Politics in Sports

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Chap ter On

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In her 1982 autobiography, Billie Jean King relected on the changes that she had seen in the irst forty years of her life, a time of enormous transitions for women, tennis, and America in general. “Any woman born around 1943 has had to endure so many changes — in her educational experience, in her working life, in sex, in her roles, her expectations. But with me, it always seemed like I was also on the cuting edge of that change.” She continued, “I was brought up in a very structured universe — in my family, in school, in tennis, in every part of my world. hen, all of a sudden, the rules all started to change, and it seemed there weren’t any rules let. I tried to go with the low, but always seemed to ind myself out in front and on the line.” his sense of being ahead of her times, a trailblazer on a variety of personal and professional fronts, characterizes many aspects of Billie Jean King’s life. She remains positive about the future: “I have to be. I’m always 20 years ahead of the times.”1 Practically as soon as the American public began to take notice of a brash young Californian named Billie Jean Moit King, fans and detractors alike

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realized that there was more to her than just her tennis. “Billie Jean is not just a tennis player,” noted a fan in the Reader’s Digest in 1974. “She’s a cause.” Like other sports stars such as Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and Joe Louis, who grabbed national atention to become icons of their individual sports and ambassadors of sport in general, Billie Jean King won a follow- ing for her role in transforming amateur tennis into a successful profes- sional sport with broad national appeal. Soon ater, she emerged as one of the nation’s most prominent and outspoken champions for the female sex — “Mother Courage with a backhand.” In 1990 Life magazine named her one of the hundred most inluential people of the twentieth century.2 And yet, as with any idol or icon, it is important not to conlate Billie Jean King the symbol with Billie Jean King the person. “Even my own auto- biography siting up there on my shelf gives me the willies,” she told women­ Sports in 1977. “It’s like two diferent people. here’s me, and then there’s that tennis player. I feel like I’m not what I am.” Fearless and bold in public but more conventional in private, she struggled to reconcile her transgres- sive (for the time) sexual feelings with her desire to be universally liked and respected. America at the time was not ready for a gay tennis superstar, so her sexual orientation was kept irmly closeted. To her the rationalizations were compelling: she didn’t want to hurt women’s tennis, and she didn’t want to embarrass her parents, who would have found such a choice incom- prehensible. his deceit meant that for most of her career — even ater she was outed in 1981 — she was living a lie. As we will see in chapter 6, King’s search for acceptance, from her public and especially from herself, turned into a lifetime journey.3

Billie Jean Moffitt was a war baby. When she was born on November 22, 1943, her twenty- ive- year- old father, Bill, was in the navy, stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, as a physical education leader for stateside troops; her mother, Bety, had stayed home in Long Beach, California, for the duration of his active duty. Like many children conceived during wartime, Billie Jean was named ater her absent father instead of her mother’s original choice of  Michelle Louise. King later couldn’t resist imagining the headlines: “Michelle Louise Whips Bobby Riggs in Straight Sets.”4 Both her parents had grown up in broken homes during the Depression, and memories of those hard times were not easily dispelled. Her mother re- membered a succession of stepfathers and times when all the family could aford to eat was potatoes. Her father’s mother deserted the family when

