Playing Ball with the Boys. Betsy Ross
have been since 1968, which most people don’t realize. I’ve either owned tournaments, and now I own the majority of the World TeamTennis league, and our league has men and women with equal contribution to the team effort, on a level playing field. So if you ever see a World TeamTennis match, you see my philosophy on life.”
On the “Battle of the Sexes” matchup with Bobby Riggs: “I actually realized the magnitude of the event when I said yes to him, for two months before we played. So I understood it was about history, it was about men and women, their own emotions about themselves, about the opposite gender. Title IX had just been passed, June 23, 1972, and I played Bobby in ’73, and I really wanted to win that match to change people’s hearts and minds to actually match the legislation of Title IX.”
On advice she gives to young people, especially young women: “I want young people to know history. Because the more you know about history, the more you know about yourself, and how you fit into this universe. And then from having that knowledge, it will help you and direct you to know where you can make a difference in this world. And also know your strengths and weaknesses.
“So you must have self-awareness, but you must understand history if you want to be leader. If you want to make a difference, it really helps to understand history and then how you’re going to shape the future. When I talk to the young tennis players on the WTA Tour, I say, ‘You have to shape the future for the next five to ten years. How do you want to do that?’
“And they’re stunned, because they’ve never thought of themselves shaping anything. But they are shaping the future. Every generation shapes the next five to ten years, twenty years. So it’s very important to kind of wake up young people to start thinking about their legacy.”
Then when the interview was over and I was shaking hands to thank her for her time, she said to me, “And how about you, are they treating you well here?” In all my years of covering sports, I’d never been asked that. So I gave her a quick synopsis of my sports work, my experience in the market, and said, yes, I’d worked with many of these people for some twenty years, and they do treat me well, thanks to the work that Billie Jean and many other women had done.
“So pay it forward,” she said. “Make sure that the next generation has those opportunities as well.”
It’s a responsibility that Billie Jean, and all the women featured in this book, take seriously. Here are some of the women, especially in sports media, who have paid it forward to allow this generation to pursue their dreams of working in sports:
Sadie Kneller Miller
While Midy Morgan is considered the first female sportswriter for her coverage of horse racing (and livestock news—let’s hope the subjects were not related) for the New York Times in 1869, women in media have Sadie Kneller Miller to thank for giving them a regular sports beat. Sadie graduated from Western Maryland College in 1885 with a penchant for journalism, and caught on with the Westminster Democratic Advocate. Later, she moved to Baltimore with her parents and began writing for the Baltimore Telegram.
Her work at the Telegram included covering the Baltimore Orioles, and she became known as “the only woman baseball reporter in the country.” Her interest in writing led her to take up photography, and she translated that skill to some landmark assignments, including a notable one with Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. She turned in photos of Spanish-American War activities at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and they were so good she got a permanent position at Leslie’s.
She stayed there for sixteen years, and during that time had such assignments as the Baltimore fire of 1904, the Taft inauguration, five Democratic conventions, and portraits of Teddy Roosevelt and Susan B. Anthony, the last formal photo taken of the suffragist.
She may have been a pioneer in sports, but she also broke down barriers in overseas reporting. She became known as the only female war correspondent in the world when she covered fighting in Morocco; she described the gold rush in the Yukon; she did interviews from Cuba to leper colonies and Czarist Russia, and interviewed Pancho Villa at his base in the Mexican mountains.
The ironic thing about Sadie’s sports coverage—many readers probably didn’t even know they were reading the work of a female sportswriter. Her stories carried the byline “SKM,” probably to hide her gender.
Women who covered sports in the 1920s include Mary Bostwick, covering the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Indianapolis Star; Dorothy Bough, sportswriter for the Philadelphia Inquirer; Nettie George Speedy, sports reporter for the Chicago Defender; Nan O’Reilly, golf editor of the New York Evening News; Cecile Ladu, sports editor of the Albany Times Union.
Lorena Hickok
Lorena might be best known as one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s closest friends, but she first was a journalist. Growing up in Wisconsin, she entered Lawrence College in Appleton in 1912 but left after a year to take a job with the Battle Creek Evening News for seven dollars a week.
She eventually got a job at the Milwaukee Sentinel as a society editor, later went to the Minneapolis Tribune, then went to New York to try to get a job covering World War I. When that didn’t work out, she returned to the Tribune and eventually was assigned to cover the University of Minnesota football team during the glory days of Big Ten football. Here’s a sample from the 1924 game between Minnesota and the University of Illinois and its star running back, Red Grange: “Again and again, ‘Red’ Grange hugged the ball to his ribs and started one of his famous runs,” she wrote. “Again and again he started and dropped, with three or four Gophers on top of him.”
She eventually joined the Associated Press to write features for the national wire service, covering politics and major stories such as the Lindbergh kidnapping. But her assignment with the University of Minnesota made her the first female beat writer to cover a men’s sports team.
Margaret Goss
Although she wrote the column for only a year and a half, Margaret Goss was able to make history during her time as a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. In 1924 and ’25, Goss described herself as the first American female journalist to cover women’s sports for a daily newspaper, and also was the first woman with a regular, bylined sports column.
That column, “Women in Sport,” gave Goss an opportunity to talk about women athletes and their accomplishments at a time when they were just making strides in the world of sports. Goss’s timing was perfect, as the 1920s often are described as the “Golden Age” of sports journalism, spawning such legendary sportswriters as Grantland Rice (whose column often shared space with Goss).
Mary Garber
When the sports editor at the Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, went off to war during World War II, another staffer (and sports fan), Mary Garber, took his place. When he returned, he got his old job back, and Mary moved back to her pre-war assignment on the paper’s society pages. It didn’t take long for the editors to figure out Mary knew more about sports than society, so she returned to the sports pages, where she stayed for four decades.
If these earlier women sportswriters were pioneers, then Mary is the godmother. Mary Ellen Garber was born in New York in 1916. Her father was a contractor who moved the family to Winston-Salem in the 1920s. Mary graduated from Hollins College in 1938 and eventually found her way to the newspaper and sportswriting.
Though in her early days she mainly covered high school sports in the area, she went on to assignments involving all types of sports, including football, basketball, baseball, track, tennis, softball, you name it, at all levels from rec leagues to college. She also covered minor league baseball, international track and field, and Davis Cup tennis.
Perhaps more groundbreaking, she reported on black high schools and the historically black colleges in the area—schools that often were ignored by the daily newspapers—during the segregation years of the 1950s and 1960s.
“Nobody cared much about black players forty years ago,” Clarence “Big House” Gaines, the Hall of Fame basketball coach at Winston-Salem State University told Sports Illustrated in 2000. “But Miss Mary covered a lot of things that weren’t too