Melissa Ludtke: Interview #2

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ludtke: We had gotten through Mills [College] and all of that.

Ritchie: And your graduation at Wellesley.

Ludtke: My graduation at Wellesley, right.

Ritchie: What did you do the summer after you graduated?

Ludtke: That's when I went to Smith College and took courses in teaching, focusing on elementary education, and lived in my parents' house in Amherst, and sort of went to the Cape on weekends, lived with a pal.

Ritchie: Did you have any idea at that point what you might be doing in the fall?

Ludtke: Well, no. I vaguely remember—I don't vaguely remember, I do remember going and talking to people, coming down to Washington, talking to people about, for instance, maybe teaching on a Navajo Indian reservation. I was just, I think, really exploring ideas, but I wasn't really focused. I could say that I wasn't focused at all, and I think that would be a fair sense.

Ritchie: How did you get your first job?

Ludtke: Well, the lack of focus continues, because through that summer, I was doing the teaching [courses], but again I wasn't making any active attempt at finding a teaching job or even moving in that direction, so there must have been something inside of me that wasn't totally committed to that way of life or that choice. So when fall came around, I just simply made the choice to stay on living at Cape Cod. My parents went home to Amherst, and I just continued to live in the house, sort of rent-free. It was just there. I'm not quite sure what I did for spending money. I probably had a bit of savings from somewhere, but it wasn't a lavish life. I can remember baking a lot of bread and kind of walking on the beach, reading, hanging out.

Ritchie: What were most of your friends doing at this time?

Ludtke: A good portion had gotten married. I remember going to a bunch of weddings.

Ritchie: Was that a consideration?

Ludtke: No! Again, I didn't, of course, have a proposal that I was turning down, and I didn't at that time have anyone who seemed like a likely prospect, even. So I went to a lot of weddings, but didn't see myself in terms of moving in that direction. It's hard, when I look back, to think that I was so laid back about the whole thing, but I really was. I guess I just figured that when the time was right, I would make a move to do it. In fact, that's what happened, because late in that summer, I actually had the opportunity—and I think this is what life is about—I had an

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Ritchie: Friends from college?

Ludtke: Family friends that I knew. On one of these trips to New York, I ended up meeting, through Donna, through this phone introduction to Donna, two other women at ABC Sports, which were a very few number that were there. One was a producer, a woman named Ellie Riger, and another was a production assistant, a woman named Barbara Roche. It turned out that I came to know them, and they were just then producing a special for ABC called "Women in Sports," because this was the era in which Billie Jean King had just played her match that fall against Bobby Riggs. Title IX had been passed, guaranteeing equal access for women athletes at colleges. So it was a very exciting time in terms of women in sports, and this documentary they were doing for ABC was sort of a reflection of that. So here I suddenly found myself in the company of these terrific women who I just hadn't even known existed.

Ritchie: Doing what you would like to do.

Ludtke: Doing what I would like to be doing, but certainly had no qualifications to do at that point. So I just sort of hung out with them for a couple of days and went to the screening rooms, watched the film, got to know both of them, and we were just very much attracted to each other in the sense that they could see I had great enthusiasm and I loved what they were doing.

Ritchie: And you knew the topic very well.

Ludtke: And I knew the topic. But anyway, Barbara invited me to come and move in with her in New York. So I think it must have been that I met them the December before I went out on this ski trip and realized then that I could make this move, and then when I came back in January, made the move, knowing that I had a place to move to. I think that must have been the way it went.

So I did, I just went down. I had no job, but I knew I had a place to live. I had a little money that my parents had given me or I must have had left over from my college. At that time, college wasn't as expensive, and I had some money left over. I just kind of appeared on the scene, moved in with Barbara. We eventually found another apartment together. And all I did was start becoming what they call a "gofer." I would just go out and do events. I would be the handyman.

Ritchie: You were actually employed to do that?

Ludtke: No, I was freelancing. I was just kind of available. They were always looking for extra people that they can pay very cheaply to go out and do stuff, whatever it is. Also I became someone who just really hung out sort of in the underground caverns where they pieced together ABC Sports and a number of the events, watching how they did the layovers, just sitting in and spending time getting to know the directors, the producers, because that's the way you got a job as a gofer on something; you got to know them. And Frank [Gifford] was very helpful. He would look for opportunities for me to get jobs. I can remember flying out to Utah and doing a ski show out there. It barely paid my expenses, but they put me up, I got to do the show, gave me a little bit of exposure to what was happening. It was all those kind of tradeoffs.

