Let's Row Together
Don't forget the women, Abigail wrote John. Are you listening, Boston Globe? Big jump in Final Four women's coverage, and room for improvement with other sports. Women and baseball; a short history.
Bostonians savor their well-earned reputation as America’s most rabid sports fans.
Sports talk radio shows top drive-time ratings. Regular season games sell out. And fans depend on the Boston Globe to feed their ravenous appetites for game stories and features, league notes and provocative columns. The Globe rarely disappoints – except when the hometown team playing for a championship has a roster filled with women.
The Renegades, Boston’s pro women’s football team, started its run for its sixth national title on May 4, 2024. The Globe published its last story on the Renegades on July 22, 2023. After Boston’s women’s hockey team advanced to the league’s championship this month, my fellow rower, Lisa Laskin, posted a video on Instagram (accompanied by U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”) to document her frustrating search (from Ireland) for what turned out to be the Globe’s non-coverage of Boston’s newest team.
This week, on Wednesday morning, I joined Lisa’s search. By then, I knew Minnesota had won Tuesday’s game, tying the series at 1-1, but I was curious to see the Globe’s coverage. On its homepage, I scrolled through a firehose of stories and columns about the Celtics’ miraculous semi-final Game 1 win. (A Celtics’ steal and buzzer-tying three pointer sent the game into overtime.) Soon, I lost count at six, though I’m sure there were more. I kept scrolling in my hunt for just one story about the women’s game. It was, after all, sold out, and on local TV, after Game 1, I’d heard older women (my age) say they’d never imagined living long enough to see such a game played, while teen-aged girls told of dreaming that someday they’d play on a team like this one.
If only by tapping into the zeitgeist of this cultural moment – with a surge of interest in women’s sports intersecting with the hockey team’s last home game of its inaugural season – the Globe certainly owed readers a story worthy of this team’s season.
While I wait for that story, my scrolling did pay off with my Eureka moment!
Way, way. way down on the Globe’s webpage, long past the homepage screen, and well after its daily listing of sports stories that weren’t featured “above the fold,” I saw my story. It was the third item in a box called “More Recent News,” accompanied by the story of a fallen hiker rescued on a New Hampshire mountain and a mother moose that had killed an Alaskan man who got too close to her newborn calves.
In 2026, a pro women’s soccer team arrives in Boston. This gives the Globe two years to figure out how to cover its hometown teams with a “W” in the league name. Maybe next season they’ll practice on the women’s hockey team. For now, I have good news: you can watch tonight’s game on the PWHL’s YouTube channel - for free.
Some uplifting news about coverage of women’s sports: Lindsay Gibbs, who will moderate my book talk at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, North Carolina on Oct. 4, 6:00 pm – released her 2024 #CoveringtheCoverage of the NCAA Final Four.
In her May 13 Power Plays newsletter, Gibbs described her process: “I tallied the number of women’s college basketball and men’s college basketball stories; the number of women’s sports stories and men’s sports stories in general; and took a snapshot of the front page of the [six news organizations she tracked] sports section each day. Then, I made some spreadsheets and did some math and made some charts. Finally I did something I haven’t been able to do before, and I compared these tallies directly with the #CoveringtheCoverage data that Tori Burstein collected for Power Plays back during the 2021 Final Four.
Dig into Gibbs’ Power Plays for fascinating findings – and subscribe!
Just know that her news about coverage of other women’s sports is not nearly as heartening. At her six news organizations, that coverage rose 11% since 2021, but notice the comparison of women (34) and men (287).
Boston Has a Hard Time Welcoming Women to Sports
From Locker Room Talk, I’m sharing brief excerpts to provide historical perspective on the reluctance Boston has demonstrated through time towards women and baseball. This week on X (Twitter) Baseball and the Law posted the visual, below, reminding me of pieces of evidence I show in my book about Boston’s dismissive ways.
21 years before @MelissaLudtke kicked-down doors of #MLB locker rooms in order to gain equal access for women reporters, the Boston @officialBBWAA denied Cleveland News BB writer Doris O'Donnell entry to @fenwaypark press box on 5/21/57
#BaseballandtheLaw 223-36, female reporters
On June 23, I’ll join Judge Louis H. Schiff, a co-author of Baseball and the Law, at Mitchell Hamline School of Law as a guest lecturer in a two-day legal seminar in which I’ll speak about my case, Ludtke v. Kuhn.
From Locker Room Talk:
“In 1957, Boston’s baseball writers told the Cleveland News writer Doris O’Donnell to stay in the grandstand during batting practice. Then, they refused to let her sit in Fenway Park’s press box. Traveling with the Cleveland Indians, O’Donnell’s editor had thought it would be fun to send his star female news reporter on a four-city East Coast trip with the team. When Boston’s writers said “No”, she responded by mocking the men in a story for the readers back home.
