The last few weeks have been great ones for female athletes breaking into the male dominated sport of baseball. Four women led the charge, realizing their dream on the diamond.

            This week, San Francisco Giants assistant coach Alyssa Nakken became the first woman in Major League Baseball history to coach on the field. She took over when the regular first base coach was ejected from the game. Nakken worked in the team’s front office before becoming an assistant coach in 2020.

            Last week, Rachel Balkovec became the first woman to manage an MLB minor league affiliate, skippering the Tampa Tarpons, a Class A affiliate of the New York Yankees. The Yankees promoted her from her previous job as a minor league hitting coach, and everyone knows she’s earned her position.

            “She’s not a token hire. Whether she’s male or female, it doesn’t change the fact that she is a great coach,” said Yankees hitting coach Dillon Lawson.*

            Meanwhile, Team USA’s Kelsie Whitmore signed with the Atlantic League’s Staten Island FerryHawks. (The Atlantic League is a professional league one level below MLB.) A pitcher, Whitmore won silver in the 2014 Women’s Baseball World Cup and gold at the 2015 Pan American Games.

            Finally, last month, Alexis “Scrappy” Hopkins was drafted by the Atlantic League’s Kentucky Wild Health Genomes. With these signings, Whitmore and Hopkins become the first female players to take on-field positions in professional baseball.  

            Hopkins got her nickname for her style of play as a catcher and utility player. But she didn’t always see this future. When she was asked to write a college essay about a dream, she didn’t mention baseball.

            “I was going to put down professional baseball player, but I actually didn’t because I was like, ‘That’s never gonna happen,’” she said. “But I guess here we are today making a dream come alive.”**

Forging a path to home plate

            Women’s achievements in this sport are particularly notable because there’s no path for women who want to play pro baseball. Girls are most often steered — even shoved — into softball. Some women prefer that sport, as it allows them to compete on a team of women with other women.***

            But if a girl really wants to play baseball, she has to break into the male domain. We’ve talked about Maria Pepe, who in 1972 forced Little League Baseball to accept girls.

            But after Little League, then what? My son’s Cal Ripken and Babe Ruth teams had no female players. His college’s varsity and club teams had no female players. His adult rec league has no female players.

            But girls do indeed play baseball. TEAM USA includes collegiate, national and Olympic teams. Just recently, about 130 colleges across the country committed to allowing women to try out for their men’s teams. An organization called Baseball For All is also pushing colleges to form women’s club baseball teams and baseball programs with NCAA status. 

Take a ride with Geena Davis

            Because of the movie “A League of Their Own,” everyone knows about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. During and after World War II, from 1943 to 1954, ten teams competed, with about 600 women participating.

            The league still exists today, promoting baseball for women. In 2019, the AAGPBL established a non-profit, American Girls Baseball, whose mission is to support girls and women who want to play baseball and provide a path to competitive play and financial compensation.

            It’s no surprise that “League of Their Own” actress Geena Davis, who plays star catcher Dottie Hinson, also played a role in Title IX’s history. In 2003, when a federal commission was considering whether colleges could comply with Title IX by using surveys of female students to gauge athletic interest, Davis called that evasive tactic a strikeout.

            “I am here to take you on a short ride in Thelma and Louise’s car if you think it’s fair and just to limit a girl’s opportunity to play sports based on her response to an interest survey,” she said.****

            I’m eager to follow the trajectory of these new initiatives in women’s baseball. Because of my son’s involvement in the game, I’ve come to love it myself. Were I to live my life over, perhaps I’d ditch the music lessons and pick up a baseball mitt instead!

                                                            _____________________

* Elizabeth Merrill, “New York Yankees minor league manager Rachel Balkovec has worked her entire life for this moment,” ESPN (April 8, 2022).

** Legendary softball coach Margie Wright was thrilled to play ball on a women’s team, rather than be the sole female player on a men’s team. Read about Margie’s experiences in my four-part series.

*** Jack Bantock, “Alexis ‘Scrappy’ Hopkins becomes first woman to be drafted by a professional baseball team,” CNN (March 25, 2022).

