Melissa Ludtke's Impact on Sports Journalism Continues
When Melissa Ludtke isn't rowing on the Charles River in Boston, she's reserving flights, booking Amtrak seats and toting bags of her books around the country. Ludtke, 73, arranges her own appearances in bookstores and speaking engagements for her absorbing book " Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside ." She was 26, a reporter for Sports Illustrated in 1977 and the only woman in the country reporting baseball on a full-time basis. A few women covered basketball and hockey for newspapers and magazines with access to locker rooms for interviews. But not baseball. "Personalities sell the sport," said Claire Smith, the first woman to cover a Major League baseball beat full-time when she reported for the Hartford Courant in 1982 before moving to the New York Times as a columnist. "If you can't see the immediate reaction to wins and losses or arguments and you get a sanitized version, and if you're dependent on players once they have ...
