“Locker Room Talk, A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside” by Melissa Ludtke is Revealing In All the Right Ways

Gloucester’s tough-knocks commercial fishing seaport was a fitting place for Melissa Ludtke to explain the rough-stuff of her work-place experiences. She’s the author of “Locker Room Talk, A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside”, a non-fiction accounting of her place in sports journalism, a space once reserved exclusively for men.

In 1978, Ludtke’s experiences as a sports reporter splashed across National headlines. She hadn’t intended to become a role model in the tough business of sports reporting or civil-rights but that’s where the tides of fortune took her.

Inside Gloucester’s Sawyer Free library, the charismatic author was interviewed by Aime Alley Card, author of The Tigerbelles, Olympic Legends from Tennessee. Their easy rapport hooked the audience eager to hear of Ludtke’s unlikely path into an old boy’s club and the a federal court decision, Ludtke vs.Kuhn, that affirmed equal rights under the 14th amendment.

Aime Alley Card, author of The TIgerbelles Olympic Legends from Tennessee State with Melissa Ludtke in Gloucester 11/9/24

Ludtke explained, as a young woman her passion was to study Art History at Wellesley College. Coupling her proximity to Boston and fluency with all things Red-Sox-Nation the co-ed was familiar with colloquial past-times of Bostonians who summa in Hyannisport.

After earning her BA from Wellesley and unclear about her career course, the lovaa-of-summaa found herself weighing her options while walking the Cape Cod shoreline. Fatefully, she noticed a sailboat at risk of grounding. The young woman righted the sloop, helmed by family friend Ethel Kennedy, sending it and the crew back to sea. Over her shoulder, Kennedy thanked Ludtke yelling, ‘Come on over for dinner tonight at 6:30.” 

And so, the unlikely career of a potential art-historian turned sports-journalist was launched serendipitously that night at a Kennedy Compound dinner table when football-great and Kennedy friend Frank Gifford said to the young beach walker,” For a girl, you know a lot about sports. If you’re in New York, I’d be happy to introduce you to people who work at ABC Sports.”  Ludtke’s life story is filled with unanticipated moments like that one, but that’s one of the reasons this book is so captivating.

More than being in the right-place at the right time, Melissa Ludtke’s successes are due to her work-ethic and tenacity. *’After moving to New York City, she added unpaid evening hours at ABC Sports to her 40-hour secretarial job. By sitting in video studios, she learned the technical aspects of sports broadcasting, and then live sporting events, which she worked as a $25.00-a-day go-for, which meant taking on whatever tasks a producer, director or broadcaster asked her to do. By doing these things, she developed connections for herself in sports media.’

The journalist earned the privilege of covering sports as men did because she hustled to get the story, never intending to become the story.  However, in September 1978, Ludtke and her employer TIME Inc. made news when they sued Bowie Kuhn, Commissioner of Baseball and Leland MacPhail, President of the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs and the New York Yankees, with others, for excluding the accredited reporter, on the basis of sex, from the locker room of the Yankee clubhouse in Yankee Stadium.

Represented by Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr., and colleagues, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, after due process, the court determined the defendant’s policy of total exclusion of women sports reporters from the locker room at Yankee Stadium was not substantially related to the privacy protection objective and to deny Ms. Ludtke access to post-game locker rooms deprived the plaintiff of her fundamental right to pursue her career. (The Complaint from ‘Melissa Ludtke and Time, Inc V. Bowie Kuhn, Commissioner of Baseball, et al.; Court case to provide equal access to athletes for women sports reporters, 12/29/1977’ can be reviewed in National Archives, Records of District Courts of the United States. )

“Locker Room Talk, A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside” chronicles one hard-working woman’s story of our evolving work-place zeitgeist.

Melissa Ludtke and STP-News in Gloucester 11/9/24

In support of all hard-working women, STP- thanks author *Melissa Ludtke for fact-checks and stylistic contributions to this article.