But it clearly wasn't quite enough to live on, so I realized reality set in, and I had to find a job, so I ended up taking a job as a secretary at Harper's Bazaar magazine, which was one of the most weird—I mean, fashion magazine secretary. It was incredibly depressing.

Ritchie: That must have been quite a combination.

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Ritchie: So anything they needed, you took care of.

Ludtke: Anything they needed. And it's not easy to convince a bartender to let you take a double martini outside of the bar, to go. So, you know, you do need someone who's got a little spunk and is willing to figure out ways to make this work.

So that's what I did, and I can remember that Sunday afternoon, the Sunday afternoon I came back from doing that layover, the phone rang, and it was someone from Sports Illustrated saying, "We have another opening. We'd like you to come back in and do an interview." So I went in that next week, and I got hired that time. I made it.

Ritchie: For what position?

Ludtke: For researcher, full time. I sort of went on board probably right after Labor Day, that September. So that would have been September of '74, so about fourteen months after I'd graduated from college, I sort of had my first full-time job. I don't count the secretary at Harper's. But I mean my first full-time job, and there I was. So I stayed.

Ritchie: What did the first job involve? What were some of your responsibilities?

Ludtke: Essentially researchers are there to assist writers, similar to production assistants helping producers, which can run the gamut from doing actual interviews for writers to get included in their stories. You always ended up fact-checking stories. You were responsible for the accuracy of the story when it went into the magazine. As I found out in a very blunt way at one point, you also were responsible for all the drawings that went with a story, as letters poured in one week on a football story I had done, where a drawing of a play actually had one man too many on the field and, in fact, there hadn't been that man. So that was what you were responsible for. So it was a real mixture.

I got assigned, actually, to the gentleman who was writing the TV/radio column, because they assumed that part of the expertise I was bringing was I had worked in television sports, so I had some familiarity with the media and sports. So I was assigned immediately to work on that column, and that was terrific. The downside was that I didn't get a sport per se, a beat per se, right away, but I did get a page that ran pretty frequently, and a writer who was very interested in having me do a lot of reporting. So I couldn't have been happier. I loved it. I mean, I had a lot to learn. Having never worked in any newspaper or anything, I had so much to learn.

Ritchie: How did you learn things?

Ludtke: Doing, watching, asking, just absorbing everything that went on around, beginning to learn the lingo that people used in terms of stories. One of the ways I think that I got through as a female in sportswriting is that I'm able to in some ways—there has to be a more polite way of saying it than "bullshit," but I mean to really just be certain of enough things that I can kind of fill in the blanks and talk my way into finding out more, but at the same time not making people think that I'm really stupid about it. So I had enough confidence that I could go into situations that I really knew nothing about and sort of find my way through them, but at the same time I had enough knowledge to know that I had to ask some questions to learn what was going on.

So as I say, I was really happy doing all of that. It was just amazing. It was great.

Ritchie: Was that typical that you would be assigned to one writer?

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Ludtke: Yes, and dated a man who worked at the magazine. It became very much my life, and I loved it.

Ritchie: Were there any differences in the way the women reporters were treated and the young men?

Ludtke: Yes, there were. For instance, on the baseball beat, it was assumed that a woman couldn't fully report or be fully the legs and eyes and ears for a writer, so customarily there would be the senior baseball reporter, who would be a man, and then there would possibly be a second-string baseball reporter, who would be the woman. And more often than not, the man would, for instance, be able to stay and do the kind of game reporting, and the woman would often be back in the office "closing the story," doing the fact-checking in the office and the rest. It was just kind of assumed that that is the way it was. And there were a large number of women who were researchers, but very few of them, when I arrived, were really actively acting as day-to-day reporters.

Ritchie: Did any of them know the sports as well as you did?

Ludtke: Yes, yes, yes. I mean, some didn't, but, no, I think it was a very top-level crew of people, many of whom went on to newspaper work in covering sports. They continued to be part of the wave of women sportswriters in the seventies. Jane Gross, who is now a reporter out in the San Francisco bureau for the New York Times, was there at Sports Illustrated when I first arrived, and she went on to Newsday to cover professional basketball and actually became the first woman to have locker-room access through the basketball league when she was covering the old ABA, and went on to do some extraordinary work. She's now covering social policy issues and children and families. So it's interesting that a lot of us have moved out of sports into areas of these kinds of issues. Stephanie Salter left maybe a year, year and a half, after I got there, and went out to San Francisco Examiner, I think, and started covering sports as a daily beat reporter, covered a lot, I think basketball, as well. So, no, there were people who really knew their—

Ritchie: Do you think the pay scale was different for the young men and young women?

