TheCatch

A streak of fiery pink brightened the horizon, lighting up a line of clouds that towered like smokestacks over the bayou. It was 5:30 a.m. on a Monday in early June, and although the full moon had not yet set, the marina in the tiny outpost of Venice, Louisiana, was already awake. A pickup truck backed a boat to the edge of the water alongside a fleet of vessels lining an L-shaped dock. The smell of gas infused the salty air while captains filled tanks for a nine-hour day on the water. And from every direction arrived anglers — all of them women.

An all-women’s fishing tournament is nothing new in 2023, but the concept was revolutionary back in 1955, when a group of women decided to leave their husbands at home and start the IWFA — a history I knew about because of Virginia Kraft. In 1960, Kraft first wrote about the IWFA for Sports Illustrated (SI), making her — at the time and for a long time after — one of the only women writing the kinds of in-depth stories the magazine became known for.

Over a 26-year career at SI, Kraft wrote deeply reported and immersive features, just like her male colleagues. All the while, she quietly racked up an unrivaled collection of firsts. She was the first woman to race in a major dogsled event in Alaska, the first woman and first foreign journalist to hunt with General Francisco Franco of Spain, and likely the only mother of four to traverse six continents to take down all of the Big Five trophy animals. Yet despite the enduring reputation enjoyed by her male contemporaries at SI — including George Plimpton, Frank Deford, and Roy Blount Jr. — her work has since faded into obscurity.

Despite more than 100 SI bylines and significant accolades and attention in her time, Kraft is absent from lists of pioneering women in journalism, and her articles are excluded from discussions of notable SI stories. Her work isn’t covered in journalism schools, and when asked, none of my peers was even familiar with her name. Virginia Kraft might be the most influential sports journalist nobody has ever heard of. Why?

The more I learned about her, the more compelled I was to answer this question. My start in adventure-based journalism came in 2001, more than 50 years after Kraft’s, when I joined a mostly male expedition team to write about animals and the environment in the Peruvian Amazon, Turkey, Cuba, and other remote places where I was always outnumbered by men and sometimes the only woman. Since then, I have hiked up mountains, trekked through jungles, and even skateboarded down ramps for my work — never considering whether I could or should do it, even when I left my children behind. In fact, more often I was motivated to demonstrate, through my work, that women can achieve whatever they want.

When I first heard about Virginia Kraft, she seemed to be a classic overlooked hero, a woman who had chiseled early cracks into a male-dominated world that would eventually open enough to make way for my own writing career. Delving into her life and writing in the context of 1950s New York, however, revealed a complicated story of a woman who did not fit into simple boxes, and whose career challenged my expectations of what it means to be a pioneer.

Eager to see how that description held up 63 years later, I contacted IWFA President Denise Freihofer and asked to watch the group’s upcoming tournament. She tried to talk me out of it. It would be hot, she said, adding that everyone would be too busy fishing to talk to me during the day, and afterward they might be too tired. And, she piled on, boat captains are secretive about their fishing spots and would likely not want me following them.

Virginia Kraft would have been undeterred by Freihofer’s discouraging words. Stories of her confidence were legendary among those who remember her best. During a trip to Cuba in 1956, she knocked on Ernest Hemingway’s front door without any notice. He answered wearing yellow pajamas. She told him her name, which he recognized from her work, and he invited her in. They spent the morning drinking together. “I mean, who does that?” recalled family friend Christian Erickson, who is also the trustee of her estate. “She was not afraid to take risks, and she did. Nine times out of 10, it worked out.”

Channeling Kraft — or, at least, who I thought she was — I replied to Freihofer that I was willing to get hot and I’d take my chances with getting ditched.

Virginia Kraft was born in Astoria, New York — a neighborhood in Queens, across the East River from the Upper East Side of Manhattan — on February 19, 1930. Her Canadian mother Mary Flora Gillis, known to most as Jean, was the daughter of a prominent Nova Scotian builder who also ran a bottling plant. Jean was a housewife who had dinner on the table every night at 6 p.m. Kraft’s father George John Kraft, born to working-class German immigrants, became a successful sales executive, first for a printing company and later for Johnson & Johnson.

As a kid, Kraft loved spending time outside during the day and listening to the radio at night. She owned her first horse at age 8 and played polo as a young child. She and her younger sister Jacqueline spent summers with their family on Long Island. After excelling in high school, she went on to attend Barnard, an all-women’s college in Manhattan, where she majored in English and participated in extracurriculars like the student newspaper, the junior class play, the Newman Club, and other social committees.

