Meet the woman who fought Major League Baseball for equal locker room access for all reporters

Melissa Ludtke's new book "Locker Room Talk" tells her story for the first time.

This one is personal, sports fans. 

I always want to bring guests onto my show who can educate and entertain you. And Melissa Ludtke will do that. But having her on the show is big for me because I wouldn't be doing what I do as I do it without her. 

She is a pioneer, a trailblazer for women in sports media because of the legal battle she waged against Major League Baseball in 1978. She wanted equal locker room access, and she got it. It changed her life, and it changed mine too. 

Now she's written a book, a memoir about her experience fighting for that access: “Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside.” It's set for release on August 16, and I'm so honored to be joined by Melissa to talk about all of this on The Jenni Carlson Show. 

You can find my content here on my Substack as well as YouTube. Subscribe!

Episode highlights

2:45: Why did Melissa decide to undertake the writing of “Locker Room Talk”?

10:00: What was it like for Melissa rewinding on some of the stories written during the time she sued Major League Baseball for equal access for women in the media?

16:40: What details of the case were Melissa excited to share in the book?

24:27: The main character in the book is Melissa. What stood out to her about the person she was in 1978 when she went to court?

35:28: When did Melissa realize she was going to be a central figure in Time Inc’s lawsuit against Major League Baseball?

42:05: What was it like for Melissa to rewind on her case’s day in court?

49:08: Why Melissa didn’t go to the ballpark the day after a judge’s ruling opened up the locker room to her and all female reporters.

55:53: What does Melissa hope readers will take away from her book?

Producer: Jacquelyn Musgrove

Creative Director: Michael Lane

Transcript

Jenni: Well, Melissa, it is an absolute honor to have you on my podcast show. I can't tell you how excited I am. We want to talk about the book, of course, but first can I fangirl a little bit? I mean, you were laying the groundwork for me to become what I am, a sports columnist, before I even knew I wanted to do what I'm doing. So thank you isn't enough, but thank you.

Melissa: Well, thank goodness I did because I get such joy seeing your Substacks come through. Without them, I'm not sure that I'd be as clued in as I am about what's happening in Oklahoma and in sports in general. You are part of a new tribe of women who have fabulous podcasts about sports, newsletters about sports. I mean, who would have ever believed this? 

It was nearly 50 years ago. … It’s a lesson in patience, perseverance, persistence and sort of that long arc that we always talk about. So it's great to finally meet you, and I'm eager to kind of talk about the past, talk about the present. You know, we'll do it all.

Jenni: Yes, absolutely. Let's start with a big-picture question about your book, “Locker Room Talk” which again will be out there for people to get August 16, which is so awesome. It dives into your case against Major League Baseball, of course, seeking equal access for women in the media. Why did you want to write this? You reference in the book, it took you several years, but why was this an important project for you to undertake?

Melissa: Well, several years actually is about a dozen years from when I first got the idea, when I actually started visiting my papers and my documents, which by then I had donated to the Radcliffe Institute on Women's History. And so I had to go and kind of let people know I was coming. They'd roll my papers out to me. You know, I almost felt like I should be wearing white gloves to touch things, and in fact, a lot of them are the original newspaper clippings from that time. I couldn't bring any sharp instruments in with me. But I wanted to have them there so they would be preserved. And so I began visiting them maybe a dozen years ago, only to sort of reacquaint myself with the story and begin to photograph the documents, begin to take some notes, begin to have those documents tell me back the story as I could remember it and piece it together with some journal entries I did and the rest. 

And that sort of journey back was begun with the idea that perhaps I would do a book, but I really struggled with what that book would be. And one of the reasons it took me a dozen years is that I wrote almost an entire book before I threw it away and started the book that we have now. Here's the reason I did: because as sort of as an amateur at this kind of both bringing the personal and the professional story together, I really began it in just a chronological telling, as one would about my girlhood and then into this. And as I wrote that, I became increasingly bored with writing this story. I said to myself, ‘There's been almost a million, if you go on Google, hits on this story in one way or another. Locker rooms, Melissa Ludtke, whatever, women in baseball.’ If people want to know it, it's there. … I came to understand it as I wrote it, if I'd written that first book, the book that I've written now would maybe be at most two or three chapters in a much longer book. 

But what I began to realize is that it was my turn to tell my story. I began to realize in those clips that it was the men who were telling my story in the 70s. And because they were telling it, it actually wasn't my story. It was a story about naked men and sexual privacy and with me portrayed as potentially a woman who wanted only access to the locker room to go in and leer at men's bodies. So it was told from a totally male perspective.