Ludtke: You know, I don't know. I don't know whether it was. One difference may have been the sense that for a young man who was starting as a researcher, I think there was a belief that even if their pay scale was what my pay scale was, that there were opportunities to kind of move up, because it was a magazine where they could look historically and see that some of the terrific writers of the present had been researchers before, and most of that progress was certainly in men. So they could see, if they could see ahead, that their salary was going to be a pretty good salary. I'm not sure that women could see that same thing, because, by and large, they didn't have much hope held out to them that they were going to move up through the ranks in the same way.

Ritchie: Were there any women at the writers' level?

Ludtke: There were, I think, two or three, one really functioning, a woman named Sarah Pileggi at the time, now Sarah Ballard. She had been a researcher and really worked very hard to get herself from being a researcher to a writer, and she was just starting that out when I first arrived. Then there was a woman named Pat Ryan who was an editor, had just been made an editor, and she was covering special features at the magazine. She was the one to whom I turned when I was interested in first writing. I went to her with some ideas and tried out things with her first, and she was the one who really gave me encouragement, as well, to try it.

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Ritchie: Did you ever get a promotion?

Ludtke: No.

Ritchie: A raise?

Ludtke: Raises, I mean, in the sense of annual raises, sure, but I never got a promotion. I was there about five years as a researcher.

Ritchie: Did you ever formally apply for another position there?

Ludtke: As far as I can remember, no. I don't think they really had applications in that sense. They certainly had writers' trials, and there had been reporters who I knew very well, who had been put on writers' trials. Some of them had kind of made it through the other side and become writers.

Ritchie: What do you mean by writers' trials?

Ludtke: Where your responsibilities as a researcher get taken away, and you're given a chance to try writing. I think I did not ever formally apply for that, because I think the signals were so strong that it wasn't something that I ought to think about doing. I have a feeling it was a sort of informal process in the sense that if an editor thought you should do it, they would certainly let you know and kind of give you the opportunity to do it, but it wasn't the kind of thing you were going to get just by asking for it. I think it really worked that way. But it didn't happen for me. But I was writing a lot. I mean, I worked that job basically seven days a week. My days off, I was looking for stories, I was always up at the ball park. When I'd finally gotten the job as a beat reporter for baseball, I just lived at Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium.

Ritchie: How did you get switched to baseball?

Ludtke: At a certain point I think I just both asked for it and sort of just, in a sense, took it over. Stephanie Salter, who is the one who went to the San Francisco Examiner, I think she had been the second-string baseball reporter. I think when she left, I just sort of took over. At that time, the back-up baseball reporter often was responsible for keeping the books, as they say. In other words, you would log in every baseball game—at that point they had something called baseball's week, and that would be a review of each of the leagues in terms of what happened. That would essentially be written out of these books that would be kept. You'd keep a scrapbook of game-by-game accounts, and you'd sort of log pitchers' records and this kind of thing. So I think I realized that a good entry point would be kind of to take those books over, so I think that's how it happened, that it was more informal than anything else. Then it was just eventually assigned to me because I was doing it. But I loved baseball, and that's what I wanted to do, so I think I went after it with that in mind.

Ritchie: So you found an opening and got in there.

Ludtke: Yes. A guy named Jim Kaplan was the lead baseball reporter, and it was very clear that he was the lead baseball reporter, that he was the one who was going to be staying on weekends if there was an assignment to be done, and he was the one who was going to be looked at to do the reporting. I would sort of log the books and take care of the clean-up stuff.

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Ritchie: Did you travel much with your work?

Ludtke: Yes.

Ritchie: Was that hard or did you enjoy it?