Cleveland girl had fun trying to crash Fenway press box: Female writer was blocked access by vote of peers
By Doris O’Donnell, May 22, 1957
Boston sports writers are sissies.
They banned me from the all-male sanctuary – the Red Sox press box – because they are afraid to establish what they consider – dangerous precedent. Women reporters are by tradition here in Boston persona non grata in the press box. No traveling female reporter from Cleveland is going to shatter that rule. The finality of the writers’ decision had all the boom of a strike called by Umpire Bill Summers.
‘It was a close vote, five to four,’ said Globe sportswriter Bob Holbrook apologetically. … The gallant Mr. Holbrook said, after the vote, and a trifle lamely: ‘Well, we could let you in, but how about the other girls on the Boston papers. They’ve wanted to get in a long time ago.’
“I had fun trying to crash the press box.
“The Associated Press sent this account: ‘Ladies, take heed. The baseball press box will remain a male sanctuary – in Boston, at least.’ Quoting O’Donnell, the AP placed her ballpark hiccup in the context of her distinguished journalism career. ‘I’ve tested tanks for theArmy. I’d ridden an elephant in the circus. I’ve driven cabs. Last year, I went to Russia for the paper, and let me tell you it was easier to get inside the Kremlin than it is to get into a baseball press box.’ After being denied a writer’s customary path of access to the ballplayers, O’Donnell merged her dogged determination with feminine affability to snare an interview with usually taciturn Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams. As they talked, each one leaned on the hip-high wall separating her from the field. When the Boston writers read her story, it was they who envied her access since Williams rarely spoke with them.
“A profile published decades later gave a snapshot of O’Donnell’s only baseball road trip. “When the trip ended, O'Donnell had been thrown out of two press boxes, told she should be home making babies [by an opposing manager] and came up with a rare one-on-one interview with [Ted] Williams while leaning against that wall. Shortly after her return, she was the subject of a front-page story in The Sporting News in which she was quoted saying of sports writing: ‘I'd rather see a son ofmine driving a bus.’ The story also had advice from Williams, who said after hearing she had been ejected from the press box: ‘Don't let those guys push you around.’”
“More than two decades later, in September 1972, a Red Sox PR person informed National Observer reporter Diane K. Shah that she would not eat her meal with fellow sportswriters. They told her this only after her male editor and the magazine’s male lawyer had to intervene with the Red Sox PR to get her access to the field and a seat in the press box. When she requested press credentials, the Red Sox had denied her both. Her male colleagues never thought to ask about where she would eat. It had not occurred to them that she would be escorted to a special picnic table on which a sign reading ‘Ladies Pavilion’ was prominently displayed and told that she’d eat her pre-game meal there by herself. The Red Sox waited to reveal this to her only after batting practice when she got to ballpark’s roof believing she was about to join the other writers in the team’s dining room.”
A reminder: Not in the press box nor dining room and certainly not on the field was any man naked, which was the reason baseball gave for my exclusion.
But Is She Serious?
On Sunday, Oct. 1, 1978, the Boston Globe published Leigh Montville’s column, “But is she serious,” soon after Judge Constance Baker Motley had ruled in my favor in Ludtke v. Kuhn. In it, the Globe sports columnist poses a series of questions to test my fitness to write about baseball.
Globe readers responded, as did Montville’s only female colleague in the sports department, Lesley Visser. I didn’t, but as I later discovered, my mom almost did.
I saved this clip my mom cut from the Globe and sent me. Her note reads: “I had thot of writing but these have made any of my efforts superfluous (in retrospect). All Love xxx. Thanks for your letter JEL (sportsperson of the 40s).”
Here’s an oddity in my life these days. Letter reach me requesting my autograph to add it to their baseball collection. I sign enclosed cards (or balls), and send them back. Then, I think of the 1970s when we didn’t shoot selfies and I didn’t sign autographs.
No one ever asked.
To preorder Locker Room Talk at a discount (30% off) + free shipping, go to Rutgers University Press webpage and use the code - RUSA30. I’m slowly building a calendar of book events on my website. You can go there to find out if, and when I’ll be doing a book near you. If you have suggestions for a book event near you, let me know.
No Substack Next Week – I am flying to Denver to celebrate the life of my dear friend Harriett Milnes. I wrote about her magnificent life and our half century friendship in this Substack.
Now, I’m off to hear Rita Moreno and Sonia Sotomayer at Radcliffe Day.
Yet another engaging and informative Substack post; I am so enjoying these! Learning even more via the comments section. Just ordered the book and looking forward to seeing one of the discussions. Keep up the great work!
Absolutely absorbing to hear about Ella Black, and I cherish the details you've shared about her experiences as a baseball writer, albeit for a relatively short time. Thanks so much for sharing her story with me and, in turn, with others who will take the opportunity to read comments on my Substack. Ever so grateful, Melissa