I don't know whether you agree with this, Jenni, but most of my friends who I've tried this out with: women do not have the same interest in staring at naked bodies of the opposite sex that men apparently do. And so, you my story had been stolen from me and told by the people who held the megaphones back then. They were all men.

There were a few women, and I touch on that in the book, many of the differences that came out with the few women who had a pen or a microphone. So what I realized is that the story I wanted to tell was the story of a battle for equal rights in an era when that battle was happening across the board for women, not just in baseball. But because baseball was such a bastion, such a cultural touchstone, you know, as the all-family game and all of that, it was our national pastime. There were advertisements, you know, about apple pie, Chevrolet, and baseball. It was that big, big cultural icon. And here I was moving against it as one woman. 

So, that's the story I now get to tell. What I did is, I decided the story was about the legal case. It was about the hearing. And the reason that you're not going to find any stories, if you Google, you can Google forever, you can Bing forever, you can do whatever you want, you're not going to find a story about my hearing because no male reporter sports writer who covered this thing ad nauseam, bothered to show up in the courtroom on the day that the hearing was held. 

Because that wasn't their story. It wasn't laughable. It wasn't something they could mock. It wasn't silly. It was actually about a woman at that point just who wanted to do her job, wanted the equal opportunity to do her job. Now that wasn't a sexy headline. It wasn't a funny story. It wasn't, as Red Smith once said, ‘fluff in the locker room.’ It was a woman who had been through a hell of a lot of mocking and skits done on Saturday Night Live and the whole thing, who actually had her day in court. 

Even though I knew by then, and this is April of 1978, I knew by then that I had lost my case in the court of public opinion, this was my chance to win it in a court of law. And that, in fact, we did. We can talk more about that. But it's a long answer, but I hope it makes sense in filling in that context about why I decided to finally understand that the book I had to write, the story I had to tell was the only one that wasn't told.

Jenni: You mentioned these stories that everybody else was telling and it's just ridiculousness, some of the headlines and some of the storylines that were taken back then. But I have to imagine in the moment you are aware of some of what was happening, obviously, but we didn't have the Google ability when you were going to court against Major League Baseball. To go back and read what the story of your case was what was that like all these years later to dive into some of that?

Melissa: It was a revelation. I had a lot of memories from that time. I had very intense emotional reactions that I remembered well. We can get into it if you want, but I write very honestly, I think. I mean, I hope people will find that I do. Other people have said it to me already who have read advanced copies of the book that I'm almost too honest at times that it makes them kind cringe at sort of the level of detail that I get into. But it took a personal toll on me, which I've never forgotten. But at the same time, it shaped me in a way that I don't think a lot of 26 year olds are shaped. It prepared me for growing a very thick skin, although those words and the things that were said about me penetrated. Because what was said about me … let me just back up for a second because even though we might not have had Google, we might not have had the internet, and in fact, we didn't. One of the things I did have because I worked at Time Incorporated, was that I had a clipping service from literally around the world. And so every few days, a stapled packet, pretty thick of articles would come in. I mean, I still have some in my scrapbook in the files that are in Radcliffe that are written in Finnish, you know, or written in other languages because it became a global story. So I certainly saw the headlines. I certainly read them in the New York papers, which were very eager to continue to tell this story. I got the copies of the cartoons that ran around the country. I saw the syndicated columns that appeared with different headlines on them. 

And I might say that it was a heyday for the men of the copy desk. I mean, because if you can mix up, let's see, catching a damsel at the plate. I mean, there were all sorts of kind of puns. And of course, if you're on a copy desk and you're doing headline after headline, this story comes along, you think, ‘I can have some fun with this one.’ So it was something about bare chests. It was, the ladies sees the players bare or something, all that is bare to see. There was just a whole variety of stuff.

Art Buchwald, who was the satirist of the time at the Washington Post, took the poem, “Casey at the Bat,” And instead of Casey striking out on the field, he did a whole rendition of the stanzas of Casey striking out in the locker room by trying to proposition the female writer who was coming in. So every kind of creative way that the men could sort of juxtapose puns or laughter or pictures that would be rather inflammatory or provocative. I always was portrayed with huge breasts. I mean, it wasn't that it was me, but the cartoonist’s way of explaining that there was a woman in the locker room was to show her whole huge breasts and then the athletes sort of hairy legs. In one of them, the athlete is reaching out with his arm and he's saying, ‘Here, sweetie, you know, just try on these and then we'll be equal.’ So he's giving me a pair of underpants as though the quality or the equal access or the equity that I'm looking for is with the ball players, not with the male sports writers. So it was sort of have a laugh at the expense of what is very silly story.