Ludtke: No, I enjoyed it. I had nothing that was keeping me down. That was part of the thrill of this whole thing, to travel. Most of my travel was actually on the subway, primarily to either Yankee or Shea Stadium, because after I became a beat reporter in baseball, I got my little card from the league, which gave me access anytime I wanted, to any of the stadiums. So I would go up almost every night. So I would get to work at around nine, 9:30 in the morning, I'd work a full day until 5:30 or six, then I'd get in the subway and go right up to the stadium, go to the batting practice and the rest, have dinner with the sportswriters, go up, sit in the press box, do the game, and then take the subway home. Now when I think about how unsafe that was, it's crazy, because I was taking subways home literally by myself from the Bronx, from 161st Street in the Bronx, and then walking home from Sixty-first Street to Sixty-fifth at midnight, and I was doing this night after night after night.

Ritchie: It sounds, though, as if you enjoyed the lifestyle.

Ludtke: I loved it, yes, and I got to know a lot of people in the business. At first it was very strange, because I arrived and really didn't know anyone. No one knew me. And here you stand out very much as a woman in a press box, at least back then you did. There may have been one or two others, but usually you were by yourself. So it took me a while to get to know people and for them to get to know me, and then it began to get very comfortable.

Ritchie: Did you feel you were accepted by your colleagues, like when you went and had dinner with them or sat in the press box?

Ludtke: I did. I began to feel that way. At first, I was a bit shy about being there. Also, I always knew that my life was very different, because most of the people who were up there were doing daily journalism. I was just kind of there watching it, because I just wanted to take in as much as I could. So I'd go to batting practice and talk to the players, but it wasn't always for a specific story or an assignment; it was just because I wanted to just be a part of it.

Ritchie: You didn't have the deadline aspect.

Ludtke: I didn't have the deadline, and often I didn't have an assignment. It was just because I wanted to kind of go. Then I did get to know some of the players pretty well, because you just get around and you talk to them enough, you start to know them.

One player in particular, I actually got an assignment to work with Roger Kahn, who was a writer, had done the book The Boys of Summer. I was assigned to fact-check a series he was doing of feature articles on baseball for Sports Illustrated. It turned out he wanted to turn those articles into a book, so he hired me as his fact-checker on the book, and off we went on a week-and-a-half-long trip to do reporting and the rest for his book. So I suddenly was out in Chicago, interviewing Bill Veeck, who was the eccentric owner of the Chicago White Sox at that time, and then we went to Cincinnati. He really liked Johnny Bench, was one of his favorite players, so he spent a lot of time interviewing Johnny Bench, and also he loved the Dodgers, who he'd written about in The Boys of Summer. It had just so happened that a man named Tommy Lasorda was just made manager after many, many years of Walter Allston being the manager. So I met all

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Ritchie: When you did your interviews, did you have a prepared set of questions and would you tape them?

Ludtke: No, I've never worked off a prepared set of questions.

Ritchie: You'd just talk with people?

Ludtke: I've always been a reporter who's believed in conversation with a theme, usually, with a point to it. But that's how I do my reporting now. I'd much rather engage someone in a conversation than I would in an interview. That's the kind of reporting that I do. I'm not a hard-nosed news reporter, per se; I'm much more a "feature-ish" kind of person. So we'd get in conversations, and great stories would come out of this. The umpires were very funny, and the catchers were very funny, so when an interview would work well, I'd just be delighted, because I just knew I had it. It was just really neat stuff, and no one else had still written this thing.

Ritchie: So all through the summer, you were taking notes.

Ludtke: All through. Yes, all through, just keeping it going, keeping it going. So over the winter, as we'd get ready for the spring issue, I started writing this piece.

Ritchie: What did you do in the winter? It was off-season for baseball.

Ludtke: I covered pro basketball. I got assigned to basketball, so I did that, which meant traveling. Baseball was my love. So I did basketball. My off time, I would sit down and try to really take all of this information I had and write it.

Well, anyway, it ended up being chosen as the feature story for the baseball issue. I think this was in '77. It was a wonderful, wonderful piece, had great illustrations of the umpires and the catchers and all the little things they did behind the plate. It was just a neat story, and it was a long story. It was, frankly, a good effort. It was a good idea, it was well executed. It had to go through several rewrites, but that's not surprising. There were things that I needed to work out in terms of organizing a longer piece.

Ritchie: How would rewrites work? Would you turn your material over to someone and they'd kick it back?

Ludtke: Yes. You'd turn it in to an editor, he'd say, "Listen. You're on the right track here, but this needs some work in the middle here," whatever. So we went through that process, but in the end, it worked. It worked. That was a very pleasing experience. That was a great deal of satisfaction. But as I say, in the process of getting the information, I think it was starting to be a lesson to me that this whole system, where the lack of access was so noticeable—

Ritchie: Did you talk to anyone about this or express your frustration at this time?