Kraft was also the subject of a 1949 college newspaper story about a coed European tour she was organizing at Eastern colleges to take place the following year. For $1,148 — the equivalent of nearly $15,000 today — students on the all-inclusive trip would visit England, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and France. “This is a tour I have arranged for myself and students like myself,” she told the paper, “who would otherwise go to Europe alone, with no experience arranging accommodations and travel.”

After graduating in 1951, Kraft wanted to work in magazines but wasn’t content with the typical roles open to women as secretaries or on staff at women’s publications. She had been raised to do something different. When she was just 5 or 6 years old, Kraft recounted in a speech to Siena College graduates in 2012, her father lifted her onto a windowsill on a clear night and pointed to the full moon, which looked close enough to touch. “You can go there someday,” he told her, decades before space travel was a reality. “You can do anything you want as long as you want it and work for it. The whole universe is out there waiting for you.”

Over the years, articles written about Kraft provided various accounts on how and when she learned to hunt. Among them: she started as a child, she taught herself to shoot in order to land her first job, she learned from her first husband, and she learned while at SI. In her speech to Siena graduates, she said she learned to fish and hunt — first with a bow and arrow, then with a gun — on weekends while at Field & Stream. However it started, she was seemingly willing to fake it until she made it. “She kind of bullshitted her way into the job,” says Erickson, citing the version he was told. “She’d never hunted in her life.”

Kraft soon got her first introduction to what it was going to take to succeed in a heavily male space. Forgoing recognition was part of the deal. While there, she wrote for the magazine under a male pseudonym: Seth Briggs.

Although Kraft’s name never appeared in the magazine, reading the column with her in mind conjures an image of a young, ambitious writer, collecting knowledge, accumulating experience, and patiently observing men in the workplace. Briggs’ answers, assuming they were written by Kraft, reveal occasional hints of an emerging voice and a hardening point of view. In July 1953, an amateur fisherman told “Outdoor Questions” about the guilt he felt every time he hooked a fish. “Actually, I don’t think there is much pain at all,” answered Briggs/Kraft. “The low state of development of the nervous system apparently explains why a fish is relatively insensible to the pain caused by a hook.”

Briggs, not Kraft, appeared on the masthead as an associate editor when she started at Field & Stream, becoming “department editor” at the end of 1953. But the name actually preceded her, first appearing in the magazine starting in 1927 and remaining there for years after Kraft moved to SI. It suggests “Briggs” was a placeholder name for staffers who hadn’t yet made a name for themselves — a regular practice in many magazines and newspapers at the time.

At Field & Stream, Kraft worked hard. Whereas the rest of the staff left at 5 p.m., even if they were mid-sentence, she stayed at least until 7, sometimes later, studying the archives from A to Z. Over a year and a half, she “gained a Masters-worth of knowledge about the outdoors,” she said, and she used that knowledge to hone her outdoor skills. Still, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of additional writing opportunities for Kraft at Field & Stream. Although a female byline occasionally appeared on the publication’s pages in the early 1950s, those stories tended to follow entrenched gender stereotypes, like a complaint-filled essay entitled “I Married a Fisherman.”

The early ‘50s, when Kraft started in journalism, was the Mad Men era, and according to Michael MacCambridge, author of the The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine, Time Inc. was “Mad Men on steroids.” The company, based in midtown Manhattan, already published Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. Looking to add to their portfolio, discussions began about relaunching SI, reviving the title of two previously failed publications by other publishers.

Conversations about the third iteration of the magazine involved booze, crude conversations, and jokes about whorehouses. To hash out the details, 67 male executives from Time Inc. met at a country club in South Carolina in 1954. There was golf. But, likely, no women.

Kraft left Field & Stream and joined the new SI staff as a reporter. Like most of the other women hires, she would have a supporting role for the heavily male writing and editing staff. But she didn’t see why her gender should get in the way of her ambitions. “The magazine was brand new, the beats were up for grabs, and advancement was based on performance and competition — being male or female had nothing to do with it,” she told a reporter for Copley News Service in 1975. “So I ended up on what is considered the most ‘masculine’ beat — hunting.”

Every story was written by a man and all were about men, animals, or both. Features covered Roger Bannister, who had recently run the first sub-4-minute mile; a court battle between bubble gum manufacturers over baseball trading cards; and an appreciation of the important role that beavers play in protecting forests. Although no stories were about women, they appeared in photographs, including a “pretty, well-tanned” 15-year-old golfer, Betsy Cullen, who would later become a professional.

A woman did show up, sort of, in a cheeky one-page feature department called “Hotbox,” which asked readers to respond to the question, “What sport provokes the most arguments in your home?” Golf was the response given by Warren Austin Jr., an attorney from Burlington, Vermont, whose wife remained nameless and faceless in his answer even as he praised her skills. “My wife was afraid of becoming a golf widow,” he wrote. “I didn’t want her to tag along, but she would trail me to the country club against my orders. There she’d take golf lessons. Now she teaches me. It’s downright humiliating. But the arguments are not so frequent. She’s won.”