So I mentioned before that, I'd lost in the court of public opinion. I'm 73 years old now, I was 26 then. What I learned is, because I was actually a plaintiff in a case, you really learn it when you are, is you see the result come down, you're ecstatic, you think, ‘OK, well, tomorrow the world will change.’ I mean, the law’s come down, the judge put her gavel down, she's written this order. And in fact, here we are 50 years later, and yes, we've made progress, but you know, the law is a lot easier to change than the public attitudes. 

The attitudes are still there. And the women who are doing this job today face similar attitudes. We now have a word for them: misogyny. I didn't know that word back then. I didn't know what sexual harassment was back then. We didn't have a term for it. All of these things that were happening to us, sort of out of view, are now very present in social media to the point where women utter an opinion that the men don't like and their only way to respond evidently is still to sort of turn her into a sexualized being, potentially threaten her. So we still obviously have issues of sexual harassment. There's a number of these issues that we're still working on. So, I've learned a lesson in a long life, and that is that, yes, did it matter that I went to court and had this order come down? It mattered. Did it change things right away? It absolutely did not.

Jenni: I want to get into the more of the personal side of things, but one of the things that really stood out to me about the memoir about you is that I think the journalist in you showed up, Melissa, because you really dove into the histories of not only your case, but also discrimination in the country, people involved in the case. Judge Motley. Your attorney, Fritz. I mean, there were so many details I don't know if I was expecting to find out. It filled out the story so much. Were there specific details, maybe it was personal or maybe it was more about the characters around you, that you were excited, delighted, just things that as you found them out that you were really excited to be able to share in your book?

Melissa: I didn't know any of this history then. Again, this was pre-Google. Did my attorney tell me that the woman who became our judge by a spin of a box, you know, and her card got pulled out, did he fill out her history? No. Did I go to a library and look her up? No. Did I have an inkling that she had a history behind her? Yes.

But it wasn't until I really began going back to the Radcliffe Institute, began really living in this time again, that my curiosity and yes, my journalistic instincts got to me. So I've read every book about Judge Motley. I've learned her history. I've talked to people who know her. I've met with her son. You know, I really dug in. 

Fritz is still alive and with us. So I've obviously come to know his history. He shared a lot of his biography with me. But if I can briefly kind of update why I felt so strongly that these characters that really kind of fell into my story from, I don't know, central casting. I don't think you could have done a better job. 

But Judge Motley, for those who aren't familiar with her, Constance Baker Motley, was the first black woman in our nation's history ever appointed to the federal bench. And she was appointed in 1966 by President Johnson. The man she worked with during the 50s and 60s when she was the plaintiff's attorney in major racial discrimination cases was Thurgood Marshall. She worked side by side with Thurgood. In fact, Thurgood sent her to the South to argue racial discrimination cases there in part because of the fear that if Thurgood or other men from the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund went, they well could be murdered. As was Medgar Evers, at whose home she stayed when she was in Jackson, Mississippi. Constance Baker Motley won nine of 10 cases she had to take to the Supreme Court. That was unheard of for a woman attorney, a Black woman attorney at that point. So when she is appointed in 1966 to the federal bench, she ends up being appointed to what is the mother court of our country, the Southern District Court of Manhattan, which was the only court founded before our Supreme Court. She becomes not only the first Black woman, but the first woman in the history of that court. 

And in 1978, when my suit is filed on December 29, 1977, when the court clerk spins the wheel of the available judges and pulls out a name, she remains the only woman in the history of that court to serve on it. She's one of 27 judges, and he pulls her name out. 

How could I not include this history?

Because the precedent that she had set as a plaintiff's attorney in racial discrimination cases based on the arguments of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment become the basis of my case. Now, why did they become that? Because Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an extraordinary woman who became, of course, a cultural icon herself, for six years in the early 70s had begun a strategic campaign where she started using men as plaintiffs so that she could raise the judicial scrutiny of gender. She achieves that so that gender is not as high as racial discrimination, but it is an intermediate scrutiny by the time my case is filed the next year. My case has a context in our nation's history that how could I avoid telling it? It has to be told. 

And these figures are people we know, or in Constance Baker Motley's case, people we should know. She's a hidden figure in our history. 