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Bill was thirteen, leaving him with adult- sized responsibilities for a younger brother ater an older sister died of cancer. Born and raised in Montana, at some point in the 1930s Bill, like so many other depression- era migrants, made his way to California, where he enrolled at Long Beach City College and played on the basketball team. He met and married Bety in 1941 and soon ater entered the service. When he was released from active duty, Bill Moit got a job as a ireighter in Long Beach, and he and Bety bought a compact (1,000 square feet) three- bedroom tract house in a nice but hardly fancy neighborhood. here they lived the American dream of home owner- ship and nuclear family life that was the epitome of the immediate postwar period. In 1948 their second child, Randall James (Randy), was born.5 Like much of California, Long Beach experienced dramatic growth dur- ing the 1940s as part of wartime mobilization, playing an especially criti- cal role as a major seaport just twenty miles south of the terminus of Los Angeles. In the postwar period, government spending for what came to be known as the military- industrial complex continued to fuel exponen- tial economic development and population growth in Long Beach and surrounding areas. Media writer John Leonard (who also grew up there) once described the city’s suburban sprawl architecture as a place “where churches looked like airports, the high schools looked like illing stations, [and] Midwestern geriatrics trolled housing tracts in go- carts.”6 Long Beach and nearby Orange County were also noted for their preponderance of fun- damentalist and Pentecostal churches, and the strong conservative politi- cal views of their residents, especially on the subject of anticommunism. It was no accident that Orange County in the 1960s was the seedbed for the modern Republican conservative revolution known as the New Right. With only slight hyperbole, a sociologist once referred to “the orange cur- tain” that “metaphorically surrounds Orange County, California and keeps it seemingly free of liberal thinking.”7 Bill Moit it the proile of a strongly conservative, hyperpatriotic, an- ticommunist citizen, oten intolerant of those who didn’t share his views, including, at times, his only daughter. “I guess my parents were prejudiced, not so much against individuals as against groups,” she later recalled. “I remember one discussion with my father about homosexuals when I was about ten. It wasn’t much of a discussion, actually: he made it clear he had very litle tolerance for them. . . . It was all a strange contradiction, because they brought Randy and me up to always treat each person as an individual, as a human being, but when it came down to the broader issues, I guess

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they were really prety narrow.” Her future husband put it in a less latering framework, calling the Moits “straight out of Archie Bunker.”8 Complementing their conservative political views, the Moits had a very traditional marriage: “Dad was the boss, the breadwinner, the one who made all the inal decisions. Even though mom wasn’t afraid to speak up, she wasn’t nearly as opinionated as dad.” It was obvious to everyone that Billie Jean got much of her competitive drive — and temper — from him. he most important family rule was dinner every night at 5:30 sharp, “or dad would go into a tirade.” Her mother, always the peacekeeper in the fam- ily, painted the mealtime ritual in warmer tones: “Family dinner has always been an important event in our home. It was discussion time, warm, pleas- ant, and an opportunity to exchange ideas. It made us a very close family.” Feeling so well grounded in this secure family environment as a child was an important precondition for Billie Jean King’s success, athletic and other- wise. And yet just as noticeable was her early desire not to grow up to be a typical South California housewife like her mother, struggling to get by on a ireighter’s salary. Class as much as gender fueled the future tennis star’s ambition. “I like being diferent,” she once said. “I also like being successful. I somehow always knew that I would succeed.”9 In later years Billie Jean King felt a real bond of kinship with fellow ten- nis player Chris Evert, who though a decade younger, also came from a very traditional family background in Florida. (Note also the shared ad- vantage of growing up in climates where you can play tennis outdoors all year.) heir suburban houses even looked alike, but the similarities went deeper than postwar décor: “In both houses you could feel the discipline in the air.” Even though the Everts were Catholic and the Moits Protestant, “there was a lot of black- and- white thinking in both. Her father was a real disciplinarian. We both learned to be perfectionists.”10 As an active girl fond of pick- up football, speedball, baseball, or what- ever else was being played on the street (“Small but quick, I was the scourge of 36th street”), Billie Jean earned the unavoidable label of tomboy, a term she disliked, as did her parents.11 As a child, however, Billie Jean showed litle interest in any traditional female accomplishments, despite her moth- er’s atempts to introduce her to sewing and embroidery. Even if she didn’t know then that Babe Didrikson Zaharias was probably the best all- around athlete, male or female, of the twentieth century, Billie Jean certainly would have agreed with her when she was asked if there was any sport she didn’t play. Babe’s pithy reply: “Dolls.”12