There was a clear hierarchy. After Time Inc. relocated its offices within midtown Manhattan to the 20th floor of a 48-story skyscraper in 1959, reporters toiled away in cubicles in a large room called the bullpen, whereas writers and editors worked at the other end of the hallway. By the time Kirkpatrick arrived, Kraft’s door was down that hall.

Although Kraft has been described as the first woman on staff at SI, she wasn’t the only woman reporter on the masthead in the early months, nor was she the first to become a staff writer. But she was the only one who soon moved into a steady writing job that involved major adventure.

In 1954, Kraft joined a pheasant hunt with other members of the SI staff at a preserve in upstate New York. Also on the trip was Red Smith, a New York Herald Tribune columnist and frequent SI contributor whose later work for The New York Times was syndicated in nearly 300 papers nationwide and earned him a Pulitzer. Smith noticed Kraft, who showed up the night before the other staffers, went out early the next morning, and shot a buck with a brand-new shotgun. Smith’s column about the hunt, which appeared in December that year, described Kraft as a “pretty gun moll” who “smiled with cool composure” but confessed that the sport was new to her. “It was the first deer I ever saw,” said Kraft, who told Siena graduates that the hunt is how she landed the SI job. A few months later she wrote her first story.

How Kraft managed to land this first assignment is uncertain — it was likely part of a press junket organized in partnership with other Time Inc. publications, says MacCambridge — but she would go on to write dozens of similar stories about hunting and fishing in exotic locales, often with notable, wealthy, and sometimes controversial men. There is no sign that she or SI were bothered by Franco’s fascist and dictatorial regime — or by the carnage of the hunt.

Sports Illustrated was already covering hunting and fishing sporadically, but Kraft soon staked claim to the beat. Before long she was regularly striking out on harrowing adventures in wild places. In November 1957, for example, she wrote of her travels to the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a vast roadless area in Montana. Taking along a single pair of pants, six pairs of socks, camping gear, a variety of warm layers, and perfume in lieu of deodorant, she set out on horseback at around 5 a.m. with three guides — two state game rangers and a game biologist, all male — in pursuit of elk and skittish mountain goats.

After six miles on horseback, the quartet started to hike, scrambling on hands and feet over shale slides. Navigating wide crevasses, they climbed to the top of a 9,000-foot mountain, where they spotted five mountain goats on the other side of a boulder-strewn canyon. Then came nearly an hour of tiptoeing, crawling, and zigzagging to stay downwind. Once Kraft had crept close enough, she aimed and shot, bringing down the biggest of the five.

Stories written about Kraft in the 1950s and ‘60s often dwelled on her looks and femininity. She was a “brunette beauty with sparkling eyes” that shone with the ruddy glow that comes from time spent outdoors. On her travels, she styled her hair, packed a full set of perfumes and face creams, and wore bespoke hunting pants, boots, and gloves with leather backs and corduroy fingers. As fit as Kraft was — 5’4" and maybe 120 lbs. — she didn’t look it. One female reporter noted, “Despite the fact that Virginia’s athletic abilities are such that she could outclimb the Shah’s own Master of the Hunt in the rugged 20,000-foot Iranian mountains, Virginia Kraft gives no hint of muscles in her looks or delightful manner.”

For her part, Kraft argued that women’s patience made them particularly good hunters. She may have spoken with the accent of a New Yorker and looked enough like an all-American model to once appear in an ad for Family Circle magazine, but in the wilderness of men, she moved with stealth.

In 2011, while in the jungle of Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, I interviewed a jaguar researcher, a woman who had been studying the elusive and increasingly rare animals for eight years but had never seen one in the wild. I thought of that biologist again when I read about Kraft’s own encounter with a jaguar.

Kraft spent nearly three weeks in her element, sleeping in camps, waking before sunrise, and riding horses through the spectacular landscape, sometimes getting lost but always finding her way. “These days were some of the best I have ever known,” she wrote. Several times her group thought they were close to seeing a jaguar, but they were repeatedly stymied by thick brush, bitten by fire ants, and stung by wasps.

Finally they saw one. The scene erupted in chaos. Dogs barked. Men shouted. Kraft heard two gunshots and thought someone had killed it. But no, there it was. A spotted feline, black and gold, perfectly still, camouflaged by the speckled sunlight of the forest.

This moment in Kraft’s story gripped me with recognition of the rare kind of joy that comes when nature shows you its cards. It is a glimpse of what the world would be without people, something I had experienced just a handful of times, including once while on assignment in Peru.