And then my attorney, Fritz Schwartz, Fritz had just come back from a leave from Cravath, Swaine and Moore, which was the outside counsel for Time Incorporated. He had been the youngest counsel ever to head a congressional committee, and it was the incredibly famous Church Committee, which was looking into issues of privacy and surveillance in our country. Fritz was the counsel who found the letter, the anonymous letter that was turned out to have been sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King Jr. suggesting that he commit suicide prior to accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. … He was bouncing between these careers. And so he had just returned to Cravath, Swaine and Moore, returned to becoming the outside counsel for Time Inc. But he was so tied into continuing what had happened in Washington that when he took the call to get my case, he took it in Fritz Mondale's office. And Fritz Mondale by then was the Vice President of the United States. And the two Fritzs, they were both nicknamed Fritz, had gotten to be great friends. And Fritz Mondale depended on Fritz Schwartz to actually craft the legislation and the bills that would come out of this committee work. So he took the call to take my case when he's standing in the executive office building at the White House. 

So these characters, I could bring them to life and begin to create the history of that time in my own book and in the own telling of my case. I hope I've succeeded in doing that, but that was my aim, was to really try to place this as more than just a case in a vacuum that was kind of funny and it was all about sex and all of that, but place it in a larger understanding of the things that were happening, the history that was developing over that time.

Jenni: The main character, though, Melissa, is obviously you. And you referenced the fact that telling your story from your perspective was paramount to all of this. And I thought it was just so telling that obviously, this was a huge deal and you were there on the day of the hearing and you were obviously a part of all of this. But at the time, your focus was, ‘I just need to get to games. I just need to get experience. I just need to get bylines and I need to build a reputation in this profession.’ It was very much the beginning steps of any journalist's career trying to make their way. As you were recounting that time in your life, what stood out to you just about the character of you on those pages of your book?

Melissa: The character that I portray in this book is one that no one will believe. First of all, anyone who knows me well today and knows that because I'm sort of an old woman now and I'm kind of fearless, I will kind of voice my opinions. I will fight for what I believe in. Back then, as the lone woman in a sea of men in a fortress of the patriarchy, to use a term, I was much more of a mother, may I? I really paid deference to the men. I tried to learn from them because how else was I going to learn? 

When I got to Sports Illustrated, unlike most of my colleagues who got there because they were sports writers in college or sports editors at their college papers, I kind of came in a different door. I came in through an introduction from ABC Sports, and I had no clip files. You know, the best I've done was writing a term paper with passive verbs. And here I am working with Dan Jenkins and Curry Kirkpatrick. They're making up verbs, you know, that all make sense, and it's all active and it's just like not only do I have to learn how to write, but I have to learn how to even report.

So when I get on the baseball beat, which I had pushed and pushed for by doing the grunt work that took place in the office in order to kind of demonstrate to people how much I wanted to do this game, which I felt was kind of in my blood. I loved it. It was what I wanted. And when I finally got it and I got the press passes that said I can go up to the stadium. It wasn't like I was being sent on assignment. But the minute I had that opportunity, I'm not going to leave it on the table. I'm going to be up there every single game that I can be at in New York. That means when the Yankees are in town, I'll be at Yankee Stadium. When the Mets are in town, I'll be at Shea Stadium. I'm going to be there, and I'm going to learn everything I can learn so that I can build up my skill set, et cetera, and learn how to write this game, learn how to report it. 

So, my only roadmap was what the men showed me. I would just kind of hang out on the side. I would try to be as absent as I could because the moment I walked out in the field, a lot of eyes would turn toward me. ‘What is that girl doing here?’ And so for a long time, I just didn't open my mouth. I just learned. I followed the men around. I listened very carefully to how they asked questions. I listened to how they follow up. I listened to how they were, if a manager was reluctant to answer a question, how they push. I was learning the tools of the trade. And I did that maybe several months before I even had the gumption to think about approaching a player and asking a question. 

But what I knew, what I knew in my soul, my heart, was that the moment I asked the question, it was going to be different than a man asking the question. Because in that question, I had to do two things. I had to show that player that I wasn't there asking for a date or flirting or anything like that. I had to be serious but also friendly. I had to sort of really walk that thin line with the question. But I also had to do enormous amounts of homework before I went up there because all eyes and ears were on me. If I asked a stupid question, a ball player walked away or made a joke about me, that was something that was going to be noted. And I was aware of that constantly. 