**** In the 1991 movie, “Thelma and Louise,” the titular characters played by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon drive over the edge of the Grand Canyon in an impromptu suicide pact. In 1992’s “A League of Their Own,” Davis’s character is based on AAGPBL player Dorothy Green. Davis’s athletic interest is not surprising — in real life, she’s an avid archer.

When we talk about female athletes of the mid-1900s who broke through gender barriers, we tend to make their stories into ones of pure triumph. And triumph they did.

            But I’ve become curious about their entire lives. What happened when they came to the end of the paltry opportunities they had in pre-Title IX days?

            Some women fared better than others.

Didrikson the dame

            Let’s look at Babe Didrikson, who we talked about last week. At the 1932 Summer Olympics, she won gold in the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin, and silver in the  high jump. She had wanted to enter all five events she qualified for, but at the time, women were only allowed to enter three events. Because, of course, women are fragile!

            She could have chosen almost any sport. She excelled at basketball, swimming, diving, riflery, handball and boxing. She even pitched in a few spring training Major League Baseball games.

            Yet the sporting world wasn’t ready for women in professional sports.

            Sportswriter Joe Williams conceded that Didrikson was a talented amateur, but opined that women don’t belong in professional sports. They can’t break male records and they can’t make the same money male athletes can, he argued — Didrikson was just “cheapening herself” by trying.

            “But let the dame play all the amateur golf she wants to,” he shrugged. “By now, she must have learned there is no money in feminine athletics.*

            Fortunately, Didrikson did turn to professional golf and won 10 LPGA major championships. In her career as a golfer, she brought in a comfortable income. Her best year was 1950, when she entered the U.S. Open, the Titleholders Championship, and the Women’s Western Open, which made her an earnings leader. She was a leading earner again in 1951.

            From then on, illness hobbled her, although she still performed well. But in 1938, she had married wrestler George Zaharias, which no doubt brought her an extra measure of financial stability.

Gibson’s struggle

            It was a different story for tennis player Althea Gibson, who we also talked about last week.

            In 1950, at age 23, Gibson became the first African American player to compete at the U.S. National Championships (the U.S. Open). She was the first African American woman to win major titles: the French Open in 1956, and Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in 1957 and 1958.

            But racial bias meant that many white players refused to compete with or against her. Discrimination even affected her game — coaches taught her to play any balls within two inches of a line to avoid conflict with opposing white players.

            When Gibson retired from amateur tennis in 1958, she had made almost no money from it. And with no channel to pursue pro tennis — professional tennis tours for women didn’t fully start until 1973 — she struggled to earn a living.

            No one was interested in her as a tennis pro. Race had a lot to do with that, she knew.

             “To hail my talents in public doesn’t cost anything, but to hire a Negro — and a Negro woman at that — to teach white club members called for a bigger expenditure of courage than most club owners were willing to make,” Gibson said.**

            She tried her hand at golf, as Didrikson had, but it didn’t work out. She played exhibition matches on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, tried life as a singer, coached a few promising players and ran tennis clinics for children in underserved neighborhoods. 

            But by the mid-1990s, Gibson was sick, alone and living in poverty. She told her best friend, fellow Black tennis player Angela Buxton, that she was going to kill herself.

            “She was calling to say goodbye,” Buxton said. “I said, now wait just a minute.”***

            Through a tennis magazine, Buxton arranged a fundraiser, and money poured in. Gibson went on to have another ten years.

            Gibson lived until age 76, a long time to struggle with income insecurity. And who knows what would have happened for Didrikson? She died at age 45 at the height of her fame and what little fortune she enjoyed. Had she lived longer, her story might have ended much differently.

                                    ____________________________________

* Joe Williams, “Let Her Play Golf, Even If She Is a Pro,” New York World Telegram, reprinted in the Oklahoma News (May 15, 1935), p. 9. In the article, he quotes an earlier, undated column of his.

** Alicia Ault, “Althea Gibson’s Momentous Achievement,” Smithsonian (June 1, 2021), quoting Ashley Brown, a University of Wisconsin historian who is writing a biography of Gibson.

