In 1977, Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke was being told that the only real sportswriters were men, and those men were not to bring a “girlfriend” or “secretary” into the inner sanctum of baseball clubhouses. That was 35 years after the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movie “Woman of the Year” appeared, in which Tracy (playing a sportswriter) brought the highly-educated, well-traveled political affairs columnist (Hepburn) into Yankee Stadium’s pressbox and was emphatically reminded it was no place for “ladies.”

“Indeed, change takes longer than we ever imagine it will,” Ludtke emailed after I noted the persistence of such beliefs. “As I found out, it is easier to change the law than it is to change attitudes.”

This was just after Ludtke spoke via Zoom to my Hofstra University sportswriting class about events surrounding the 1978 court order that at last permitted female reporters access to major league baseball players in their team bunkers. At the time, Ludtke was a fully-credentialled baseball writer alongside fellow journalists covering the Yankees—all of them male—but barred from joining the men for pre- and post-game interviews in the team’s lockerroom.

She was exiled to a tunnel outside the Yanks’ clubhouse, at the mercy of a male official who would attempt to fetch players for Ludtke to obtain a quote or two. And in the case of the Yankees’ 1977 World Series-clinching victory, Ludtke waited an hour and 45 minutes in that tunnel, among a raucous crowd of fans and hangers-on, before Reggie Jackson, whose three home runs were the story of the night, appeared.

“Melissa,” Jackson brusquely informed her, “I’ve said all I have to say tonight” [to the men who had quizzed him inside]. I’m going downtown.” And he left.

“What Commissioner [Bowie] Kuhn was saying to me basically was, ‘We’re going to give you separate accommodations and we’ll call it equal, because you’re going to have access to the players. It’s just not going to be in the lockerroom with the men,’” Ludtke said.

So Time, Inc., Sports Illustrated’s parent company, sued. And the federal court judge who ruled in the case, Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York, applied the same reasoning that went into the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision: That separate cannot be equal.

So Ludtke (and all women sportswriters) won. Technically. Motley “did not say that I was allowed in lockerrooms,” Ludtke said. “The decision about where interviews took place was not a decision a federal judge could make because baseball was a private business.

“The only thing she could say was: ‘Whatever your media policy is, it needs to be non-discriminatory between men and women.’” So if Kuhn continued to require that interviews take place within the clubhouse, then Ludtke and other women also could be in that space.

All of this will be in Ludtke’s book, “Locker Room Talk,” to be released next year. As well as her reminder that, while she won in the court of law, “I lost big time in the court of public opinion.”

There were television skits and newspaper cartoons implying that female sports reporters were looking for more than quotes from male athletes. That they were using their feminine wiles to elicit information from the ballplayers, or were looking for dates. In a sense, Ludtke went from Dante’s first circle of hell, limbo, to the ninth circle, treachery.

“This was about equal rights. Equal access,” she said. “But there was always that notion that this was about nudity and sex.”

All these years later, there is a growing number of women in sports journalism, in press boxes and lockerrooms, doing their jobs, though still decidedly in the minority. But, too: In 1999, the Library of Congress selected that 1942 film, “Woman of the Year,” for preservation in the National Film Registry based on it being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Which might mean that the no-ladies-in-the-press-box conviction is not especially dated.