Years ago, sitting in an inflatable raft on a tributary of the Amazon River, I also saw a jaguar. Like Kraft’s journey, our trip had become a survival story, filled with venomous stingrays, killer bees, vampire bats, excruciatingly itchy insect bites, dwindling food supplies, and agonizingly slow progress through a river that was not deep enough to paddle through. Then, suddenly, the majestic cat was standing shin deep in water downstream from me. It stood still and silent, not 100 feet away, seemingly relaying the message that my hardships were not the center of the tale. For a long and precious minute, it stared directly into my eyes.

Lost in the reverie of my own memory, I should have seen a violent ending. I had already learned to expect this kind of heartbreaking conclusion in Kraft’s work. But it still pained me each time. She wrote about nature with the lyricism of a poet. Her stories included rich characters and revealing quotes. They brimmed with sensory details and suspense. And, too often, they ended with the deafening crack of a gun.

After a trip to Alaskan sea ice with scientists for a 1968 story on concerns about polar bear populations, she hired a guide and killed one. On a canoe trip down the wild Serpent River through the Tehuantepec jungles in Mexico, the group slayed javelinas and tapirs. By 1970, she had taken down a tiger, an elephant, a rhino, a polar bear, an ibex, a caribou, and a moose.

The Venice Marina is about as close as you can get to the southern tip of Louisiana, a maze of waterways and marshes that separates the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico and is ideal habitat for sea trout, flounder, snapper, marlin, and other big game. Angling is so important to the region’s economy that Venice dubs itself “The Fishing Capital of the World.”

In some ways, the modern version of the group echoes the IWFA’s early years, when Kraft chronicled a mix of competition and fun that defined the organization’s beginnings. Back then the women were fabulous. During the first IWFA billfish tournament in 1956 in Florida, Kraft detailed some of the atypical fishing attire worn by the event’s 66 competitors: silk pants, Chanel sweaters, gold lamé pants, a full-length mink, hairdos adorned with ribbons and lace, and hazardous footwear, although no high heels.

They were also fearless. In 10-foot waves and chilly temperatures during one tournament, competitors puked over the side of the boats. Yet soon after, the women of the IWFA were beating men at their own game, crushing world records and winning coed tournaments. They changed the sport, too, insisting that fish be thrown back alive into the sea to count for points. And they were fierce. At a competition in Cuba, the IWFA team beat Fidel Castro, who didn’t catch a single fish. “Even the most begrudging captain had to admit that, if nothing else, the gals were game,” Kraft wrote. “Before long the captains were also admitting, reluctantly or not, that there was nothing more formidable than a female who has learned how to fish.”

Kraft’s writing style hints at the way SI reflected society’s view of women in the ‘60s. It is unclear how much of that culture Kraft embodied, how much was pushed upon her by a male editorial staff, or how much of it she intentionally included to satisfy the expectations of her editors and readers. But she scoffed at the women’s unconventional attire and embedded insults throughout the story that diminished their accomplishments. “The lady may have trouble figuring out the phone bill,” she wrote in 1967, “but give her one glimpse of a leaping sailfish at 200 yards and with computer speed she will come up with a pretty accurate estimate of its length, weight and girth.”

For those whose husbands didn’t fish, the sport offered opportunities to get away from home and have relatively respectable adventures without arousing suspicion about what they were up to. But as a bonus, Kraft noted, they could spend time on fishing boats with male captains. Good captains were in such demand for their ability to help even mediocre anglers win tournaments, Kraft wrote in 1963, that prospective employers sometimes bribed them with extravagant gifts: split-level homes, sports cars, even marriage proposals.

For these female anglers, Kraft made it clear that catching men was still as much of a sport as hauling in fish, and maybe even more important. Kraft ended her 1967 story not with the women or with the marine life, but with the line, “Men, we still need you!”

During my day with the women of the IWFA, I noticed something Kraft didn’t acknowledge: the strong sense of community. These women clearly adore one another. As they fished, they took breaks to drink beer, eat snacks, and pee off the side of the boat together. “When I am out on the water, it’s almost like a religious experience because I am so thankful to be able to be out there and to be with such a great group of women who love me like a sister,” Weingart told me before the trip. “They don’t expect anything out of me other than just be kind, go fishing, and have fun.” At the tournament launch party, nine of the competitors dressed up in shark costumes and performed a choreographed dance for a room full of women who whooped and cheered.

By the end of my time at the tournament, I felt so moved by the connections I saw that I found myself reflecting on the importance of these kinds of enduring friendships in my own life. Kraft did not. She probably knew her male audience wouldn’t have wanted to read about women bonding with women, even if her editors had let it through. “Within the lush though limited captain market, trading is always brisk,” she wrote. “The rules are simple: every gal for herself — and the stakes are high.”

