baseball in New Jersey. In neighboring Delaware, two girls, Kim Green and Alice Weldin heard that girls were playing Little League and they wanted to do the same. When they discovered the ruling didn't apply to them, Kim's mother, Sylvia, threatened legal action and then started a Little League team all their own. The girls' team was called the Angels. Kim's father, Dallas, then the Phillies’ director of minor leagues and scouting and would become the Phillies manager in 1979, was asked about his daughter playing Little League with the boys, "he told them if a girl was good enough to compete with the boys, she should be allowed to do it," according to the Washington Post. 

“Sylvia plastered notices around the school and the area: She would hold tryouts for an all-girls Little League team, players ages 8 and 9. ‘One hundred-something girls came out,’ she remembered. ‘Then the first one picked up a hard ball and threw to another one who couldn’t catch a hard ball and boom, smack in the head.’

Sylvia suddenly appreciated the benefits of Little League’s insurance coverage but stuck with her vision and whittled the group down to a team of players with talent and experience, anchored by Kim and her friends. In uniforms of powder blue — not pink — the Angels charged through Midway’s Little League competition. They won the first eight games of the 1974 season against all-boys teams.

Kim’s best friend, Alice Weldin, who has since died of cancer, was the Angels’ catcher. From her spot behind the plate, she could hear the disgruntled mumbling of batters and the angry chatter of boys in the opposing dugout, most often the phrase ‘she plays pretty good for a girl.’

’We changed a lot of reactions,’ Kim said. ‘Parents thinking if a little girl can hit like this, she can play. Nobody was purposely mean about it, but I think it was an educational thing.’

The Angels finished second in the league.”

— The Washington Post

A baseball player's mom, Karen Zerby Buzzelle, founded the Boston Slammers. When I hung out along the sidelines yesterday afternoon and watched the girls scrimmage, it was mostly moms who were sitting with me. Then, there was one dad from New Hampshire who had brought his 11-year old daughter to this neighboring state so she could play baseball with girls. This strikes me as not so different than what happened in 1974 when girls from the neighboring states of New Jersey and Delaware wanted to play baseball, and inspired by each other, they did.

Baseball: A Sport Girls Love. A Sport Girls Play.

12-year old Michaela Silher was the only girl playing on her Little League team in Port St. Lucie, Florida. "It's hard being a girl and going into baseball because you don't get the respect sometimes that you want," Sihler told the TC Palm, on a day when she was also the only girl on any team in the baseball tournament,

This headline stopped me cold:

Report: New Hampshire Youth Baseball Coaches Planned To Bean Their League's Lone Girl Player Into Quitting

A girl playing baseball is so threatening to a team or league that hitting her in the head with a pitched baseball seems a good idea? Even verbalizing such an idea, even if you don't intend to go through with it is dangerous and extremely worrisome.  

I read of this threat in Deadspin, in a story picked up from Foster's Daily Democrat, a local newspaper near the girl's hometown, Madbury, New Hampshire. An 11-year-old girl's father had contacted the local baseball association officials to say that "two coaches said they would instruct a player to 'bean' his daughter — strike her in the head with a baseball during practice — in order to intimidate her into leaving the baseball program." His allegation was based on what he'd been told by other coaches who attended the meeting where the plan was discussed.

His daughter is the only girl playing in her age-bracket of this baseball league. She was also reportedly the last player drafted when the coaches met to select their teams. She's played T-ball and baseball baseball and T-ball with teams in this region since 2012, mostly without incident. At younger ages, several other girls were with her on baseball teams, but as they reached their pre-teen years, her female peers switched to softball – while she stayed with baseball.

The matter is being investigated, according to the story, but it is unclear what the investigation revealed or what steps, if any, are being taken to remedy the situation.

My reading of this story coincided with an invitation to spend a few hours on a splendid Sunday afternoon at the Boston Slammers practice. The Slammers are three all-girls' baseball teams – 11 years old upper age, 13 years old and 18 years old – organized by Karen Zerby Buzzelle. a mom. The teams' summer season include a bunch of scrimmages, mostly against boys' teams, and a regional girls' baseball tournament in New Jersey in honor of Marie Pepe.

“Girls can play baseball today because Maria Pepe stood up for their right to play,” said Ms. Justine Siegal, the first woman to coach with a Major League Baseball organization and founder of Baseball for All.

“Maria Pepe, at that time, was a little girl that did not realize what the future would hold as far as playing little league baseball and the controversy it would bring. With her ability to play baseball and her determination, she stood up to the controversy. Because of Maria’s courage and fortitude, she won the court case,” says James Farina, her Little League coach.

In 1972, Maria Pepe, then 12-years old, was selected for her Hoboken, NJ Little League team. After playing three games as a starting pitcher, she was told she could not continue to play under Little League rules dating from 1951 that prohibited girls from playing Little League baseball. With support from her coach, James Farina, Maria Pepe fought for the right to play. The National Organization for Women filed a gender discrimination case on her behalf and won. Her case led to the nationwide acceptance of the right for girls and women to play sports, which aided the passage of the 1975 federal regulations that ensured equal rights to sports in education in accordance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Title IX states that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

— Baseball for All press release about Maria Pepe girls' baseball tournament

In the first week of August, the Boston Slammers will travel to Rockford, Illinois, the one-time home of the Rockford Peaches in the  All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, for the national girls' baseball championship.

