Mary Garber died the other day. Lenox Rawlings, a colleague from the Winston-Salem Journal, wrote a lovely remembrance, and an obituary appeared in The New York Times headlined: “Mary Garber, 92, Sportswriting Pioneer.”

Those who met Garber will recall a slender, diminutive woman wearing a knit cap and wire-rimmed glasses, armed with a tough manner and a clear eye. Yet for someone who interviewed her 30 years ago, her affection for those she covered is what lingers.

Garber, like many barrier-breakers, was no intentional pioneer. She was simply doing her job when, due to a dearth of available males, her beat was shifted to cover sports late in World War II. “I’m probably the only sportswriter in the world who started as a society editor,” Garber said in 1978.

The New York native encountered plenty of resistance entering previously all-male bastions in high school sports, minor league baseball, and black college athletics in central North Carolina. “At first, it was kind of hairy,” Garber said. Prevalent attitudes spurned the notion women could compete or consort with men as equals in society. Females were widely and somewhat dismissively referred to as “girls,” a practice that lasted well into the 1990s among troglodytes such as Tom Butters, a major league pitcher turned Duke’s director of athletics.

Barriers stiffened when Garber attempted to cover major-college football. A story often retold, minus identification of the school, was Duke’s refusal to grant her access to the press box at Wallace Wade Stadium. While male counterparts worked in sheltered confines, and perhaps received a nip of liquor to lubricate their typewriter keys following the game, Garber was relegated to an auxiliary area. “I was trying to cover the game,” she recalled angrily, “while children were beating on the table and the wives were discussing recipes for what they were going to cook after the game. It was awful.”

A letter from the management of her newspaper to Duke’s president caused sports information director Ted Mann to relent, and Garber was granted a seat with her peers. “I have been told,” Garber said, “that my editor said it wouldn’t have made any difference if they’d sent a monkey.” Apparently many colleagues agreed; Garber reported she was initially regarded with condescension and annoyance by other sportswriters.

Gradually women -- once not even supposed to perspire in polite society -- gained a toehold in the world of athletics, boosted mightily by the 1972 enactment of Title IX, the federal statute mandating equal opportunity in all facets of education.

Changes in covering sports have been slower than the transformation of the games themselves. Garber retired from full-time newspaper work in 1986. Two years later, Lesley Visser became the first woman to serve as a Final Four sideline reporter.

Today, the preponderance of females on network TV still roam the sidelines, where they are as much objects of admiration for their appearance as their knowledge. If you doubt that, note the superfluous high heels worn by women covering basketball, even when dressed in pants. Or check YouTube for a video, actually a photo compilation, that celebrates anatomical features of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews and has drawn more than 1.3 million hits.

Garber also had to fight to be taken seriously. The former philosophy major at Roanoke's Hollins College eventually gained acceptance, then admiration. She was inducted into several halls of fame. A number of awards were named in her honor. Recently the Association for Women in Sports Journalism, still a relatively small group, established an annual Mary Garber Pioneer Award honoring a role model for women in sports media.

Garber made a point in that long-ago interview of stressing that her craft enabled her to debunk myths. For instance, she estimated she had watched 30,000 high school athletes to that point, and only eight made it to the pros. “I think the cruelest thing in the world is the dream of pro ball,” she said, “because your chance of success is so small.”

Garber also had a profound effect on at least one young sportswriter by remarking that the longer she covered sports, the less important she regarded the outcome of specific games. What mattered most, she said, were the people, the participants, the human side of the equation.

This may seem an obvious approach, particularly as the games blur together with the passage of years. But a personalized focus is by no means universally embraced.

“That seems to be where it is, nobody likes to write about the games,” objected Gary Williams, the Maryland basketball coach. “The games are still pretty good. Once (the personalized approach) is created in people’s minds, then they go with it. The media sometimes doesn’t understand how much they influence not just sports but the whole country, the economy.”

Duke cultural anthropologist Orin Starn, a vocal critic of big-time college athletics, struck a similar chord, if only as an observation on how sports are covered in the United States. “Europe, Latin America, tend to be more focused on the game,” said Starn, who has lived in Italy, Turkey, and Peru. “In U.S. sports, we always want a story line. It can’t be just one talented team against another.”

Whether the bent of American sports coverage is good or bad depends upon your taste – in turn largely influenced by what’s familiar. And what’s familiar was shaped by writers like Mary Garber, who brought a different sensibility, not just a different physiology, to what she saw.