Nobody at the Louisiana tournament had heard of Kraft or read her stories about the IWFA before my visit, nor had they heard her views on the motivations of their predecessors. When I read this excerpt to the women while they fished, they laughed hard, especially after the part about catching men. A few female fishing guides are available now — although not many, said IFWA board member Connie O’Day. They still hear from male guides that women are better clients because they actually listen, something Kraft noted, too. All agreed that fishing with one another is different, and still preferable, to fishing with their husbands.

When she returned home from reporting trips, Kraft wrote in her third-floor office of the Carmel house, which was filled with trophies from her hunting trips: the heads and skins of caribou, buffalo, polar bear, and other animals. “When other kids came to our house, they said it was like a museum of natural history,” says Aurland. “To us, that was totally natural.”

Kraft was disciplined about her work, and she depended on live-in nannies and caretakers for her kids and home. “We run a tight ship around here,” she told a newspaper reporter in 1968. “When I’m working, it’s just like normal office hours and I’m not disturbed.” At the end of the workday, she played with her kids and spent a lot of time outdoors — riding horses, skin diving, fishing, sailing, and playing tennis, which she wrote a book about (one of five she penned during her career). Not knowing what else to do with the mandatory six-month leave of absence forced on her during her pregnancies, she wrote a book during each one. She took many of her activities to extremes. A finalist in several world championship fishing tournaments, she skied competitively, raced sailboats, earned trophies for winning a national hot-air balloon race, and, according to some accounts, was inducted into the Underwater Hall of Fame for diving.

Although Kraft was often away from her kids, she took each one on adventures. Aurland remembers a month-long journey to Africa in 1972. In Ethiopia, they met Emperor Haile Selassie. When they arrived at his palace, Aurland presented him with a rifle. Then she played with the emperor’s Chihuahuas while her mother met with Selassie. After returning home, she was surprised to receive a gift of one of the dogs’ puppies — sent all the way to New York from the emperor.

Kraft did face her share of struggles as a working mother of four in the 1970s, Aurland says, especially after she and Grimm separated in 1970 and divorced the next year because of “irreconcilable differences,” according to her nephew Jon Wickers. After the split, the kids, ages 7 to 12, lived with Kraft in the house and regularly saw their dad, who lived nearby. Kraft did her best to keep things normal. She made Halloween costumes, cooked dinners, and cultivated silly traditions at home. Whenever one of their eight cats had a birthday, the pet was allowed to sit on a special stool at the table.

I wonder whether other suburban stay-at-home moms of the era judged Kraft for her commitment to work. Even if they did, she didn’t let them get in her way.

As she traveled the world and churned out stories — moving into a staff writing position at SI in 1959 and an associate editor role in 1966 — other women at Time Inc. struggled to land the same kinds of opportunities. Men were more quickly promoted from reporter to writer positions, according to MacCambridge, and women were less likely to get plum field reporting assignments. During the 1967 Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, SI sent a team of reporters that included just one woman, journalist Sarah Ballard. After a day of watching golf and conducting interviews, Ballard was also expected to cook dinner.

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’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.

Kraft was something of an enigma to her colleagues. When Kirkpatrick arrived at the magazine in the mid-1960s, Kraft was already both well established and scarce in the office. On the days she did come in, she kept to her end of the hallway, less social than the writers who invited reporters to their offices or even dropped by the bullpen to chat. Kirkpatrick rarely saw Kraft, whom many called Ginny. On the handful of times he spotted or even exchanged words with her, she seemed aristocratic and classy, on another level. “I remember her having an office way down the hall at the other end, with the editors and writers and me thinking that she was like a big, big deal,” Kirkpatrick says. “I remember being very intimidated.”

He wasn’t the only one. Around the same time, Carolyn Keith started working as a summer intern at the magazine. On the only occasion she recalls interacting with Kraft, the writer emerged from her office as Keith walked by. Kraft complimented Keith’s clothing, which surprised the young intern. “At that point, she was very well known, very upper crusty,” and “she was dressed like somebody that had the money to do it properly,” Keith says. “She looked stunning.”

In fact, Kraft was so elusive at SI that every other staffer I talked with for this story who overlapped with her responded that they didn’t have anything of substance to say about her because she was either gone a lot or too important to interact with them, although she was pleasant if you managed to get a minute with her.

Beyond SI alumni, Kraft is otherwise unknown among many who do parallel work today. I talked to a number of journalists and experts on women in sports journalism for this story. None knew who she was before I told them about her.

