Let's Row Together

Being young and in the bulls-eye of media animosity is stressful but there are ways to cope with undue pressures when we are young. My guidance to young people based on the big mistakes I made.

This week a question I’d anticipated was asked.

A lot.

That variations of this query popped up again and again this week shouldn’t surprise me. I spent this week with university students who are roughly the age I was when the nation’s media mocked my gender discrimination case against Major League Baseball and demeaned me as the “girl” plaintiff who was doing this to see naked men.

Mostly it’s been professors asking this question on behalf of their students. Their queries go like this: at the age of 26, you found yourself in the bulls-eye of animosity from the male-dominated media that derided you due to your lawsuit. Talk about how you handled the stress brought on by your instant notoriety and how would you advise these students to handle a similar situation today if they put themselves out front on an issue that matters to them?

“Don’t do as I did,” I tell them immediately, beginning what usually turns into a long-winded answer. Still, even as my answer drags on, I see that the students are rapt. Their generation, we know, is greatly stressed, as many of them say they feel lonely or depressed. The meanness of our national dialogue surrounds them on social media as many of them worry about the fate of their future well-being as they live among the surging impacts of climate change.

Right away, I tell them about my hasty, ill-thought through decision to marry a man I’d met just a week after my legal case was filed. Three weeks later, when he asked me to marry him, and I said “yes.” I was, I tell these students, seeking a safe harbor from the storm I felt intensifying around me.

And it was a huge mistake.

May 29, 1978, my father and me on my wedding day, less than six months after I met the man I married and six weeks after my court hearing for Ludtke v. Kuhn.

In “Locker Room Talk,” I write about the stress I experienced and I describe my response to it. (from Chapter 20):

“When the press assault began, I was 26-years old, single, blond, and slim. I was also a person about whom the media had never paid attention. I’d never read a story about me in a newspaper or magazine, nor had I seen myself on TV or heard a radio host talk about me. I was as far from being a celebrity as a person could be, and I wasn’t even well-known as a writer when I surfaced as ‘girl’ plaintiff in this highly publicized court case. Notoriety was new to me, and frightening. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to protect myself from the blast of negative attention. It felt like I’d tumbled headfirst into a media maelstrom, which naively I had not expected. When I was asked if I’d be the plaintiff in this case, I’d said ‘yes’ right away. I did that because of how much I wanted to do my job. I gave zero attention to the possibility that things said of me would be twisted in ways that made most people think I did this to see naked men.

“When the onslaught started, I realized how little control I had over how all of this would unfurl. I also didn’t know where to turn for solace. Mostly I internalized the emotional pain, which I believe contributed to my hasty, ill-advised decision to marry a man who I barely knew and who my friends and family told me not to wed. To me, becoming a wife provided me with the safe harbor I needed as this media storm raged. The more that people harped on my poor judgment in agreeing to marry him, the tighter I clung to my cockamamie belief that by doing this I’d rescue myself. I found this illusion sustaining at a time when many in the press misconstrued my intent, mischaracterized who I was, and misled Americans about my case. I didn’t know how to respond to the falsehoods, so I didn’t in interviews or when I gave a speech to the few groups inviting me to do so. On some mornings I woke up feeling bruised like I’d been a sparring partner to the writers whose punches I absorbed. As weeks went by, the constancy of these attacks took a toll my well-being though I hid my bruises.”

I beg students not to make the kind of mistakes I did by hiding myself from friends while I acted based on my emotional tumult rather than finding my clearer head and using that to weigh the consequences of a bad decision.

Sometimes, when I am speaking at a book talk, I’ll scroll through my emails so I can share a much-appreciated message sent to me recently by my dear friend and 1970s Sports Illustrated colleague John Papanek after he read Locker Room Talk.

“There is so much information, and such great detail that I never knew or was fully able to appreciate … including most importantly the depth and persistence of pain, pressure and excruciating frustration that you were forced to endure, and worked so hard to keep hidden from your many, many dear friends and colleagues. For refusing to give up on your mission to get such an epochal story written and published, you deserve — and have certainly earned — my greatest and unbridled admiration. And I’m sure that all who know you, or know of you, or are just learning about you, will wholeheartedly agree.”

Yesterday, when I was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I urged students to form circles of supportive, trusted friends. I advised them to seek mentors and form trusting relationships with them they can confide in them and from whom they can receive wise guidance built on experience. I warn my young friends not to absorb internally what strangers write about them but to off-load these characterizations or mean words with friends and family members who can help them process these words that sting – and assist in moving them past them.

Even as I say this, I hope they’ve already heard this advice, but maybe my encounters with stress helps to reinforce this for them.

At UMass Amherst with sports journalism professor Steve Fox and the students who came to our book talk event. Photo credit: Liesel Nygard.

