Gordon blazed trail for writers

All Alison Gordon wanted to do was write about baseball when she became a sports reporter at the Toronto Star in the late 1970s. But as one of the few women on the beat back then, just doing her job was a daily fight. Gordon, who died Thursday at the age of 72, became a trailblazer for female sports journalists, breaking down barriers that had previously kept women out of the locker-room. “I don’t think she went into it with the idea of, ‘I want to be a trailblazer,”’ said her brother Charles Gordon, a former columnist at the Ottawa Citizen. “There had certainly been women before who had written about baseball, but I think she was the first actual female beat writer. so the whole question of the locker-room was just huge in her first year.” Gordon, who went on to have a career writing mystery novels, died at a Toronto hospital. Her brother said the cause of death wasn’t known.