It is no surprise, then, that Kraft also appears to have been invisible when, in the spring of 1970 — a few months before an estimated 50,000 people walked down Fifth Avenue as part of the Women’s Strike for Equality March — the New York Attorney General’s office filed charges on behalf of more than 100 women at Time Inc. who complained of gender-based discrimination at Time, Life, Fortune, and SI, in violation of state law. The move followed a similar action at Newsweek, where 46 women had filed a gender discrimination suit not long before.

At all the Time Inc. publications, men dominated leadership roles. At Time magazine, all 12 senior editors and 19 of the 20 associate editors were men. These kinds of gender disparities may have been acceptable in the Roaring ‘20s, the women of Time Inc. said in support of the lawsuit, according to news coverage at the time. But in 1970, the obstacles they faced were humiliating and illegal. There was a similar gender breakdown at SI, where the masthead from May 1970 reveals one woman editor camouflaged in a field of male counterparts: Virginia Kraft.

After the case settled in 1971, improvements came grudgingly, and then only for women who hadn’t signed the petition, according to MacCambridge. When Laguerre promoted Pat Ryan to a senior editor position that year, he offered her a raise of $3,000, which would up her salary to $21,000 a year. She insisted he match what men in the same position were making. Reluctantly, he gave her $28,000. “Every woman who fought through the glass ceiling was fiercely self-reliant,” MacCambridge says. “You had to be really willful and resilient to succeed there.”

Still, her apparent absence from the struggle is notable. I found it unsettling. She had been doing men’s work for well over a decade, and she had the potential to influence a generation of women behind her. Instead, it seems, she made a deliberate decision in 1970 to pursue her own interests rather than fighting for other women. “I don’t remember her saying, ‘Listen girls, let’s have lunch together and talk about it,’” Keith says. “She was not part of the daily or weekly scene.”

There is another possibility. Maybe Kraft saw that choice as a different way of fighting the fight. Her contribution to women’s lib, she told a reporter in 1972, was that she “wanted to cover hunting and fishing and the editors had no objections.” She didn’t consider herself a feminist, Aurland says, so much as motivated to do what the men were doing. She was an individualist, Wickers adds: industrious, independent, and always busy.

Whatever she thought about the lawsuit and women’s struggle, Kraft had, it seems, fully embraced her role as a huntress, tending to her own pack while stalking her ambitions. This contrast, more than anything else, may have set her up to be overlooked. To make it at SI as a woman in a field of men, she’d had to become a kind of apex predator, determined and willing to take what she wanted. But leaning in to an ambitious male persona actually made her harder to recognize as a role model later, especially through a contemporary lens in a world where so much wildlife is now at risk and women are supposed to have power independent of men.

Even at the peak of her journalistic success, Kraft felt like many people didn’t understand her. She appeared on The David Frost Show in 1971, described only as a “big game huntress” rather than a writer or even an angler. In the interview, Frost ambushed Kraft. “He told her would ask about stories but attacked her,” Aurland says.

Still, with her persona well established by then, Kraft did not back down in the interview. Wickers, who was 5 or 6 years old when it aired, watched it on a black-and-white TV. “She kept her composure perfectly, and she explained that if everything’s utilized and recycled properly, it’s the healthiest way, it’s the way of nature,” he says. “She boxed her way out of a corner, and it was extremely, extremely impressive. I never forgot it.”

In her mind, Kraft was an animal lover, no matter how many creatures she killed. The family had many pets: horses, cats, dogs. Wickers, who lived with Kraft and her children for a summer when he was 16, once watched her, nearly in tears, carefully pull a rodent out of the mouth of one of the cats. Another time she scolded a hunter for improperly taking down a game animal, causing it to suffer. In multiple stories, she reported on conservation efforts that fought for kangaroos, white rhinos, the Arabian oryx, white crowned pigeons, and others.

“Big game hunters are often misunderstood,” she told The Tennessee Sun in 1970. Illegal poaching was the problem, not licensed hunters. Hunters, she said, “don’t simply destroy animals, but they replace them and are deeply concerned with ecology.”

I found myself facing a paradox in both the life of Virginia Kraft and the way I thought of her. Just as she simultaneously adored animals and killed them, I both detest the idea of hunting and admit she had a point. Like Kraft, I have written about counterintuitive environmental efforts that sacrifice living things for the sake of a bigger picture. I have covered conservation projects that kill invasive animals to save native ones. And I have documented the way that hunting groups, in order to preserve the animals they want to shoot down, have allocated billions of dollars to protect vast habitats. Those efforts have, among other benefits, allowed wetland fowl to thrive amid global declines of other kinds of birds. Although some of Kraft’s views seem misguided now, someday mine may, too.