Ludtke: No, I don't think so. I may have just talked to friends offhand about it. I think there was still a feeling that I had—maybe others wouldn't have had it—that you sort of weren't allowed to, that it was just the way it was, and there wasn't a whole lot that I, as an individual, could really do to change it. So even though I was frustrated and upset by it, I wasn't consciously thinking about having to find ways to change it, and my feeling was that the editors were very aware of this difference. They were aware just in terms of assigning people, and it didn't seem to be bothering them. So I didn't think that they were going to be people who would pay a whole lot

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Ritchie: You didn't have the advantage of the moment of triumph or defeat, either.

Ludtke: I didn't have that, but, you know, interestingly enough, from my perspective, as someone who considers herself more of, again, a feature writer looking for a little bit of "off the news" kinds of stories to do, more pieces, in a sense, looking at the team dynamics or players or things like that, I was more concerned with what I was missing in the sense of an opportunity to talk with players in a much more informal and longer way before the game, which was the locker-room access.

You see, the whole focus of locker-room access, to the public's way of thinking, is after the game. They think every locker room looks like the champagne bottles being poured and the whole celebration. That happens once a year, once a season. The time that's really the time that reporters use to get leads, to get stories, to track down things from the night before, is before the game. There's a period of about an hour where players are going in and out to batting practice for a while, but while the opposing team is taking batting practice, they're, for the most part, in the locker room. That's the time. They're there sitting around picnic tables, signing baseballs. It's just a very relaxed time. In fact, you get more from players in terms of more in-depth longer, more thoughtful, than you do after a game, where again there's that kind of frantic activity that takes place. If they have to catch a bus, then it's even faster. So that's what people don't think about. That's in the catchers and the umpires story. If I had had that access, I would have had a lot more success. I wouldn't have needed the catchers after the game. What I wanted was that time with them before, in a relaxed environment.

Ritchie: You were spending a lot of time with your work. Did you have any time for yourself, any social life?

Ludtke: My social life, I think, for the most part revolved around the games and the sports. Again, I think I mentioned to your earlier, maybe not on the tape, but my work and my personal life are basically kept separate in terms of my realm of friends. I think my Sports Illustrated experience would be a different time in my life.

Ritchie: That's an exception.

Ludtke: Yes, an exception or a difference from the way it is now.

Ritchie: You clearly liked the job at Sports Illustrated.

Ludtke: I loved it.

Ritchie: What didn't you like about it?

Ludtke: I can't think of anything I didn't like about it. I loved it. It was something I looked forward to. I can't think of a day where I didn't look forward to going in. I didn't mind checking the stories; I could do that very easily. It wasn't difficult, but it was challenging, because I was learning new things. Once I discovered being at the ball park, that was a whole other layer to it, and I loved that.

Ritchie: Did you ever want to advance?

Ludtke: Yes, I definitely wanted to be a writer. I got to the point where I wanted to do that.

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The reason that I was asking him this in such an informal way is that as the season had gone on and the Yankee players had become comfortable with me, and Billy Martin, who was then their manager, had become comfortable with me, Billy Martin, in fact, had given me complete access to his office, the manager's office, kind of through the back door, which was attached to the locker room. On occasion, he would get, or get someone to get, players for me, so there had been an informal kind of thing worked out. So I was just kind of mentioning to Tommy, "Don't you think there's a way we can do that?"

His response was, "I'm not responsible for that. Why don't you talk to Tommy John, who's right here," and he introduced me to him, because Tommy is the player rep. So here is this coincidence. Not only Tommy Lasorda, but there was Tommy John.

Ritchie: What do you mean, player rep?

Ludtke: He's the representative for that team in terms of being the player. He's the one who would be representing the players if there were a dispute with management or whatever. In fact, Tommy John had listened to the whole conversation, and he and I had a brief conversation afterwards, and he said, "Listen. What I'll do for you, I'll go back and I'll poll the players and I'll find out if they're okay with it."

Ritchie: What was your reaction to that?