I'm not going to say that I felt like there was a lot of pressure because the main thing I felt was joy at being able to have this opportunity. So I felt like it was just an extraordinary time. During the 1976 season, most of all, that was a learning experience. When I get to 1977, now I'm gaining a bit more confidence, talking to a lot of the ballplayers. I'm trying to get ballplayers or press people, the younger guys sort of would befriend me and talk to me. So I'm asking some of them for favors to see if they can get the ballplayers to come out of the locker room because I can't go in there. Come out and talk to me in the dugout. Some will, some won't. So I'm starting then to get a little frustrated. But I know I can't show it, and I can't try to barge my way in. That mother-may-I helped out because I began to sort of talk under the radar privately, never making a public show of it, to the PR person at the Yankees. And by mid season, 1977, Mickey Morabito, who was my age … now that makes a huge difference because the older PR people wanted nothing to do with us. But Mickey understood. He was sort of watching what was happening in the larger world. … So by midway through the season, he came to me and said, ‘Listen, I've heard your frustrations. I understand them. I can see it.’ He said, ‘So why don't we try to start here?’ He said, ‘I’ll go in the front door with the players after the game. I'll come around. I'll meet you at the side door, the clubhouse, and I'll bring you into Billy Martin's office.’ He said, ‘I can't take you into the locker room,’ but he said, ‘I can do that. That'll be a start.’ And you know, I was a gradualist and I said, ‘Yeah, let's do that.’

Well, Jenni, that opened up so much because that clubhouse was a soap opera, and I was never part of it because I couldn't get in. I couldn't understand the stories. But when the press people came back to Billy, they would ask him what the players had said and ask him for comment. So suddenly I was getting the pieces and things were making sense. And the last two games of that season, 1977, Mickey Morabito, not by me asking, he just left me two press passes for full clubhouse access. And I looked at them and I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a mistake.’ So I saw Mickey on the field. He said, ‘You use them how you want. I trust you. Just do what you want, do what you want with them. You've earned it. There they are.’ And so he went to the guards, told them that it was fine if I went in. 

So again, as a gradualist, I only use the press passes before the game, between batting practice and the game, when no player changed their uniform. Now, why I hadn't been let in all those years during that time? There was no nudity. You'd have to ask Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, but I wasn't. So there I was, and I used them. No one threw me out. Evidently, no man who wrote about baseball thought it was a big enough story to write. No one wrote it. And so during the American League Championships, I did the same thing. And I also went in after the game. The Yankees were more used to me at that point.

So … it was at the 1977 World Series that Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball, finds out that I had gone on a courtesy call to the Dodgers because I knew they didn't have a woman covering them. I'd explained to their player rep, Tommy John, that I had a pass for the World Series that gave me access to their clubhouse. I explained what had happened with the Yankees and how things were working. And Tommy John said, ‘We’ll take a vote. I'll go back and talk to the players. We'll take a vote and I'll let you know before the game tomorrow.’ This was at the workout, the Monday workout. And he came back the Tuesday night before the game and he said, ‘Listen, it wasn't unanimous, but we talked about it. It was a majority who said they understand you have a job to do. And if you need to come in, come on in.’

And that was it. I started walking away, and he called me back. He said, ‘Hey, by the way, would you go find our PR person and just let him know that we've had this conversation.’ Again, Jenni, I'm under no obligation to do this. I didn't know their PR person, but I spent like 30 minutes trying to go find him in the tunnels and stuff. And I told him what we agreed on, and — it was because of all of that, wasn't the Yankees side, it was the Dodgers — because of what I had done as a courtesy to that team, the commissioner was informed. In the fifth inning, I was called up to the main press box and told that permission was never granted because the only person who could grant permission, not the players on either team, not the teams, the commissioner, and that as far as he was concerned, permission had never been granted and never would be granted for the rest of this series and forever. 

That is what led to negotiations between SI and the commissioner's office. By the way, I was never part of those negotiations. They all involved men deciding what was going to happen with the one woman. We could go into that if you want because their solutions weren't necessarily the best ideas. That's what led to this situation. 

Jenni: Did you realize at some point that — and because you weren't involved with the negotiations between Major League Baseball, the commissioner's office, and Time Inc, I don't know when this point might've been — but that you might become a central figure in all of this? Obviously you knew at some point you were going to be a litigant in this case, but was there a point when you realized … (you were) going to be thrust into some unexpected role?

Melissa: Well, there were indications as the negotiators for baseball and for Sports Illustrated kept meeting as they moved through the fall. There were indicators that were said to me that they didn't think that the commissioner was going to ever get to a point where he would move past his notion that separate was equal. Now we know that in Brown vs Board of Education in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that separate is not equal. But to this lawyer's mind, and Kuhn was a lawyer, he'd gone to the University of Virginia Law School, he evidently believed that he would win the case and that his separate policy for women was giving them the equal opportunity to interview the athletes. And of course it wasn't. So there was the realization there. 