*** Althea Gibson, “Tennis Star Ahead of Her Time, Gets Her Due at Last,”New York Times (August 26, 2019).

 

We last talked about Babe Didrickson, an athlete whose accomplishments began to break down the prejudice against women in sports. But it was another athlete who attacked not only the gender barrier, but the barrier of racial hatred as well.

            In 1950, 23-year-old tennis player Althea Gibson became the first African American player, man or woman, to compete at the U.S. National Championships, now known as the U.S. Open. She went on to become the first African American woman to win major titles: the French Open in 1956, and Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in 1957 and 1958.

            Those last two years, the Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year — no racial qualifier, just the best. After her first Wimbledon triumph, she was honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City, only the second African American person to be so recognized, after Olympic runner Jesse Owens, who was lauded along the Canyon of Heroes in 1936.

            Gibson credited Jackie Robinson, the Black baseball player who in 1947 broke through the color barrier in Major League Baseball, as her inspiration. But historians believe Gibson smashed an even greater barrier than Robinson.

             “You’re talking about an elite, country-club sport, which has a very different meaning in society” than baseball or other team sports, noted Damion Thomas, a curator for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.*

Lightning strikes the tennis world

            In fact, at Gibson’s first appearance at the Open in 1950, even nature seconded that statement. She won her first match, but the second match was halted by rain. During the ensuing storm, lightning shattered a stone eagle at the top of the stadium.

            “It may have been an omen that times were changing,” Gibson said.**

            Gibson was born to a family of sharecroppers in Silver, South Carolina, a speck of a town barely on the map, and the family moved to Harlem when she was 3 years old. She was a problem child — she hated school and often skipped to spend her days playing ball sports of all kinds. She excelled at women’s paddle tennis, and at the age of 13, she dropped out of school.

            Taking on the game of tennis, Gibson competed in tournaments for the American Tennis Association, which was almost exclusively Black in the 1940s. In 1946, two Black tennis-playing doctors, took Gibson under their wings.

            Soon-to-be welterweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson and his wife also befriended Gibson. The families of the doctors provided homes, tennis instruction and academic structure.  She graduated high school in 1949 in Wilmington, N.C., and from Florida A&M in 1953.

Show ‘em who you are

            Gibson had won the national Black women’s tennis championships two years running. But in 1950,  it looked like the lily-white United States Lawn Tennis Association would exclude her from the Nationals. Another tennis player took up Gibson’s cause.

            “If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of players, then it’s only fair that they meet this challenge on the courts,” wrote Alice Marble, a tennis star of the 1930s. To Alice, she wrote: “Don’t bother to tell ‘em who you are; prove it instead.”*** 

            Marble’s challenge prevailed and Gibson made her debut that year. Unlike Jackie Robinson, though, Gibson didn’t see herself a trailblazer for the entire Black community. She found that role too oppressive.

            “I don’t consider myself to be a representative of my people,” she said. “I’m thinking of me and nobody else.”****

            Gibson believed instead that individual achievement on its own would lead to opportunities for everyone. Yet, no matter what she said, she did indeed broaden people’s ideas about who exactly gets the chance to excel.

            “Althea’s accomplishments set the stage for my success, but she also made a difference for people of all backgrounds in all areas,” said tennis star Venus Williams. “Through beneficiaries like me, Serena, and many others to come, her legacy will live on.”*****

                                                _______________________________

* Alicia Ault, “Althea Gibson’s Momentous Achievement,” Smithsonian (June 1, 2021).

** Mark Preston, “Gibson’s Forest Hills Debut,” United States Tennis Association (February 5, 2020).

*** American Lawn Tennis (July 1, 1950). Alice Marble wrote an editorial for this issue of the magazine, along with an open letter to Gibson in February 1950, to which Gibson replied in the same issue.

**** Sally H. Jacobs, “Althea Gibson, Tennis Star Ahead of Her Times, Gets Her Due,” New York Times (August 26, 2019).

***** Endorsement for Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson, by Frances Clayton Grey (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).