Ludtke: Not one way or the other. I thought he was a wonderful person and a gentleman, something that would be confirmed later on as he became a Yankee and I got to know him better. He's just a class act. I was just grateful that he would at least ask the question. I said, "That sounds fine." He said, "Listen. I'll find you before the game tomorrow, and I'll let you know what they decide." I said, "Fine." End of it. Never even mentioned the conversation to anyone else. Didn't call an editor. Again, we were off Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Did not even bother to call an editor. This is my sense of news judgment, right? I mean, it just seemed to me it was a request that I was asking, and we'd see what happens.

So I went up the next day. It was a day off, and then the game was going to be that night, so I just went up to the stadium again by myself, hadn't gone to work that day, obviously, and got up there maybe around 5:30 or so, and Tommy [John] found me. He sought me out and said, "Come on back here," and we went back against the backstop fence. He said, "I will not tell you that-" And I think I wrote this in the L.A. Times piece. "I won't say it was unanimous, but there was a majority that said that it's fine with them if you come into the locker room if you need to, to do interviews." He said, "That's the way we do things on the Dodgers—majority vote. So consider it fine." And I said, "Well, good. That's great."

Ritchie: At this point, did you think that you had made history?

Ludtke: No! I mean, that's what I'm talking about—my lack of news judgment. No! First of all, I knew Jane Gross very well, and Jane had done this, as I say, in basketball. Hockey was already open to women in terms of their locker rooms. So I didn't quite make the connection between baseball being the American pastime and how much of—I mean, in a sense, basketball players are sort of not quite—they're like people who run around in underwear, you know, and they're not quite the same kind of folk heroes that somehow baseball is. Hockey, they all seem to speak French, and no one kind of identifies a lot with them. And those two had really basically happened not because they had to go to court, but because they worked out this thing.

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dreadful lack of common sense—I did not even call my baseball editor that night or the next morning to say what happened. I think I was still working under the presumption that it wouldn't really matter. They'd been aware of all of this. What was going to change? It's just the way I thought at that point.

I went back up the next night, and I think at that point they began talking about giving me—no, it wasn't at that game; it was then later that they talked about giving me an escort, so that that escort would go in and be able to get players and bring them out to me from the locker room. That was the way they did it.

Anyway, so that Wednesday night game, I didn't, again, go back and try to argue it anymore or barge in; I just sort of accepted that that's the way it was.

Thursday morning, I showed up for work, and immediately upon arrival at work, got a call from the baseball editor saying, "What has been happening at Yankee Stadium?"

Ritchie: So it had gone beyond you and other people were involved?

Ludtke: Yes. In fact, Jane Gross had called, who was a very close friend of the baseball editor's, and said, "I think you ought to be aware of this happening up there." And so began our conversations about now what would happen. Their desire, which I think probably surprised me, was to really pursue this matter, to really take it quite seriously, what had happened. So I think that it was a mixture of both delight and surprise that I came out of that meeting with them asking me, would I be willing to proceed if they decided to file a lawsuit if it came to that. I think their first option was to try to negotiate with the commissioner's office, to see what they could get. But I think the negotiations obviously came to, "No."

Ritchie: I wonder why they thought so quickly of going to a lawsuit.

Ludtke: I think they posed the lawsuit as a final option—would I be willing to participate in that if that's where they got to. In the meantime, I can remember them asking me to do it, and I have a copy of this at home, a letter that I wrote to Commissioner Kuhn, walking through all of the steps that I had made, leading up to where his assistant said to me that I would not have the access. I think that letter was hand-delivered to his office, and I think that's when negotiations began to ensue between the managing editor of Sports Illustrated and the commissioner's office and my baseball editor.

That was why they then made the arrangement when the Series returned to New York, because I did not go out to L.A. as part of the team. I wasn't ever assigned to, so I didn't go. When it came back to New York, that's when they made the arrangement to give me an escort, who turned out to be the PR person for the Philadelphia Phillies, whose job it was going to be to get me players who I wanted to interview from the locker room, which was, of course, an absurd notion, because he was not going to be able to go in and get me the player I wanted, because there would be fifteen other reporters around this player. He'd say, "Excuse me. I'm to take you outside the locker room, and you're to do the interview out here"?

So its ultimate test was, of course, game seven—it may have been six or seven, I can't remember now at this point—but it was an astonishing game. It was the game where Reggie Jackson hit three home runs to win the World Series and become the most valuable player, of course, after a tumultuous season of very big ups and downs with the whole dynamics of that Yankee team. So of course the player I asked for was Reggie. I said, "Would you get me Reggie?"