So meet the Boston Slammers – with a few photos and videos from their indoor practice on Sunday. I'll be hanging out with the girls through the summer, so stay tuned. More stories to share ahead. But first a shout out to Justine Siegal who founded Baseball for All so girls could play the game they love, for steering me to my new hometown baseball team, the Slammers.

“I was 13-years-old the first time I was told I shouldn’t play baseball because I was a girl.

My coach explained to me that he didn’t want me on his baseball team and that I should play softball instead. It didn’t matter that I was one of the best players on the team, that I loved baseball, or that I practiced way more than any of my male friends. It only mattered that I was a girl.

The day my coach told me to quit was that day I decided to play baseball forever.

Too many girls are still told they can’t play baseball because they are girls. I founded Baseball For All to empower girls to believe in themselves and to keep playing the game they love. I fear if you tell a girl she can’t play baseball what else will she think she can’t do? I then worry what else boys will think girls can’t do?

Baseball For All is leveling the playing field for girls across America by addressing the social justice issue of gender inequality. I want girls to know they can follow their passions. That they have no limits. That their dreams matter. ”

— Baseball for All, message from Justine Siegal

Meet the Boston Slammers

Pitch Like a Girl, the Boston Slammers

Catch Like a Girl, Boston Slammers

Two hour practice begins with drills.

Locker Rooms and Women Reporters: A to Z by Julie DiCaro

Melissa Ludtke in her Sports Illustrated office in 1978

It's my great pleasure to share Julie DiCaro's well-crafted narrative that she wrote for this podcast. It is simply the best short history of women sports reporters' locker room struggles. With her use of revealing details and poignant examples, Julie narrates a magnificent story of what it was like to be a woman reporting on sports who ran into barriers – both structural and attitudinal – when it came to equal access they needed to interview athletes as male reporters do. Since interviews in baseball took place, by tradition, in locker rooms, access to locker rooms was the focus of my federal lawsuit, Ludtke v. Kuhn, and the locus of media attention.

Episode 6: Women in Pro Locker Rooms

Welcome to this week’s episode of Stick to Pods. I’m your host, Julie DiCaro.

Last week, Sports Illustrated published a piece on the culture of sexual harassment and abuse taking place inside the Dallas Mavericks organization, written by Jon Wertheim and the amazing Jessica Luther.

As many women who work in sports will tell you, we’ve made in-roads, but still have so far to go, particularly when it comes to handling harassment online and in our workplaces. And having to constantly deal with those issues keeps us from focusing on bigger issues, like getting more women in decision-making positions in sports and sports media. To their credit, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban hired a woman to take over at CEO of his team, and one with a background in HR at that.

But women still aren’t the norm in sports. Back in 2015, Graham Watson, a writer for Yahoo Sports, was barred from entering the Indianapolis Colts locker room by a male usher. And in 2017, Carolina Panthers QB Cam Newton pointed out in a press conference that he felt it was “weird” to hear a woman asking him a question about routes following an interaction with sportswriter Jordan Rodrique.

I also happened to FINALLY see the movie The Post this week, about 3 months AFTER a movie where Meryl Streep plays Katherine Graham should have had me in the theater, and the movie takes great pains to show just how often Graham walked into a room where she was the only woman.

All of this story got me thinking about how much women still have to deal with in the world of sports, and what it must have been like for those who blazed the trial for us back in the 70s and 80s. And that let me to this week’s topic: This is the story of the first women into pro sports locker rooms.

It’s tough to say who the first woman across the thresh hold into a pro sports locker room was, as several women were pushing for access in different sports around the same time. But back in 1975, Robin Herman, a 23-year old reporter for the New York Times, had been trying to get NHL teams to allow her access to locker rooms for a year, with no success.

Gordon Robertson, locker room guard, stops Robin Herman from entering the Chicago Black Hawks locker room (January 1975).

Robin Herman interviews Ken Hodges in the locker room.

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 sports writer, because that’s when the most genuine reactions and quotes were gotten. For women covering sports, going in locker room was never about nudity. It was about 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 sports writers, even though they were doing the same job.

Then, the 1975 All-Star game happened. During the pre-game press conference, someone asked the two coaches 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 says, looking back, she was only allowed access that night because responsibility is diffused in an all-star game, with coaches managing guys that aren’t usually on their roster. Herman says the coaches opened the door on a whim, maybe even a dare. But that whim changed the course of history for women in sportswriting.

Upon entering the locker room, Herman says 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.” And if you need a reminder of how recent this was in the annals of history, Robin Hermann was in the first class of women admitted to Princeton – and that was in 1969.

Of course, some of the players responded exactly as you would expect pro athletes to. As Herman interviewed player Denis Potvin, another player yanked Potvin’s towel off, leaving him completely exposed.

Still, Herman said later “My post-locker room quotations showed patience and good cheer. I was 23-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.” Herman went on to say that wasn’t the end of the story. 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 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 Long Island Nets. The daughter of a sportswriter, Gross is the first to admit she got her job as the result of nepotism, but her timing was astute.

In 1974, women filed a class action law suit against the New York Times, titled Elizabeth Boylan v. New York Times.