In the 1900s, some sports began to appear as appropriate outlets for women’s athletic pursuits. Still, the Olympics remained elusive.

            Early women’s sports, like golf and tennis, were approved pursuits of the upper class and an option only for white, upper class women. Who can forget the aloof and alluring professional golfer Jordan Baker in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby?  

            Women got a toehold in the Paris Games of 1900, when 22 of the 997 athletes were women, but they competed only in tennis, golf and croquet. Later, a few other sports, such as sailing and equestrianism, were added as women’s events.

            At that Olympics, golfer Margaret Abbott of Chicago became the first American woman to win Olympic gold. Unlike the men, however, she got a gold-plated ceramic bowl instead of a medal. And, ironically, Abbott never knew she’d won a gold medal. The 1900 games were called the Championnats Internationaux, instead of the Olympic Games. The event was not recognized as an Olympiad until after Abbott’s death in 1955.

Pierre digs in

            However, backward male attitudes still held sway and the Olympics remained out of reach for most female athletes.

            “Women’s sports are the most unaesthetic sight human eyes could contemplate,” sniffed founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin. “The Olympics should be reserved for men… with female applause as its reward.” ^*

            Women struck back, starting their own competitive games, which were held until 1934. But every time they requested full entry into the Olympics, women met “a solid wall of refusal,” said Alice Milliat, a French athlete who founded the women’s games.**

            In 1928, a woman’s race at the Amsterdam Olympics set back the cause of female athletics for decades. After runners competed in an 800-meter race, sportswriters ridiculed the women’s efforts.

            “It was a pitiful spectacle to see the girls tumble down after the finish like dead sparrows,” a writer from the German magazine De Maasbode said. His conclusion? “The distance is far too strenuous for women.”^***

            Piling on, the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Count Henri Baillet-Latour, proposed that all women’s competitions be cut from the Games. While his outrageous suggestion was not taken up, the IOC cut women’s races longer than 200 meters from the Games until 1960, when the 800-meter race was re-introduced. The women’s marathon wasn’t approved until 1984.

Babe bursts on the scene

            The 1930s passed before the finally the IOC began adding women’s sports to the Games in significant numbers. However, progress slowed for all athletes when the Olympics were cancelled by war in 1916, 1940 and 1944. And into the 1960s, individual sports were still the only avenue open to women.

            But outstanding female athletes gradually began to change people’s minds. Mildred “Babe” Didrikson mastered every sport she tried, including golf, track and field, basketball and baseball. She won two gold medals in track and field at the 1932 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, and after turning to professional golf, she won ten Ladies Professional Golf Association major championships.

            Yet, in the press, Didrikson was criticized for her short hair and for wearing pants and  shorts. A sports writer once said of Didrikson, “It would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.”****

            Didrikson just brushed off the insults. She was once asked, “Is there anything you don’t play?” Her answer: “Yeah, dolls.”^*****

            Professional sports and the Olympics were cracking open for women. In my next post, we’ll meet Althea Gibson, an African American woman who crashed the lily white game of tennis.

                                                _______________________

* David Goldblatt. The Games: A Global History of the Olympics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), p. 109-110.

** The Games, p. 114.

***The Games, p. 112.

**** Joe Williams, “Let Her Play Golf, Even If She Is a Pro,” the New York World Telegram, reprinted in the Oklahoma News (May 15, 1935), p. 9. In the article, he quotes from an earlier, undated column of his.

***** Karen Blumenthal, Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX: The Law that Changed the Future of Girls in America (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2005), p. 57.

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Central New York State has always been a hotbed of reform sentiment. Abolition, suffrage, temperance, religious reform — you name it, people have always rocked the boat here. When it comes to girls and sports, it’s no surprise that a revolution happened here, too.

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This week, three congresswomen accused the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) of violating Title IX’s spirit of gender equality.

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Hoboken, New Jersey, considers itself the birthplace of baseball. The first officially recorded game of baseball was played at the town’s Elysian Fields on June 19, 1846. There’s a plaque honoring this fact — I’ve seen it.

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