Nobody said women couldn’t do the work of writing, but the culture of the place implied it. André Laguerre, the magazine’s managing editor from 1960 to 1974, regularly worked until 3 a.m., then returned a few hours later at 9 or 10. He expected his staff to do the same, whether male or female, parents or childless. After-work drinking sessions were also part of the deal. “Sports Illustrated made nearly impossible demands on people’s personal lives,” MacCambridge says. “It was that kind of remorseless place that Virginia Kraft would have had to make her way in.”
Kraft did more than just make her way. She won journalism awards, gave talks, appeared on television, and garnered media attention for her successes as a woman in both hunting and writing. But from the perspective of history, Kraft stayed strangely under the radar. Despite her pioneering status, MacCambridge didn’t mention her once in his 400-plus-page book about the history of the magazine; her name didn’t come up in his research. Although he regrets the omission, he says he didn’t have anything to work with. “She was a trailblazer and an important figure, and I feel bad,” he says. “But I don’t even have an anecdote.”
“Sports Illustrated made nearly impossible demands on people’s personal lives. . . . It was that kind of remorseless place that Virginia Kraft would have had to make her way in.”
— Michael MacCambridge
Kraft’s erasure from the history of sports writing may have something to do with her general absence from the offices of SI during her career there. Distancing herself from the boys-will-be-boys, hard-drinking culture based at the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center, Kraft lived in a world of her own. She spent about a third of each year traveling on assignment, making the outlandish claim that she covered 200,000 miles annually. And although that number is hard to believe, she was clearly prolific: In 1967 alone, she published 10 major features, including one of her stories on the IWFA. (That year she also wrote about hunting in Jordan, hunting in the Grand Canyon, fishing in Australia, and racing in a dogsled competition in Alaska.) When not in the field on assignment, she generally went to the office only a couple of times a week, staying in an apartment in the city as needed. More often, like some of the other senior writers, she wrote from home.