Women who worked for The New York Times and in 1974 sued the newspaper for gender discrimination

It’s well-worth reading the whole story behind the lawsuit in Nan Robertson’s excellent book: The Girls In the Balcony: Women, Men, and the New York Times. Robertson writes:

“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.”

The New York Times suit was eventually settled in 1978, and the Times were 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. 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. And we’ll touch on their stories as well a bit later.

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 5 children, to a baseball -loving mother and college football loving father.

Melissa Ludtke's family, 1962, Melissa is standing, far right

In 1977, Ludtke was assigned by Sports Illustrated to cover the World Series between the Yankees and 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. Having secured permission from the Yankees, Tommy John took Ludtke’s case to the Dodgers’ locker room. 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.”

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 a player, 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 “Half the human race was shut out of this profession for no good reason.” She goes 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.

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.

As Ludtke describes in the terrific ESPN documentary “Let Them Wear Towels,” which you can find on Youtube, the 1977 Yankees locker room was filled with drama and large personalities, like Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, and Reggie Jackson. The on-going 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 post-game vital to covering the team.

ESPN's Let Them Wear Towels, a documentary about women in sports media from the 1970s

MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn got word that Ludtke had been lobbying teams for access – and 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.

The commissioner’s office reached out preemptively to Ludtke, telling her they didn’t care what the Yankees and Dodgers said, that they controlled the locker rooms, and she would not be allowed in post-world series. Instead, she would wait in another area and players would be brought out to her after they had dressed – putting her at a huge disadvantage in covering the team. When she asked why the Commissioner’s office was making that decision, she was told the Commissioner’s office hadn’t polled the players’ wives about allowing women into the locker room and that the players’ children would be ridiculed at school. Publicly, Commissioner Kuhn said that having women in the locker room was unfair to players, other reporter, and fans.

And, just like that, Melissa Ludkte was shut out from the biggest sporting event of the year.

In Game 6 of the World Series, the Yankees’ Reggie Jackson, who had been sparring with coaching and management all season, hit three homeruns on three consecutive pitches. Ludtke stood in the hallway and watched as all her colleagues made their way into the locker room for the post-game reaction. For an hour and 45 minutes, Ludtke waited for Reggie Jackson to be brought to her for an interview. When Jackson finally did emerge from the locker room, he was dressed. He told Ludtke, “Melissa, I’m exhausted, I’m going down town. Sorry.”

Ludtke’s bosses at Sports Illustrated decided they weren’t going to allow Kuhn’s decision to stand. In 1977, they filed a lawsuit in federal court, under the title Melissa Ludtke and Time Inc (the parent company of Sports Illustrated) vs. Bowie Kuhn, Commissioner of MLB et al. There’s great video (27 minutes into the YouTube video) of a 26-year old Melissa Ludtke sitting with Howard Cosell and explaining why she needed access to locker rooms.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Melissa Ludtke talked baseball – specifically about her legal action against Major League Baseball – on ABC Sports.

The decision came down on September 25, 1978, with the federal district could finding that Kuhn’s decision violated Ludtke’s 14th Amendment Rights of Equal Protection and due process, including her right to pursue her profession. The court held that Ludtke had been treated differently from her colleagues based solely on her gender. That decision applied only to the New York Yankees and Yankee stadium, but it put other MLB teams on notice that their policies had to change. When Peter Ueberroth took over as  Commissioner in 1984, he opened up MLB locker rooms to women across the board.

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 players in various states of undress. And they’re usually cramped, smelly, humid – definitely not the kind of place anyone would choose to hang out. And though pro sports leagues were starting to mandate that women have locker room access, that doesn’t mean the players were on board. And while pro sports teams had to allow women into the locker rooms, they didn’t control what happened once they got in there.

While playing for the Detroit Tigers in 1990, Jack Morris infamously said to the Free Press’s Jennifer Frey, “I don’t talk to people when I’m naked, especially women, unless they’re on top of me or I’m on top of them.”

Lisa Saxon, who covered the Angels for the LA Daily News remembers “"Going in the locker room, knots would get in my stomach," Lisa says. "It actually is a physically uncomfortable thing to do because you didn’t know what you would face. And at the very least you would have jockstraps thrown at you and dirty undergarments. And that was an everyday occurrence, and then you would just build onto that what might happen. And you just hoped for the best when you went in."

Lisa Nehus Saxon, right, Melissa Ludtke, center, Maya Ludtke (Melissa's daughter), left at the Baseball Hall of Fame's baseball diamond for the hall's induction of Claire Smith. July 2018

The wonderful Claire Smith, the first woman in America to have an MLB beat (she covered the Yankees for the Hartford Courant), tells a story in the ESPN documentary Let Them Wear Towels about standing in the hallway crying after being sworn at and physically pushed out of the Padres locker room in 1984 while up against a deadline.

Melissa Ludtke, left, Claire Smith, center, Lisa Nehus Saxon, right, in the Baseball Hall of Fame, celebrating Claire Smith's induction as the first women to ever be inducted into the hall.

[Addition to Julie's narrative] For Only a Game (NPR) story about women reporters, Major League Baseball and locker rooms, go to this audio story on its podcast. It was recorded during Claire Smith's induction in the Baseball Hall of Fame, July 2018

Smith describes being denied access as “humiliating,” saying being barred from the locker room made it look and feel like she was trying to get into someplace she didn’t have a right to be, which was obviously not the case. She also tells a heart-warming story about Steve Garvey riding to her rescue- coming out into the hallway to give her the quotes she needed and vowing to stay as long as she needed him – as long as she stopped crying.