The second indicator was a two-part series of stories that was written by Stephanie Salter in San Francisco. I had taken Stephanie's job after she had left Sports Illustrated to go out and write in San Francisco for the San Francisco. And she had written a two-part series. The first part was essentially her speculating that the negotiations that were taking place between baseball and Sports Illustrated would end up in a court case. I still don't know where Stephanie got that scoop from. It wasn't from me, and I checked with my baseball editor. He said he can't remember telling her, but somehow she did and she wrote that story first day. And the second day she wrote about her own experiences covering the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants. Well, New York Times West Coast sports correspondent Leonard Koppett took that story that Stephanie wrote and called the commissioner's office to alert them that this story — this is again pre-internet — and then we found this out in our discovery of documents. Leonard Koppett calls them and then baseball calls the San Francisco Giants and has them fax this story to their office so that they can see. And there's a memo that we got in the case that I write about in the book that details Leonard's conversation with them and the story arriving. 

So those were sort of two hints that happened in November. I believe that it was probably after Thanksgiving or around that time that I was approached by probably the baseball editor. Little foggy in my mind, but someone approached me and said that they probably were going to get to a point where they would have to bring in their outside counsel, and that would be Cravath, Swaine and Moore, and that they were going to go ahead and file a lawsuit, and would I be the plaintiff in that lawsuit? I say in my book, I believe I use the word naively, I said yes, without hesitation. And I say naively because it just didn't occur to me that this was a big deal. It just didn't. From my perspective, all it was about was being able to work. I mean, if you were a woman doing a job that people considered to be a man's job back then, if you whined and complained or you said I can't do it because of this or that, well, chances are you wouldn't have that job much longer. So I came up with every creative way I could to sort of detour around the barriers and stuff, and I was doing OK. I mean, I'd written a few baseball columns and started to report on what would become the feature story in one of Sports Illustrated's spring baseball issues. So I was rocking and rolling and doing what I could do within the constraints that I had. All I wanted to do was to do it and do more. I had no idea that it would be greeted in the way it was. And that's why I say naively. I was truly naive in terms of what I would be put through in terms of an emotional roller coaster with this. 

And that's what it was. It was really an emotional roller coaster. would say with more downs than slow ups. I made some very, very bad personal choices, I think, because of being in the bullseye of national and really international attention in a way that I didn't recognize myself. It wasn't me. It wasn't the person I was. And that was very confusing for me. Were it to happen to me today, I have a much better sense of who I am. But when I was in my mid-20s, it was just very, very difficult for me to piece it all together and to sort of have a sense of who I was at my core in the midst of all that was happening.

Jenni: Your retelling of the day in court and the hearing and everything from the small details to the emotions that you were feeling, what was it to go back and write that and just relive that? There's a lot of history. You sort of detour away from the action to tell whether it's Judge Motley or your attorney or other attorneys or different things in the history of it all. But what was it just to go back and put yourself back in that courtroom that day?

Melissa: Well, there are the emotions and I do write about some of the small details like the fact that my husband-to-be at that time decided to come with me to the hearing, which I did not find supportive or welcome. That may seem odd to people since here I am with my fiance and maybe this would all be sort kumbaya and wonderful that he's there to support me. But from the very beginning of that scene, you get a clear sense that I kind of wish that he hadn't decided to come to the hearing with me. So there's sort of that story that's being played out as kind of an undercurrent because I've gotten engaged to him literally three and a half weeks after I met him, and about three and half weeks after my case is filed. In retrospect, and this is where the years and looking back now give me an insight to some of the things that happened then, if I can even call it a decision as opposed to a reaction, my decision to say yes when he proposes to me, again, after maybe three dinners together, I mean, it was ridiculous. But it was really the search in my view at this point for safe harbor. I'm a sailor and the idea that when a hurricane is approaching, when you're in the midst of a storm, you're looking to bring your boat into a safe harbor and find a mooring that you can kind of attach to and secure it down. As someone who was blonde and, you know, probably fairly good looking, young, single, the men could have a heyday with me in terms of their portrayal of who they thought I was. I fit perhaps the stereotype, except for being buxom because I wasn't that. But with that exception, that wasn't necessarily a comfortable thing to be at that point for me. And so the idea that this man comes along and proposes to me, even though I don't really know him, I just said yes, and we planned the wedding for literally six weeks after my hearing. All of this is happening as all of the rest of this is happening. 