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An avid recreational athlete himself, Bill Moit was ahead of his times in encouraging his daughter to play sports, but her athletic dreams were abruptly shaken when she approached adolescence. In a story told by countless women athletes across the generations, Billie Jean had her epiph- any at a baseball game: “But what struck me like a thunderbolt as I watched the game on the diamond that day was that there were no women on the ield. My life- long ambition to become a professional baseball player was shatered.” Years later a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times substituted football for baseball, divining King’s later activism from a similar (imag- ined) gender epiphany: “King has never forgiven nature for the dirty trick it played on her in preventing her from being a safety for the Green Bay Packers.”13 Not only would there be no professional baseball career such as the one her brother Randy later pursued as a relief pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, but Billie Jean got the strong message that if she insisted on con- tinuing to play sports, she must choose one that was more ladylike, or at least more acceptable for women. Swimming and golf were options, but tennis was an even beter choice for a girl who loved to run and hit a ball. When a ith- grade classmate named Susan Williams introduced her to ten- nis, she immediately fell in love with the sport. As she later put it succinctly, “he thing I like about tennis is that you’re using your mind and body as one.”14 Soon ater she irst stepped onto a tennis court, Billie Jean Moit set her sights high. In an ot- recounted story (actually, most of her stories are ot- recounted), when Bety Moit picked her daughter up ater her irst group lesson on a Long Beach public court, eleven- year- old Billie Jean told her, “I’m going to be the Number One tennis player in the whole world.” “hat’s ine, dear,” her mother replied, and just kept on driving.15 When later asked if she was surprised at this announcement, Bety Moit said mater- of- factly, “Bill and I took her at her word. She was and is the kind of girl who means what she says.” As her daughter later explained to a journal- ist, “I’d had a sense of urgency since I was born. When you can see things so clearly, it’s hard on you. You see this vision and everyone looks at you like you’ve got three heads when it’s a no- brainer.” For Billie Jean King, her vision was to be the best tennis player in the world.16 Tennis changed Bety Moit’s life almost as much as her daughter’s, as she chaufeured and chaperoned Billie Jean on the daily ater- school trips to public courts around Long Beach for her lessons and then later to tour-

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naments in the greater Los Angeles area. “I never thought of any of the thousands of hours I spent watching Billie Jean play tennis as a sacriice,” she recalled. To friends who raised that point, “I told them that if they had a child who was as interested as Sis [Billie Jean’s childhood nickname] and who put so much efort into a project, they would be willing to go along with her, too.” In contrast to today’s over- controlling sports parents, her mother always made sure that Billie Jean had a well- balanced childhood, with piano lessons and school geting equal time with sports.17 One of the striking things about the Moit family is that their tradi- tional postwar nuclear family, with one girl and one boy, ended up produc- ing two professional athletes — Billie Jean in tennis and Randy in baseball. Relecting their somewhat modest family circumstances, journalist Selena Roberts later said of the Moits, “Somehow Bill and Bety helped create a tennis superstar and a major league pitcher on a coupon- clipper’s budget.” Still, having two athletic children to equip and transport put a strain on a ireighter’s salary, and Bety Moit sometimes worked as an Avon Lady or sold Tupperware to bring in some extra cash. Billie Jean and Randy always remained grateful for their parents’ combination of support without strings or pressure: “I think the reason we are here today is that our parents did not live through us; they stood behind us,” their daughter said proudly. “here is a big diference.”18 Billie Jean Moit took to tennis, but tennis took a litle time geting used to her. She never forgot her early run- ins with the tennis establishment, in- cluding one painful slight when she was not allowed to be in a group pho- tograph at a tournament because she was wearing tennis shorts (which her mother had specially sewn for her) rather than the requisite tennis dress. From the start she had an outsider’s sense that made her want to shake up the game from its country- club tonyness and make it more of a people’s sport. Part of this came from her public court exposure and her lower- middle- class family background. Yet she cautioned against exaggerating her family’s inancial straits: “We weren’t nearly as poor as it was fashionable to make us out to be. It was just that anybody in tennis who wasn’t in the country club was always stereotyped as indigent.” Still, her parents always felt much more comfortable in a baseball crowd cheering Randy than at a tennis match watching Billie Jean.19 Having only been introduced to the sport at age eleven, Billie Jean quickly began climbing the tennis ladder. Even if she deplored the haugh- tiness of tennis culture, she loved the game too much to just walk away