Dave Kingman dumped buckets of cold water over Jane Gross’s head one two separate occasions in the locker room, and once sent a rat in a corsage box (with a note saying “my name is sue”) to Susan Fornoff of the Sacramento Bee. NHL player Tiger Williams, after calling Lawrie Mifflin, the first woman sports writer for the NY Daily News a “cunt” from across the locker room,  picked her up and forcibly removed her from the locker room.

Cliff Johnson pours Champagne over Melissa Ludtke's head in the New York Yankees locker room, 1978 

And things weren’t any better for the women covering the NFL and college football. Lesley Visser, who began covering sports in 1974 and who was the first woman to ever have an NFL beat, recalls that one of her credentials said right on it that it was invalid if presented by a woman or child.

 

49ers head coach Bill Walsh refused to allow women into the locker room, and, when asked why, told Michele Himmelberg of the Sacramento Bee that she was “interfering with his season.” Himmelberg also had to go to court in 1981 to get access to the 49ers locker room.

Michele Himmelberg sues the San Francisco 49ers for locker room access, 1981

Eventually, male newspaper editors backed their women reporters for the most part. And they began lobbying NFL and college teams to allow women the same access to players as the men had. Under pressure from the same papers that covered their team and gave them free advertising, the NFL was forced to give in.

Of course, once were women were allowed into locker rooms in any given sport, columinists, cartoonists, and the general public had a field day at their expense, portraying them as wanton women who just wanted to get a look at some naked guys. In truth, though, women never asked to go into locker rooms -they simply asked to have the same access to players that their male colleagues did. It was the sports themselves that decided post-game interviews should take place in the locker room, with lots of naked men roaming around.

If you think this issue was settled by the 1990s, think again. In 1990, Lisa Olson, who was covering the Patriots for the Boston Herald went public about being harassed by New England players in the locker room. Olson was confronted by several naked players, one of whom said “This is what you want. This is what you need. Want to take a bite out of this?” I’m leaving the names of the players out at Lisa’s request – she doesn’t want their reputations forever tarred because of that one bad day in her words, which is more generous than I would be able to be in her shoes.

Olson sued the team, which earned her being called a “classic bitch” by owner Victor Kiam. But Olson was vindicated when the players and team were fined by the league for their conduct. What followed for Olson were insults and death threats so severe, she wound up fleeing the country for Australia.

Dianemarie Collins interviews Lisa Olson in 2014 when the Association of Women in Sports Media presented its Mary Garber Award to her in recognition of her time as a pioneering sports reporter.

In Let them Wear Towels, many of the women featured talked about their sadness and loneliness because of the way they were treated by coaches, players, and their colleagues, and many went on to pursue other beats – most leaving sports altogether.

USA today’s Christine Brennan, the first woman to cover Washington’s NFL team, said in locker rooms, women have to smile and laugh and be a little bit deaf and a little bit blind, but stories persist to this day of players, some beloved by fans off the field, still engaging in harassing behavior towards women in the locker room. In the whisper network that exists among women sports reporter, everyone knows who those guys are, though the general public would probably be shocked at some of the names.

"In the field of sports journalism, female reporters have long been a rarity. The Washington Post stands out for assigning female journalists to lead its coverage of the four major Washington D.C. sports teams: Liz Clarke on the Redskins, Candace Buckner on the Wizards, Isabelle Khurshudyan on the Capitals and Chelsea Janes on the Nationals. They share what drew them to the male-dominated world of sports journalism and what the landscape looks like for women entering the field today." From Washington Post, March 6, 2017

I’m thrilled about our guest this week. Melissa Ludtke, former sports reporter for Sports Illustrated, sued for access to the Yankees’ locker room in 1978, and that case has long been considered a watershed moment for women in sports writing. Thanks so much for being here this week: 

The podcast.

Circling Home: Girls' Basketball Rekindles an Old Love

Dave Kindred with members of the Morton High School Lady Potters basketball team. (ESPN)

Is knowing Dave Kindred and admiring him and his sportswriting, as I do, what drew me to read this story? Perhaps. But if my curiosity about what Dave's doing these days wasn't my primary reason, then the headline would have pulled me in. 

Legendary sportswriter returns to roots by covering local girls' basketball

In an extraordinary career covering just about every major sports event there is to cover, Dave was awarded sports journalism's highest honor, the Red Smith Award. He's a member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. Then, in 2010, he retired, and he and his wife circled back to where they'd grown up in rural Illinois, and there he's become the beat reporter covering the Morton High School Lady Potters basketball team. (His stories are in this blog on the team's website.) He receives no pay but the "job" comes with lots of spirit-reviving benefits.

“Dave sits alone two rows behind the Lady Potter bench in mud-splattered hiking boots, blue jeans and a green Masters Tournament wind breaker. What’s left of his thinning gray hair sprays out from beneath a red 2017 Masters ball cap, the bill shading trained eyes that follow the ball up and down the court through wire-rimmed spectacles and occasionally glance down to scribble a basket or name or note in his handheld notebook.”