With an insatiable appetite for adventure and new experiences, Kraft made it clear through her actions that women could do anything men did. With that approach, she laid out a kind of playbook for how to follow in her footsteps: Act without hesitation and display only confidence. Equity, her stories seem to say, was there for the taking.

When Vicki Michaelis, director of the Carmical Sports Media Institute at the University of Georgia in Athens, started covering high school sports for The Palm Beach Post right out of college in the early 1990s, coaches called her “honey” and offered to explain the sports to her. Still, given the pivotal gains women had made in the previous decades, Michaelis was sure things were heading in the right direction.

Some of the first equitable inroads into sport journalism came in the 1940s, when sportswriter Mary Garber broke into the male-dominated newsroom and paved the way for Kraft. Then in 1978, SI writer Melissa Ludtke earned women reporters access to locker rooms by prevailing in a lawsuit against Major League Baseball. In 1981, Christine Brennan became the first woman sports reporter at the Miami Herald; in 1988, she was named the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media. Soon after women took on more roles in the industry, covering big-time sports. “If you would have asked young me in the 1990s if [the work] would be done by 2023, I’d be like, ‘For sure,’” Michaelis says. “There were other women, and we were young, so we were like, ‘Man, think about what we can do in the next 20 to 30 years — this is all going to be solved!’”

But an uptick in major opportunities for women in sports journalism has occurred only recently. It wasn’t until 2017 that Outside magazine, one of today’s top adventure publications, announced efforts to improve diversity in who it covered and who did the writing. The next year, Latria Graham wrote a story for the magazine debunking stereotypes about Black people in the outdoors. I started reporting my first Outside feature story — about a female psychologist for a female editor — the year after that.

In 2018, Kim Cross wrote a series of articles for the Outside about equity in sports. As an athlete and journalist, Cross has long been familiar with being one of the only Asian-American women she knew doing everything she has done: competitive waterskiing, mountain bike coaching, award-winning sports journalism, and more.

Recently Cross started reflecting on the complicated ways that gender has played out in her career. In both sports and writing, she has noticed that women become less collaborative as they reach higher levels, where there are fewer spots for them. Women, and especially women of color, she says, have to work harder and be better to reach the same positions and achieve the same pay levels as men. “I honestly didn’t feel like being a woman was a disadvantage until the last few years, when I started thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, sometimes women are kind of treated like Junior Varsity in the sports writing world,’” Cross says. “Maybe I was just really naive.”

Even if Kraft didn’t act the part of a new wave feminist, marching in protest parades or signing petitions, it’s possible her byline filled that role for an unknown number of women who read SI early on, giving them a chance to see themselves reflected in its pages. “Let’s say you’re a young girl reading Sports Illustrated in the ‘60s and you see Virginia as a name and a byline,” says Michaelis. “That’s incredibly powerful if that’s something that you think you want to do.”

All the currently working women journalists I spoke with said they wished they’d known of Virginia Kraft before now. Given the challenges I encountered while excavating her life in search of a hero, this sentiment struck me. Back when I’d channeled Kraft to get invited to the fishing tournament, I had wanted to see myself in her — and in many ways I did. Even as I found differences between her life and mine, I came to identify with her, including the parts I had initially viewed as shortcomings. Working, traveling, and raising kids already makes it hard to find time for anything else. I can only imagine how much harder life would be if chasing your ambitions also required ignoring society’s rules. Put in the same position at the same time, I wonder how many women journalists of my generation would have turned down the opportunities Kraft seized. Or, unlike her, would we have been too timid or uncertain to seize what we wanted?

More than two decades after she started working at SI, Kraft traveled to South Central Florida to hunt with Charles Shipman Payson, the owner of the New York Mets, who was then in his late 70s. She had interviewed him before, but this time was different. Aurland was 17 years old and, as she remembers it, got a call from her mother while she was on that reporting trip. “You won’t believe what happened,” Kraft confided in her oldest daughter. “We were out in the buggy, and he suddenly turned to me and kissed me.”

Kraft was 47, by then an associate editor at the magazine. Payson’s health, according to some sources, was ailing, and he had four grown children from his previous marriage to Joan Whitney Payson, the extremely wealthy original owner of the Mets, art collector, and horse breeder. Payson’s children were older than Kraft was. It seemed crazy.

The kiss, which was neither friendly nor fatherly, threw her for a loop. Payson was persistent, throwing one of Kraft’s trademark traits back at her. “I said, ‘Mom, you know what? If you like him, it’s not crazy,’” says Aurland.

Kraft’s feature about Payson ran in SI in April 1977. In December that year, the two were married at the Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Falmouth Foreside, Maine, with around 54 guests in attendance, mostly family. Virginia Kraft became Virginia Kraft Payson.