So there's like all different levels going on at the same time. And so when I'm sitting in the courtroom, I mean, one of the things, Jenni, you probably understood from reading it is that I didn't understand a thing that was going on. I had no idea what my lawyer was talking about. He mentions a case about a parking garage, and he says, ‘Judge, this is the case that we're gonna be resting our case on.’ I'm like, ‘What the hell does a parking garage have to do with a clubhouse?’ I mean, I didn't have a clue. It wasn't as though he had a lot of extra time in his life to sit down and school me on what he was gonna be doing. We met a lot of times. He asked me a lot of questions. He asked me about people to get to file affidavits and support, that kind of thing. I was very much a participant in preparing for it, but he hadn't walked me through his argument. So as you, the reader, are hearing this argument unfurled in front of me, there are going to be many times in that where I literally say, ‘I don't have a clue what he's talking about. Maybe if I lean in a little, I'll get a little better idea.’ But no, I didn't have a clue.

So, I hope that comes through to people just how sort of, I don't know, distant I was from what I was actually hearing. But now, nearly 50 years later, like a journalist, I've done my homework. I've read about Motley, understand where she's coming from and her questions. I understand that case that he's referring to with the parking authority. I understand it so well that I actually, you know, felt like by the time I got to about the 46th version of trying to write it simply so that people could understand it without feeling like they were back in law school, that I really understand it now. But I didn't have a clue then. So it's been interesting to take that journey. 

And I hope that by immersing myself in it, using the curiosity of a journalist, reflecting on my emotional state at the time and how things felt to me, that I'm able to make that scene, the scene of that courtroom, come alive as I move readers in and out of it. I'll often back away from being at the hearing and take us back to the ball field if there's something that I think really relates to where my lawyer has taken it or where the opposing lawyer has taken it. So this was the kind of writing I'd never done before. I think the reason I wrote the first book chronologically is because that's sort of how I learned to tell news stories, and I was a news reporter. So that was my natural way. This was not natural. I stumbled and fumbled. I brought on board an editor to help me who had worked with me on my first book back in the 90s. We worked well together, and she helped me a lot with trying to understand how to move between the scenes and be able to try to make a whole out of a lot of pieces and the flow. Because there were really three sets. There was the set of the courtroom in the Southern District Courthouse. There was the set of the ballparks, the ball fields, the press boxes, that kind of environment. And then there was the set of sort of my home life, my apartment, where I got married, sort of that set. And it was to try to weave those three together in a way that does justice to the fullness of the story.

Jenni: You're living your life in all of those facets, even as the case is going on. And even after that day in court, obviously there were appeals and there were all sorts of things that were happening, but I think maybe my favorite detail of the whole book, Melissa, is after Judge Motley ruled that locker room is open, you don't go to the game that night because you knew what a circus it was going to be at Yankee Stadium. I didn't know what to expect, but that was a surprising detail, a choice you made not to insert yourself into the craziness that was going to happen.

Melissa: A couple reactions to that. A couple of different things come to mind when you relay that. A very good friend of mine who wrote her own story about being a sportswriter at that time, she just absolutely knew that I was in the locker room that night. So in her book, she writes me as though I was in the locker room that night. When I read her book, I had to call her and say, ‘I wish you'd have called me because I wasn't there.’ She said, ‘You weren't? Of course you would be there.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, here's why I wasn’t.’ So I kind of explained to her that I knew that that wasn't my story. 

My story and the reason that I'd fought the battle was to go and report on a baseball game, to report on the team, not to report about women being in the locker room. And I knew that every station in New York and from all the surrounding region would be sending a woman to that game with a cameraman, and they would be asking one question — ‘What do you think about me being in the locker room tonight?’ That was the last question I ever wanted to ask. There was no reason for me to ask that question. I wanted to ask questions about the game. So I absolutely made a decision that night. I wasn't assigned to write a story, although I usually was at the game. I made a point of not being at that game because … it just wasn't my game. It wasn't my story. I didn't want to be part of it. I didn't want someone to have to come and interview me. I knew if I was there, the cameras would come over and say, ‘What do you think about being in the locker room tonight with all the women?’ I didn't want to be there. 

Now, the other kind of interesting side note to that is that you might remember me just talking about my decision or my reaction in getting married in May of that year and kind of the craziness of my mind thinking that because someone asked me to marry him that I should say yes because I just don't like what's happening over here in the press and the rest. A mind does crazy tricks on you. However, at the heart of it, I was not wrong because Mike Lupica — the papers were on strike at that point, but they had a strike paper that they were all contributing to — and on the back page of the strike paper, the next day was a story that Mike Lupica had done. He'd come over right after the decision came down and done an interview in my office. For the first time ever, I was referred to in print as Mrs. Lincoln. That was my husband's last name, Lincoln. And in the first paragraph, he has this cozy little scene where I have decided to stay home and cook dinner for my husband and not go up to the ballpark. Now that is a very different image of me than the buxom lady who wants to go with her eyes wide open and leer at naked men. 