— Story by Tony Rehagen, ESPNW

After reading Tony's story about Dave, I had to share it – in part because so few high school women's basketball teams receive any news coverage at all. With Dave writing their games, these young women have one of the most accomplished scribes. In writing about this girls' team, Dave is finding renewed joy in life as he copes with his wife's devastating illness.

Before I tell you more about Dave's life today, here's a bit about his career. He was "a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The National Sports Daily, Sporting News, and Golf Digest. He has written nine books. For "Around the World in 18 Holes," he flew 37,319 miles to 21 countries on four continents with his sports-writing pal, Tom Callahan. (I reported the 1984 Summer Olympics with Tom who wrote sports for Time magazine and I was a correspondent. From those Games, here's my story about Carl Lewis, who tied Jesse Owens' track and field record by winning four gold medals in those games.)

Despite the Lady Potters winning three Illinois High School Association Class 3A State Championships, as the smallest Illinois town (population 16,000) to ever win a 3A title in any sport, few people show up to watch these girls play.

The Lady Potters 2018 team, from the Morton basketball website

Let's pick up Tony's narrative about the Lady Potters:

“Few patrons take advantage of the hefty return on the free admission. The cozy Potterdome bleachers are only half-full on this frigid December Friday, and many of those parents and students have trickled in midway through this opening act to get good seats for the main event: The Potter varsity boys, whose lone banner is an Elite 8 showing back in 2011. The cheerleaders who bounce out onto the hardwood to try to keep folks engaged during intermissions are working their first Lady Potters game this year, as is the dance squad that will perform at halftime — of the boys’ game.

But the girls have one thing — besides the monopoly on space in the trophy case out front — that the boys don’t; something that really any team in any sport, male or female, amateur or professional, would be lucky to have: David Kindred. He’s not a player’s parent or grandparent, uncle or cousin. He’s not a teacher or administrator; not a coach or scout. He’s not technically even a reporter. In fact, few outside of the tight-knit Lady Potters community know his name — and most of them don’t fully grasp who he is, and even they don’t understand why he is here.”

— Story by Tony Rehagen, ESPNW

Early on in Tony's story we learn that Cheryl, his life partner and Dave's high school sweetheart and wife of 55 years, suffered a catastrophic stroke in Dec. 2015. Each day Dave spends time at her bedside, though she remains unresponsive to his visits. One day soon after her stroke a visitor suggested to Dave that he step away from her bedside for a little while and go to back to watching the girls play basketball. He and Cheryl had gone to their games and Dave had begun to write about them. He's not missed one of their games since that day.

“What he saw was simplicity. “There was nothing bad about it,” he says. “Everything was good. I didn’t care about the experience or the spectacle. I just watched the game. This is pure — it’s such a cliché — but these games are for the kids.” And why the girls? Sure, there’s the tired answer that the girls game is more rooted in the fundamentals. But Kindred’s answer goes deeper, back to a scene in his sister’s kitchen where his sister, Cheryl, a family friend, and her 12-year-old daughter, Carly, were talking about cheerleading. All three of the women had stood on the sidelines, waving their pompoms. Kindred wondered if Carly wanted to follow suit.

”No,” she said. “I’m going to be the one they cheer for.”

”She had me at ‘no,’” Kindred says.”

— Story by Ton Rehagen, ESPNW

Years after my sportswriting career had ended and I was the editor of Nieman Reports, a magazine about journalism published by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, I reached out to Dave to ask him to write about sportswriting in the time of social media. I commend his story to you for in so many ways it is the anthesis of the kind of sports writing he's delighting in being able to do today.

As Dave told Peoria Public Radio in a story called "Dave Kindred's Search for the 'Essence of Sports,' he observed: “You get so caught up in the hoopla of a major sports event, you forget what matters . . . If you pay attention, you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. If you work at it, you can make a girls’ high school basketball game as riveting as the Super Bowl.”

In that same collection of stories Marie Hardin wrote a story I titled "A Shrinking Sports Beat: Women’s Teams, Athletes," reminding us of the tough climb women athletes still face in trying to receive news coverage for their games. As her story made clear,

“Women’s sports coverage is shrinking—not growing—even as more women and girls are competing in sports. A recent study of ESPN found that between 1999 and 2009 the time given to coverage of women’s sports on that network’s “SportsCenter” dropped from almost nothing to a bit less than almost nothing—from slightly more than 2 percent to less than 1.5 percent. What’s happened to the coverage of women’s sports during the past few years at newspapers, where there have been dramatic reductions and a reshuffling of staff as well as competitive pressures from bloggers, has not been systematically studied. But I feel safe in contending that women’s coverage hasn’t generally increased.”

— Marie Hardin, Nieman Reports, Winter 2010

Need further proof of this downward trajectory, check out this video documentary produced by the University of Minnesota Tucker Center to describe findings from their report on Media Coverage & Female Athletics. A key finding –  "40 % of all athletes are women, but only 4% are represented in the media – and too often how they look is more important than their skills." 

I urge you to read Tony's story about Dave and the Lady Potters. And next time the girls are playing basketball at your local school, head over there. You might be surprised at how much you – and hopefully your kids will be with you – enjoy the show.

Girls & Sports: Life's Lessons in the Games We Play

Amherst Junior High School, author second from right

In seventh grade I tried out for the cheerleading squad. It's what girls did, especially those who wanted to be popular. Girls rooted for the boys who played the games. On NFL sidelines and near midline of basketball arenas, scantily clad women still do. Perhaps this is why I like baseball best.

