On August 26, 2024, Emma Tiedemann and Rylee Pay became the first female duo to broadcast a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. The historic moment made just this year can be traced back to the trailblazing actions of former sports journalist, Melissa Ludtke.

In her book, “Locker Room: A Woman’s Struggle To Get Inside,” Ludtke recounts the story of her groundbreaking legal case against officials in Major League Baseball, who denied women access to teams’ locker rooms. She won her case, and the ruling opened doors for the hundreds of female sports journalists who came after her.

Ludtke traces the origins of the case back to October 1977, when she – then 26 years old – was working for Sports Illustrated and covering the biggest story of her career: the World Series. During the fifth inning, Ludtke was asked to leave her seat and report to the main press box, where she was told that despite gaining permission from both the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers, she would not be given access to the teams’ clubhouses, which include the locker rooms, where male reporters were allowed to enter and interview players.

Bowie Kuhn, the MLB commissioner in 1978, explained that he thought inviting women reporters into the locker room was not respectful of the players’ privacy. But Ludtke states that her access to the clubhouse and locker rooms was denied even before games.  

“Not one player changed out of his uniform during that time,” Ludtke said. “So that had nothing to do with nudity. It had to do with tracking that we can do back through history. Of the few women who showed up and the places that they were excluded from, we were viewed as invaders.”

For Ludtke her message was simple: “It was about equal treatment.”

What she wasn’t ready for was the response to her lawsuit. Ludtke heard about the suit going public while at a play with her parents during the holidays, overhearing chatter that focused not on her profession and access but on her morality.

“It just really hit me that very first night that I was in for a very different ride than I thought I was,” she said. “I didn’t quite understand the extent of it because the story went global.”

In an interesting twist, Ludtke’s case ended up before Justice Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman on the bench for the District Court for the Southern District of New York, who also played a role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision of Brown v Board of Education.

Ludtke said she feels content to know she’s part of the bigger picture of equal rights for women in the media and in sports.

“Once this case was resolved, and once I saw what it meant to young girls and women, many of whom wrote to me and shared their views – that they’d always loved sports and always wanted to work in it – now they felt they could,” Ludtke said. “That was gratifying.”

Guest

  • Melissa Ludtke, former sports journalist and author of “Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle To Get Inside