Here are a few more paragraphs that come soon after the ones I quoted, above. I share them because I realized last night how I always conclude my response to this question by telling students about the letters that girls and women wrote to me early in 1978. Their letters sustained me during tough times when I was in the midst of this turmoil.

“My court case touched the third rail in America’s gender wars. Stories about it moved with a space-age velocity I had not contemplated, though far slower than today’s digital media. Even as the thousands of words poured out about me with undressed men, I was comforted by the letters that women and girls sent me at Sports Illustrated. They wrote about the joy they found in watching and playing sports as they expressed heartfelt gratitude to me for proving that when girls grow up, they can still love sports and write about them. Several told me they hoped to be sportswriters, while others wanted to play competitive sports, even thought, at many schools, girls had no sports teams. Nor were there professional teams for women to play on. When they competed in sports or sat in the stands to watch the boys play, people made them feel they didn’t belong there. In writing to me, they were connecting with someone who showed them that their sports dreams could come true.

 “Julia Lagonia was in her forties and unmarried when she wrote to me.  In her second letter to me, dated January 16, 1978, Lagonia filled three notebook pages with her flawless handwriting. After thanking me for replying to her first letter, she closed her second one with a similar sentiment: ‘Thanks again and the best of luck in your future with the baseball case. I’m behind you, 100 percent.’  Fifteen-year-old Terri Lynn Bottjer handwrote her five-page letter on adorable stationary with her name imprinted on it. It took her all of those pages for her to tell me about her recent run-in with the Yankees after she and her friend wrote that team’s stadium manager, Mr. Patrick Kelly, to apply ‘for positions as batboys, or, in our case, batgirls.’ She told me what happened next:

“We were very promptly and, I might add, rather rudely turned down for applications by Mr. Kelly for the simple reason that we were female. He said, in essence, that the players would be in various stages of undress, and that the locker room language was not suitable for an ‘impressionable teenager’s ear. (I can assure him that between all the books I read on baseball and my friends, the players’ language is nothing I haven’t used or heard.)

 “Kelly’s response upset the girls, so her mom suggested they write to New York City Mayor Abe Beame and former Congresswoman Bella Abzug and ‘other important people in New York.’ They did, and then a deputy mayor replied. He had referred their issue to the New York City Human Rights Commission. Soon, a commission official asked them to come to its office where they would file a ‘formal sex-discrimination suit against the Yankees.’ He also arranged a meeting of the two girls with representatives from the Yankees. However, just before their meeting was to happen, the Yankees told the commission that another teenager, Virginia Savage, had filed a similar case, and that one was being heard. At the time Bottjer wrote me on January 9^th, they were waiting to hear from the commission about its decision in Savage’s case. ‘In the interim,’ Bottjer assured me, ‘I’ve applied again for the job of “batgirl” to see if we get the same reply from Mr. Kelly.’ Bottjer dreamed of becoming a sports journalist or TV broadcaster, so she also had corresponded with Robin Herman at The New York Times and Lawrie Mifflin at the Daily News to ask about their locker room experiences in the N.H.L. ‘Robin says she has no real trouble with the guys and Lawrie doesn’t appear to have any either,’ she wrote me.

“I wrote back to Bottjer, as I did with everyone who sent me a letter. Her gumption and grit impressed me and the information she gave us about Savage’s court case offered Fritz deeper insight into what it was like for girls to apply to be batboys with the Yankees. Bottjer closed her letter with these words:

“Well, this whole story was just to tell you that, in a way, I know how you feel, and to let you know that I’m behind you and your beliefs all the way. I love the Yankees very, very much, and would hate to see my image of them ruined by this one incident. I also hope that if this problem is solved now, I won’t have to face it when I’m a sportswriter. So Good luck! And thank you, Terri Bottjer.”

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When she was 10 years old, Gwen Goldman wrote a letter to then-Yankees general manager Roy Hamey, who replied on June 23, 1961. 

Gwen Goldman “dreamed of being a bat girl for the New York Yankees, but she was turned down because of her gender. Sixty years later, she finally got her wish. The Yankees made Goldman, 70, their honorary bat girl on Monday night ahead of their matchup against the Los Angeles Angels. She spent the day with the team, got a full uniform, met players and even got to throw a ceremonial first pitch on the mound. [CBS News story, June 29, 2021]

Batgirls Enter my Court Case

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn introduced a 1975 batgirl case into our legal proceedings when my lawyer deposed him before our April 1978 hearing. Once he’d done this, the exclusion of “batgirls” became a topic of great interest for both my attorney and his.