By eighth grade, I left cheerleading behind, forever, and was playing on the girls' basketball team. No one showed up to watch our games except an occasional mom. Mine arrived with younger siblings who could never sit still and sometimes ran onto the court, so my mom had to leave. We didn't have cheerleaders jumping up to spell A-M-H-E-R-S-T when our team took a time out. The cheerleaders only cheered for the boys.

In the memoir I'm writing, I reflect how the rules governing girls' play on the basketball court echoed through our lives as girls off the court. Let's start with how we had to play:

“When I played on my junior high school’s basketball team, our rules dictated that before I dribbled the ball a fourth time, I had to stop to pass it. It was a silly rule, as were others, such as one that kept four teammates stuck in half of the court; they played “stationary” guard or forward, but never both at the same time, though two others on the team were allowed to be “rovers,” moving anywhere we liked. When boys played this same game, they switched effortlessly between guard and forward, depending on which team had the ball. Those who promulgated our rules wanted to be sure girls didn’t run too far, play too fast, or compete too fiercely. To compete wasn’t what girls did.”

— Melissa Ludtke, forthcoming "Locker Room Talk"

Off the court, societal norms constricted us in similar ways, and with similar consequences:

“A boy was free in ways I was not. He got to decide, much more than I did, where, what, how and when things happened in his life. On the basketball court, when a boy saw an opening, his path to the basket, he dribbled the ball for as long as made sense, zigzagging his way to get where he wanted to be. Rules weren’t the only thing holding girls back. Attitudes did, too. What grown-ups thought girls couldn’t do, we didn’t see ways to do. Still, I don’t remember us using the word ‘unfair’ to describe what was happening to us. We knew nothing different. It was just how things were, the natural order about which I heard few complaints. Nor did those older than I was appear upset that girls played by one set of rules and boys by another. So I wasn’t, either.”

— Melissa Ludtke, forthcoming "Locker Room Talk"

Once I was on the basketball team, I never was a cheerleader again. From then on, I always played on one team or another – volleyball in the fall, basketball in the winter, tennis in the spring. In the summer I skippered our family's cat boat as the only girl at the helm in races against the guys. In college I discovered rowing – it's my passion, still – and became an inaugural member of Wellesley College's intercollegiate rowing team – in the same year Title IX was birthed.

Wellesley intercollegiate crew team, 1972. Author, second from left.

With my own girlhood sports experiences, I was lucky. It was the 1960s and America was a decade away from Title IX opening opportunities for girls. As I found out later, back then few girls my age had sports teams they could play on. In my hometown of Amherst, MA, we did.

On the basketball court, we were the Lady Hurricanes. We won a few games each season, lost a few others. A scorekeeper tracked the points we scored and our fouls. Not many spectators came. I don't have a single photograph of me playing in a game, expect one in a yearbook I can no longer find. Nor can I go back to our school newspaper to find stories about our games. No one wrote about the Lady Hurricanes.

Until Maddy Blais did.

By then it was the mid-1990s and after just about being state champions for several years in a row, the Lady Hurricanes finally did win the state final in 1993. That season Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Maddy Blais, a journalism professor at the nearby University of Massachusetts, followed the Lady Hurricanes as they finally triumphed after the succession of soul-crusting defeats.

Maddy knew these girls' story was worth telling. She titled her book: "In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle," and I commend her book as a terrific read. 

When she set out to write this story, it didn't matter to Maddy that the Lady Hurricanes played in gyms sparsely filled with spectators – until a championship seemed within their reach. She came to tell a story about athletes founding within themselves what it takes to overcome self-doubt, push through adversity, mend differences, and bond as a team to achieve their shared goal.

Theirs is a universal story, though one too often reserved as a narrative fit for male heroes, especially when it comes to sports. Yet this story echoes today as Americans celebrate the U.S. women's hockey team's gold medal. Four years ago some of these same women hockey players lost In a heartbreaking overtime game to Canada. While battling powers that be in their sport for the gender equity in pay, treatment and respect they felt they deserved, these women dug deep within themselves and built this team's mental fortitude so they'd not be defeated again.

In my next blog post I'll write about Dave Kindred, a sportswriter who covered every major sports event that a man of his generation could attend and received awards recognizing his excellence. Now in a small town in Illinois, Dave attends every game the Morton High School Lady Potters basketball team play and writes a story about each one.

Where These Young People Lead Us, I'm Going

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

One week after the Valentine's Day massacre that killed 17 students and faculty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, survivors will bring their #NeverAgain movement rally to Tallahassee, Florida's state capitol, and meet with legislators. "No more BS," they shouted, full-voiced at their rally on the Broward County courthouse steps.

When I was their age, I protested, too – against racial discrimination and the war in Vietnam. Their fight against the monopolistic and harmful power of the NRA came to them in the personal terror and horror of the murders that visited their school last week. They inspire me, and where they are leading, I'm going. These young people possess moral power, and their outrage paired with determination will bring about legislative changes we desperately need but stubbornly have withstood calls for action in the past.

