Playing Ball with the Boys. Betsy Ross
a 1990 interview.
She also had to fight for equal access to do her job, especially since in the early years she was barred from locker rooms and press boxes because she was a woman. In 1946, even though she had the right credentials, she had to cover a Duke football game while she was sitting in the stands with the coaches’ wives.
Her managing editor protested the move and told the Athletic Coast Conference athletic directors to get used to it—the paper wouldn’t cover their games with any other reporter but Miss Mary. They relented and let her in the press box, but the ACC Sportswriters Association and Football Writers Association denied her membership for many years. When she eventually was granted membership, she ended up as the association’s president and served on its board of directors.
She worked as a full-time sportswriter at the Sentinel and Winston-Salem Journal until 1986, when she retired at age seventy. She then worked part-time until 2002. Along the way she picked up numerous awards, including sports journalism’s highest honor, the Red Smith Award, given annually by the Associated Press for major contributions to sports journalism.
Other honors include election to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 1996, and induction into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association and Hall of Fame. The Association of Women in Sports Media (AWSM) renamed its annual pioneer award in her honor in 2006.
Mary Garber died in 2008 in a retirement home in Winston-Salem at the age of ninety-two, but she lived long enough to see a generation of women follow her footsteps in the field of sports reporting. Her quote as she received the Red Smith Award reflects her legacy: “I hope I have helped. I hope some little girl out there knows now that she can be a sportswriter if she wants to be.” In fact, the first winner of the AWSM Pioneer Award was Lesley Visser, the NFL’s first female beat writer.
Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink
Say what you will about the administration of Richard Nixon, but one of the landmark pieces of legislation that came out of that tumultuous time was the Educational Amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, known as Title IX. The amendment, prohibiting gender discrimination by federally funded institutions, was written by Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, mainly from an outgrowth of the adversities Mink faced through college. In fact, the amendment itself was renamed in 2002 the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.
The amendment itself hardly sounds controversial: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal assistance.” But what was supposed to jump-start women’s participation in sports has often turned into a battle of the sexes for athletic access.
This isn’t intended to be an argument of the pros and cons of Title IX. What is clear, though, is that the amendment has opened doors for many young girls and women who might otherwise not have had the opportunity to participate in organized sports.
The following women contributed some early “firsts” for women in sports.
Jane Gross, when at Newsday, was the first woman reporter in an NBA locker room.
Betty Cuniberti, San Francisco Chronicle, covered the Oakland Raiders and became the first woman to cover an NFL team from training camp through the Super Bowl. In 1981 at the Washington Star she became the first woman to receive the National Headliner Award for Consistently Outstanding Sports Writing.
Lesley Visser, Boston Globe, covered the New England Patriots.
Melissa Ludke of Sports Illustrated was famously barred from interviewing players in the clubhouse during the World Series. SI’s publisher, Time, Inc., filed suit, and the next year a federal court judge ruled that male and female reporters should have equal access to locker rooms.
Michele Himmelberg at the Fort Myers News-Press needed her newspaper to threaten a lawsuit against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to win equal access for her to the team’s locker room. Two years later, Himmelberg was at the Sacramento Bee where a lawsuit was filed to let her into the 49ers’ locker room.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.