Let me pick up with this aspect of my legal case from Locker Room Talk [Chapter 17]:

“Kuhn’s mention of this batgirl case and Time editorial intrigued Fritz (my lawyer). When the March 2^nd deposition ended, Fritz asked his associates to get him a copy of this essay, “The Sensible Limits of Nondiscrimination,” from Time magazine’s July 25^th issue, along with the legal record of this batgirl’s case. By March 31, when Kuhn signed his affidavit, it was evident that his lawyer had also found a copy of Frank Trippett’s essay since Kuhn borrowed liberally from it in his affidavit. As Kuhn observed, Time “wrote that many discrimination cases seem to make the implicit demand that ‘all customary standards, tastes, proprieties and practices much yield to the whims and oddities of the individual.” Then, he validated his decision with Trippett’s words: “Time points out, and I agree wholeheartedly, that some exclusivity and certain groupings exist for ‘perfectly decent reasons’ and ‘decent aims’ and calls for ‘at least a grain of old-time horse sense … to be applied to the situation.’” After listing a few of the discrimination cases that Trippett cited to make his broader point, Kuhn borrowed his words: “Too many excursions into absurdity will achieve more than amusement; they could make the whole cause of fair play seem silly.” Kuhn ended this part of his affidavit by quoting Trippett’s description of cases like the batgirl’s as “silly excursions into absurdity.”

“Kuhn’s affection for Trippett’s essay came roaring through in his affidavit. What he loved most was that Time, the flagship magazine of the company I worked for, Time Inc., published this essay, and Time Inc. had also filed the legal complaint in my court fight with him. As Kuhn claimed in his affidavit, Time Inc.’s support of Ludtke v. Kuhn represented a “complete turnabout from its earlier nation-wide editorial position.” Clearly, he hoped Judge Motley would find this juxtaposition curious.

“With the presumption that the commissioner’s favorite essayist would bolster baseball’s case in court, Kuhn’s lawyer decided to depose Trippett. Time’s essay writer was shocked to be summoned in my case since he knew nothing about it. Even so, 28 days after Kuhn first spoke about this batgirl case in his deposition, Climenko deposed him.

 “Mr. Trippett, you are an editorial writer on the staff of Time?” Climenko asked, figuring he’d receive back a quick “yes.”

 “No, sir,” Trippett said, his Southern drawl elongating “sir.”  “I am an essay writer.”

“This wasn’t what Kuhn’s lawyer expected to hear, and this distinction Trippett introduced totally undercut the point that Climenko hoped his testimony would support. Time Inc., he had testified, had not published an “editorial” about wacky discrimination suits, then filed its own silly case with mine. Instead, a Time magazine writer had written an essay, not as a mouthpiece for Time Inc. but as an individual expressing his independent point of view.

“Climenko regrouped after this disappointing start. As this deposition moved ahead, he tried to draw out opinions from his witness like those he had expressed in the essay. But when he tossed out suppositions meant to buttress Kuhn’s case, his reluctant witness deflected. It wasn’t long before it was evident that their back-and-forth was leading nowhere. All the while, Fritz had stayed seated and quiet, content to watch his opposing attorney tussling with his witness. Soon, Climenko switched tactics and began to read passages from Trippett’s essay as he requested his witness to connect the passage to my situation. He started by reading this sentence: “Many such cases clearly fall beyond the frontier of ridiculous. It is amazing, if laughable, that a young woman in New York City charged sexist discrimination when the Yankees turned her down for a job – batgirl – that would have required her presence in the men’s locker room.”

 “Again, Trippett refused to be backed into a corner. First, he claimed under oath that he knew nothing about my case except it had to do with me wanting access to baseball locker rooms. Then, he played intellectual jujitsu with Kuhn’s lawyer.

“Did anyone ever say to you that this case [Ludtke v. Kuhn] was one in which the law was being invoked to compel the Yankees to let a girl into the locker room?” Climenko asked him.

“No, sir, nobody ever said that to me.”

“Nobody ever said that?” he asked again, puzzled by Trippett’s definitive response.

“No.”

“Do you know whether that is so now?” Climenko asked.

“I don’t think the case involved a girl,” Trippett said.

“It doesn’t?” Climenko exclaimed, stressing his incredulity.

“Well, I have been misinformed if it does,” Trippett retorted.

Oblivious to where Trippett might be leading him, Climenko fished for the answer he wanted to hear. “Well, if it doesn’t involve a girl, what does it involve?”

“I understand it involves a woman,” Trippett replied.

“You are making a distinction?”

“I do make a distinction, yes, sir,” his witness assured him.

“Glad to have it,” Climenko said.

“Composing himself, Climenko volleyed back. “When you wrote what you did suggesting that it was ridiculous for a girl to go into the locker room, what were your reasons why you thought it was ridiculous for a girl to be there?”