“The leaders of America’s suddenly reignited gun-control movement hold court with cable news networks in suburban parks, strategize in a headquarters at their parents’ house and in some cases are too young to vote or buy a gun. ... A group of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School upper-classmen has turned their anguish into activism. Still grieving, they have launched an all-out assault on assault weapons, pledging that their school will be the last to become a slaughterhouse and warning politicians to get on board or get out of their way. ... They’ve given voice to a new generation of school shooting survivors and thrust themselves into the middle of a national controversy — a burden heavy for anyone, much less a group of mourning teenagers.”

— Miami Herald, Turning anguish into activism, Parkland students push America’s gun-control movement

Marjory Stoneman Douglas student rally, Broward County, Florida

These young people belong to a generation in which more than 150,000 of their fellow students, attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools, have experienced a shooting on their campus since the killings at Colorado’s Columbine High School in 1999, according to a tabulation by John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich.

These Florida students also embody the feisty, determined spirit of their activist namesake, Marjory Stoneman Douglas. In 108 years of life, she had neither time nor interest in reflecting on questions about herself. when Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich once asked her if she'd ever been discouraged in her fight to protect the Everglades, Marjory responded:

“‘What does it matter if I’ve been discouraged or encouraged over the years?’ she said, brusquely. ‘This thing’s got to be done. It’s not a question of how I feel from moment to moment.’”

— Marjory Stoneman Douglas

These young people are emblematic of the fighter that Marjory was. She might never have used a hashtag for her campaigns, but she never gave in and never gave up as she took on causes and battled against powerful forces that daunted others.

“She had battled governments, developers, engineers, sugar cane industrialists and the apathy of normal people. She had pushed so hard and for so long that the state had finally committed to preserving one of the world’s great wetlands. We have her to thank for Everglades National Park. ... As a young woman, born before women had the right to vote, she lobbied for women’s suffrage. She campaigned for civil rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. She fought for proper plumbing in Miami’s poor, black neighborhoods and worked on behalf of migrant workers.
”

— Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune

We'll hear these student's voices as more of us – old and young, Democrat and Republican – join their chorus. Let this #NeverAgain movement grow until even the most NRA-bought, gun-happy legislator can no longer hide from these young people's message. This week Florida legislators – a majority of whom are beholden to the NRA – must act as a first step in putting an end to our nation's mental instability when it comes to living in ways we do with our 2nd Amendment. 

Turns out Marjory and I have a few things in common, though I can only wish that my activism could be as consequential as hers. She and I were Wellesley College graduates, separated by six decades, and each inspired by the college's motto, Non Ministrari sed Ministrare. "Not to be ministered unto, but to minister," not to be served, but to serve in ways that make the world a better place to live for others.

The Fool's Club at Wellesley College.  Marjory Stoneman, kneeling in the foreground as April's Fool.

Marjory and I each married a man to whom we were ill suited, left our marriages soon after, and never married again. We were journalists and authors, with her book being The Everglades: River of Grass, first published in 1947. Preserving the Everglades is the fight for which she is best known; for me, it's climate change activism with Mothers Out Front, doing what I can to secure a livable climate for our children.

With climate change activism, young people are leading the way. Pause for a moment to take note of the youngsters who are in federal court accusing the federal government of violating their Constitutional rights by "knowing about the dangerous climate impacts of burning fossil fuels and supporting the developing of fossil fuel production anyway.

Eugene, Oregon

These youngsters filed their lawsuit in September 2015 and it remains in the federal court system. This week President Donald Trump was added as a defendant: This lawsuit, filed by 21 kids, challenges the federal government to slow climate change. 

 

Defying Stereotypes: It's What Girls and Women Do

Chloe Kim, gold medalist in snowboarding 2018 Winter Olympics

As the White mother of my 21-year old Asian daughter, Maya, who was born in China during its one-child policy, I've learned a lot about the assumptions that Westerners too often make about Asian girls and women. We call it unconscious bias, a term describing how we perceive others even if we don't know that these biases are driving us to do so.

Because Maya has shared with me what it's like for her to move in the world, first as a girl, now a young woman with an Asian face, I've been able to learn how powerful Americans' unconscious biases are. This is especially true when it comes to labeling an Asian person based entirely on her Asian face. I'm offering a few words from an essay that Maya recently wrote touching on some challenges she has had in coming to terms with the duality of her identity as my daughter:

“I struggled early on as I navigated my shifting sense of identity. My mere appearance presented challenges. Strangers would often assume my family was Chinese, and that I spoke Mandarin fluently. Small stories reinforced this daily. At a gas station with my mom, I was buckled into the back seat. My mom was talking with the man pumping gas when I heard her mention that I was her daughter. He laughed in disbelief. Yes, I do not look like my family, and my appearance has been made fun of. I think it helps explain why growing up I sometimes felt lonely.”

— Maya Ludtke

Maya and her mom

Like any other Asian girl, growing up she dealt with assumptions made of her. People would presume that Maya had mastered a musical instrument – isn't that what Asian girls do? She didn't. Or that she excels in math; she doesn't. Or they think they know about her temperament just by seeing her face; they don't. A lot else is occasionally bundled with these most typical stereotypical assumptions.

All of this explains why I'm thrilled that Jiayang Fan's wrote her essay in The New Yorker in which she reminds us how sports can be a powerful vehicle for shifting our biased perceptions.