So Jenni, wasn't wrong in my sort of not-well-thought-out but sort of gut instinct that this would be a safe harbor to be a married woman, I suppose. That's just another aspect of it. But the interesting thing is that the next game I did go. All of the women were gone. All of the TV women. All of the media circus. Baseball actually went back into Judge Motley's courtroom and complained, ‘Look what has happened now. Just look at the locker room. All these women are in it and blah, blah, blah. We have to control this, Judge.’ I won't get into the details of that, but I went up two days later. They played a game, and I was there and there was a woman reporter from Newsweek, we were the only two women there. We were both there to report on baseball. And that was a game that Ron Guidry pitched a beautiful game, might've even been a complete game. Ron Guidry after the game was in the trainer's room with his elbow in ice, which is often what will happen. Now, had the locker room not been open and of equal access to her and to me that evening, we would not have been able to talk to Ron Guidry because Ron Guidry would not have been able to be brought out of that locker room to talk to us in a separate but equal — ha! question mark — accommodation. So in fact, the idea that the order had come through and we were actually there doing the work that we were set out to do, her for Newsweek, me for Sports Illustrated with no cameras, no noticing, no one asking us about what does it feel like to be here, we're just there doing our job. That was such a relief. That was just such a relief that no one was watching and we were doing it. So that's kind of that the tail end of that story of the media circus. Two days later, it's gone.

Jenni: And you just get to do the job you wanted to do and were fighting to have the chance to do. 

Melissa: Which is why I fought in the first place. 

Jenni: Melissa, literally, I could talk to you for hours. But my one last question: obviously, a lot of people who are sports fans will probably be reaching for your book, there's going to be people that are like me in the media, but a lot of people that aren't that will be checking out what you've written. What do you hope people take away from reading this memoir and this story of not just the court case but really your life? What do you hope people will walk away having learned or taken from all of this?

Melissa: I'm going to just start with a very odd answer: really the power of the 14th Amendment. You know, when I talk about the characters that are in this book, you've mentioned three of them, the judge, my lawyer and myself. But I truly believe that the central character of the story is the 14th Amendment. I do believe that. And there cannot be a time in our history when the 14th Amendment has been such a valuable amendment for all of us. 

I have a daughter who is just about to turn 28. When I actually finished writing the book and wrote the foreword, she was 26, about to turn 27, and the Dobbs decision had just come down. I rewrote my prologue to end it with a reference to the Dobbs decision and to just take note that my daughter at that point was the same age as I was when I was the plaintiff in this lawsuit. Her generation, as I have discovered, because I've gone to lots of journalism schools and I intend to continue to go to schools. I've worked with people on high school projects, national history day projects. I've gone to many colleges. I want this book to be a way to continue to bring that story to people of my daughter's generation, of younger ones. I want to remind them of a time in our history when women fought and men joined them to fight for rights that hadn't been theirs. And for them to understand that those fights are what now gives them their lives that they experienced today. When we see those rights being eroded, I want them to understand that as an individual or certainly as a generation, you have the power. You have the power to bring about change through the law, through something like the 14th Amendment that people like Constance Baker Motley, people like Shirley Chisholm, who I reference as my commencement speaker at my college, who sort of gave me the impetus to move out of college life into a life of an activist, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. These are treasured people. I'm a little no one. I ended up in a situation that I didn't intend to end up in. I only ended up because I acted as a mother-may-I woman of my time, asking to do a job that I wanted to do. And yet, because I ended up as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that got a lot of attention because of men's sexual organs, I understood the power of the 14th Amendment. 

I think that power is something that I want people to take away from this book. I'm really happy that I finally understood the story that I had to tell was an equal rights story, an equal access story. And that story just lives in that long arc that we talk about, the long arc of justice. So if they know nothing about baseball, it doesn't matter. As long as they just know that baseball was a game that excluded women for many, many years, even though women loved the game of baseball, but they weren't meant to be a part of it and now they are … but the 14th Amendment is very big in my life and in this book, and I think it is going to be in the lives as we go forward. It's a story that I'm proud to be able to tell, and I want to use this book in any way I can to hopefully inspire people to think hard about the rights that we're losing, the way that we can regain the rights and what those fights are gonna look like in the future.