“Typical Protestant prejudice and ethics,” Trippett replied.

“Will you explain that to me?”

“It seems to me that a young girl functioning as a batgirl would become part of a fraternity in which would be unadvisable for her to be exposed to,” he surmised.

“And one of the reasons was that players were undressed or perhaps even naked in the locker room?” Climenko asked.

“I certainly think that would be a consideration,” Trippett agreed.

“After a few more volleys between the two men about players walking around locker rooms in various state of undress, Trippett told Climenko that he did not possess “vast experience on this subject.”

“Hearing this, Climenko pounced: “No, but you have a vast reaction on the basis of Protestant ethics about young girls being in the presence of naked men, don’t you? You didn’t need a vast experience to have that opinion?”

“No, sir. I did not need a vast experience to have that opinion.”

“All right,” Climenko continued, “Did anybody ever say to you that there might be some opposition on the part of people in our generation to having even women, as distinguished from girls, walking into a locker room where there were naked men?”

 “This brough Fritz to his feet. “What does ‘our generation’ mean in that question?” he asked Climenko.

“It means my generation and yours, Mr. Schwarz,” he replied.

“Is that the same?” Fritz countered.

As both of them knew, Climenko had graduated from Harvard Law School in the same class that Fritz’s father did.

“Well, no,” he admitted. “It is separate but since we live and exist at the same time, we are part of this world. Do you have any other questions about the meaning of the question?”

 “Fritz did not, and Climenko proceeded.

“Have you heard at any time that people who are alive now feel that women should not be present in a locker room that contains naked men? Have you ever heard that some people think that that is wrong?” Climenko asked him, again.

“Frankly, I haven’t heard the matter discussed. And I have not reflected on it at all,” he replied.

 “When this tooth-pulling Q & A between lawyer and witness ended, Fritz rose and approached Trippett. “I have a few questions,” he said, though his first one seemed more comment than query.

“Mr. Climenko didn’t ask you why you didn’t see any connection between the essay and this lawsuit,” Fritz asked the witness.

“The reason is that my essay and its one reference to even a remotely kindred matter relates to a young and inexperienced girl, and, as I understand it the plaintiff in this suit is a seasoned and mature woman reporter,” he replied.

“Climenko then rose to challenge his witness’s characterization of me. However, by then, even this protest came without this lawyer’s usual fiery posturing. His witness was a huge disappointment, and as the deposition headed towards its merciful close, Climenko seemed exhausted. He’d pushed and tugged his witness to try to get him to say something about my case along the lines of what he wrote in his essay, but Trippett never obliged. Still, since he wanted to emerge with at least one bit of evidence he could use in the hearing, Climenko asked Trippett to “tell me what you know about the lawsuit.” By lawsuit, he meant mine.

“That the lawsuit involves opening the locker room of the Yankees to a woman reporter. That is about it,” he said.

“Do you know any reason why the Yankees and Commissioner Kuhn have said they don’t want to do that?” Climenko said to press him again on this point.

“No, sir.”

“Do you know that they have said that they didn’t want to do it because they felt that a large sector of the population didn’t think that was proper? Did you hear that?”

“I have not heard that, sir.”

“Would it surprise you that anybody in authority in connection with baseball entertained that view of the matter,” Climenko asked him.

 “After he paused to collect his thoughts, Trippett told him: “Nothing would surprise me on this Earth.”

“Determined not to go home empty handed, Climenko rephrased his query: “Do you think it is ridiculous that some people might not like to have a woman in the men’s locker room even if she is a seasoned reporter? Do you think that is ridiculous?”

“Not necessarily.”

“With that, Climenko had heard enough this uncooperative witness. “That is all we want of this witness,” he said.

“Lawyers say these words when they finish questioning a witness, but this time Climenko really meant what he said.

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We can’t end our weekly time together without one more look at the rare triple play that landed the San Diego Padres in the National League Championship play-offs.

With a triple-play in the 9th inning at Dodger Stadium, the San Diego Padres clinch a post-season playoff berth. This video clip shows the entire 9th inning at-bat for the Padres, but if you want to watch just the game-ending triple play, scroll to 6:46 and begin.

How to Buy Locker Room Talk

Join me at one my book talks and my book tour is here. I’ll sign it!!!

Go to your local independent bookstore and ask for Locker Room Talk. If they don’t have my book on their shelves, please ask the store manager to order a copy for you – and more copies for other readers.

Go online and buy its ebook (Kindle) or audio versions or a hardback book. Just know that my book’s first printing has sold out and while its second printing is being done, some online booksellers will put you on a back order list. Go ahead and buy it now; you’ll get it soon.

Finally, if you’ve read it, I’d welcome your review on Amazon. It matters!