Kim Yo Jong, Chloe Kim, and the Shifting Images of Asian and Asian-American Women at the Olympics

Here her opening paragraph that kicks her essay into high gear, where it remains:

“Whether she appears onscreen or in the popular imagination, the Asian woman tends to fall into one of several predictable archetypes: the evil temptress, obliging mistress, loyal servant, fanatical tiger mom, ruthless overachiever. This facile parsing offers the convenience of manageable stereotypes and feigned knowledge. One of the pleasures of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang has been the number of Asian and Asian-American women defying the stereotypes. Among those who have most captivated audiences this past week are Chloe Kim, the teen-age snowboarder from Southern California who won a gold medal in the half-pipe; Mirai Nagasu, the first American woman to execute a triple axel at the Olympics; and Nagasu’s teammate Maia Shibutani, who, performing in the ice-dance competition with her brother, Alex, also helped the Americans win the team bronze medal. (Half of Team U.S.A.’s figure skaters are Asian-American.) On the other side, so to speak, are the North Korean women, whose presence has been used to reinforce some of the old categories: the ‘army of beauties’ cheerleaders and, especially, Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of Kim Jong Un, whose appearance eventually managed to incite pretty much every stereotype on record.”

— Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker

As I girl, I played sports. As a young woman, I wrote sports. I know the power of sports to push societal change and alter societal perceptions – witness Jackie Robinson in baseball, the end of apartheid in South Africa, propelled by a global sports boycott, and the raised fists on Olympic podium in 1968 Summer Games.

Of course, let's give thanks to American girls and women's greatest lever of all, Title IX.

How Title IX First Changed the World of Women's Sports, Time magazine

 

Sexy Sports Illustrated Hijacks #MeToo: Thumbs Down on the Result

Six years I reported on sports such as baseball and basketball at Sports Illustrated. Those six years the SI Swimsuit issue was published in mid-February. Still is. Gotta snap the men out of their winter doldrums. No more NFL where they can watch men crack heads, in the week after the Super Bowl the nearly naked women issue appears. Well, a man can go ice fishing for so many winter weeks. Heck, it's what men want, its sales and focus groups tell them – time to serve up gorgeous women wearing less and less of bathing suits as each year goes by.

This year, at least, in one section, they've dispensed with bathing suits altogether.

So along with nudity, Sports Illustrated is parading the fact that for first time ever both bosses in charge of this issue are women – the editor and the photographer, also a first.

By the way they are marketing this year's issue, you'd think #MeToo linked arms with a different kind of female empowerment. All the while the editor is assuring men that no matter what's up with women they can count on SI to serve up "sexy" images.

So how are the 2018 reviews? 

"Spectacularly Silly" – The New Yorker

"Ridiculous?" – Fashion

"the first shoot in which 'models were as much participants as objects' – Vanity Fair

The opening words of Vanity Fair's dive into this 2018 issue:

“On the short list of American media institutions invented to take commercial advantage of the male gaze, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue surely ranks in the top-three, mostly-safe-for-work division. One could be forgiven, then, for thinking that the staff of the issue were reconsidering their efforts last fall as #MeToo trended, stories about sexual harassment consumed news cycles, and audiences thought more deeply about the ways their media and entertainment were made—and who was making them. It turns out the issue’s staff had already been on their way to rethinking all of it. Editor MJ Day and her core team, comprised of all women, had decided as early as last spring to try in 2018 to make a magazine where models were as much participants as objects.”

— Vanity Fair

Let's pause to consider the word "objects."  Really? SI sees its models as much as objects as participants? Sounds about right. Can we agree that the women are objectified. I know some argue that being nude or nearly nude in these magazine spreads so men can ogle their bodies is an act of empowerment. I'm not in that camp; one reason I'm not is how often some of the same male sports fans objectify women who broadcast and write sports – undressing them on Twitter et al. with descriptions and threats that strip them of their humanity.

“The consequences of inhabiting an objectified body are, in many ways, what #MeToo is all about, and there’s something spectacularly silly, not to mention tone-deaf, about Sports Illustrated fighting fire with fire. The ‘In Her Own Words’ shoot got a predictable amount of flak on Twitter; it seems that removing models’ remaining scraps of clothes in the name of empowerment has not been widely taken in the liberating spirit in which it was intended. ”

— Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

In trying to "mirror" the #MeToo movement on their model's bodies, SI explained its mission this way; they are "allowing women to exist in the world without being harassed or judged regardless of how they like to present themselves." Yet, as editor MJ Day assured its predominantly male audience for this annual post-Super Bowl issue, this issue is “always going to be sexy, no matter what is happening.”

Again, a word check:  "Allowing" this to happen? Perhaps, a wiser word choice would be "enabling" if this is such an empowering act. 

Perhaps all of this explain why on the brink of Sports Illustrated's sale to Meredith, Time Inc. announced the launch of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Enterprises. Here's how New York Post greeted with this news:

Sports Illustrated is going into the modeling business

“.. the launch of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Enterprises, a branding and licensing venture announced this week by the Time Inc. title, which hopes to turn the popular swimsuit issue that hits in mid-February into a year-round enterprise to offset declines in SI’s print ad business.”

— The New York Post

Meet SI's 2018 Swimsuit Calendar. Stay tuned for more as the year moves on. My hunch is that this is one part of SI's "editorial" content that won't be tampered with by Meredith.