Her new husband’s children were not enthusiastic about the May-December match, complaining openly that Kraft was in it only for the money. After Payson died in 1985, they sued her for fraud, claiming she had tricked him into rewriting his will at least 16 times in the seven years they were together. The final version left most of his liquid wealth to her, including an $18 million estate and the interest on a $30 million trust fund to be split among the children after her death. To them, he bequeathed only a collection of art — albeit expensive art. Kraft argued that their love was real, that his children didn’t know her, and that she was a fighter who did whatever it took to preserve his reputation and achieve her own vindication.

She won, like she usually did, although sour feelings persisted, bubbling over in 1987 news coverage of the $53.9 million dollar sale of the Van Gogh painting “Irises,” which the Payson family owned. At the time, it was an art auction record. One of Payson’s daughters reportedly told Forbes that Kraft was “a big-game hunter and my father was the prey.” (Payson’s one surviving child from his first marriage to Joan Whitney declined to be interviewed for this story.) A quarter of the sale price went to charity, and the rest was put in a trust for Payson’s children.

The marriage and the horses appear to mark the end of Kraft’s major hunting expeditions. She was too busy learning the ropes of her new obsession. Besides, the pursuit of big game had served its purpose and given her a career as a journalist — a career she didn’t need anymore, just like she no longer needed to preserve her original last name for the purpose of a byline. With her departure from the field just a few years before the next generation of women entered sports writing, her impact faded into the magazine’s archives.

In the meantime, she turned her full attention toward horses. And just as her immersion into journalism had led rapidly to adventure and achievement, success in horses came quickly, ultimately bringing in a lot more money than journalism. Dozens of the farm’s horses placed well in major races, and Kraft continued breeding and racing horses after Payson’s death. One stallion, St. Jovite, was named the European Horse of the Year in 1992 and later sired eight winning horses that went on to earn more than $7.5 million.

Kraft continued to gain accolades and honors, earning Breeder of the Year from the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association in 1997. In her later years, she appeared in an ad for a private jet business. She married twice more, first to thoroughbred owner Jesse M. Henley, Jr., and after he died, David Libby Cole, a real estate broker. Her life, she often said, was a “magic carpet ride.” Kraft died from complications of Parkinson’s disease in January 2023 at age 92.

Friends and family described Kraft as loyal, generous, energetic, and fun. But even with the people she loved, she didn’t want to hear about your aching back, says Diana Kaylor, 83, who had been friends with Kraft since 1989. “She was not somebody who lived with delusions,” Kaylor says. She didn’t brag about accomplishments. She preferred to blaze her own trail instead of waiting to be shown the way or making a big deal out of what she had done.

Rising before dawn on the first morning of the IWFA tournament, I wondered if Kraft had trouble sleeping on reporting trips, like I sometimes did. And after drinking coffee to sharpen my senses for the reporting hunt ahead, I marveled at the chasm created by history over the decades since she first started writing, alone, and these women arrived to go fishing together. At 6 a.m., boats started zooming away from the docks, scattering across the delta past oil rigs and squawking gulls, each guide motoring off to secret spots for eight hours of fighting fish.

When Kraft wrote about the women of the IWFA in 1967, her words spooled out under an ominous headline: “Scourge of the Seven Seas.” And although SI’s first female adventure writer might have marveled at how joyful — and uninterested in seducing their fishing guides — the group’s members are today, she would have been unsurprised by their impressive haul. “By the time the IWFA was 5 years old, 23 of its members accounted for 27 of the world-record catches,” she wrote then, lauding them for their win over Castro in Cuba. “The IWFA victory was, as one Havana daily put it, ‘a new kind of revolution.’”

Perhaps the wildest thing about Kraft’s wild tale is that, despite her remarkable ability to shape-shift — mimicking male writing, staying downwind from mountain goats, dressing the part of a blue-blooded Manhattanite — she didn’t promote herself or her achievements as revolutionary. Yet she blazed a new path, leaving in her wake both accomplishments and casualties, building a life that was unimaginable for just about any other woman at the time. Virginia Kraft hunted and fished alone. In later generations, we don’t have to.

I braced the end of the rod against my stomach, my hip, my thigh. I couldn’t get leverage. O’Day reached over and held the pole while I struggled, likely so I wouldn’t drop the rod in the water altogether. My back and arm aching, we pulled a foot-long snapper out of the water. I didn’t get splashed with seawater as Kraft had, although I was soaked in sweat.

I pictured Kraft, armed with her notebook, standing on the back of the boat taking in the scene, searching for the right words, just as I was. I thought about what I might have asked her if she were there, but in the excitement of the moment my questions floated away.

As for my catch, I was surprised by the size of it, the satisfaction I felt, and the women cheering my first fish like it was their own.