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from it. In the 1950s and early 1960s, tennis really wasn’t all that changed from the genteel, country- club sport it had been in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, it would have been heretical to show up to play in anything but “tennis whites.” Balls were white too, racquets were wooden, and many clubs featured immaculately groomed grass courts. With the exception of a few ranked players such as Helen Jacobs and Alice Marble who played in shorts, women competed in demure tennis dresses or skirts that almost reached their knees. When designer Ted Tinling added lace to the panties that Gussy Moran wore under her dress for her Wimbledon debut in 1949, it created an international sensation.20 his tennis world was extremely insular and hierarchical, tightly con- trolled by the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) and local groups such as the Southern California Tennis Association, which Perry Jones (“a fussy old bachelor who hated girls,” in Billie’s words) ran like a dictatorship.21 Tournaments, local and national, were organized by age di- visions and all were amateur. Opportunities to play in these tournaments, receive reimbursement for travel expenses, or access to other advantages such as coaching and sponsorship were under the thumb of tennis asso- ciation leaders who had a vested interest in the status quo. If players were lucky, they received token per diem and travel expenses, and they oten stretched their budgets by staying in the private homes of tennis support- ers at tournaments; obviously such a set- up privileged tennis players whose families were aluent enough to subsidize their participation in the sport. Top tennis players received cash under the table — appearance money or prize money — for playing; professional tennis players, who mainly played exhibition matches, were barred from all the prestigious tourna- ments. Newspaper coverage was limited, and television coverage virtually nonexistent.22 his world of tennis was also rigidly segregated well into the 1950s. he black counterpart to the USLTA was the American Tennis Association (ATA), which ran its own tennis program as well as championship tourna- ments for youth and adults. he ATA had nurtured the athletic careers of such outstanding black female athletes as Isadore Channels in the 1920s, Ora Washington in the 1930s, and a young Althea Gibson in the 1940s, but like baseball players in the segregated Negro Leagues, these women had no opportunities to demonstrate their skill or compete against white players. It took determined public advocacy by Alice Marble in 1950 for Althea Gib- son to be invited to play in a grass- courts tournament on the East Coast.

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his invitation in turn paved the way for Gibson and a small number of other African American players to compete in tournaments such as the U.S. Open and Wimbledon.23 Billie Jean Moit, who felt like an outsider in this clubby world because of both class and gender (although not race), oten bumped up against its rules and traditions and then nursed grievances, sometimes for the rest of her life, for the treatment she received. Case in point: the inadequate inan- cial support she was given to atend the national girls’ iteen- and- under championship in Ohio in 1958. Her parents could not aford to underwrite her travel costs to the tournament, and at fourteen she was deemed too young to travel without a chaperone. When her nemesis Perry Jones turned down her request for funding, a group of local boosters came up with some cash, but the sum was too small to stretch for airfare for her and her mother, so they had to sit up on the train all the way from California. Seeded fourth, she lost in the quarterinals; it was the irst time she had ever played on clay. Ater the championship, other team members went on to play in tourna- ments on the East Coast and then on the European circuit, but a tearful Billie Jean and her mother had to turn around and return to California for lack of funds. Such slights just increased her determination to succeed.24 Billie Jean’s irst coach was Clyde Walker of the Long Beach Recreation Department, who quickly realized that she had enormous promise. Soon she was showing up ater school for free lessons at whatever Long Beach neighborhood park he was scheduled to coach at that day. She never forgot that she got her start on public courts rather than at a fancy country club. When the United States Tennis Association renamed its facility in Flushing Meadows the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in 2006, a delighted and grateful King repeatedly drew atention to the fact that these courts were public courts too, just like the ones she learned to play on.25 In the fall of 1959, a Wilson Sporting Goods representative arranged for the sixteen- year- old rising star to have private lessons with former Wimble- don great Alice Marble, who lived up the coast in the Tarzana district of Los Angeles. Alice Marble was part of the irst generation of women to play power tennis — an atacking, serve- and- volley game that she had honed under the legendary teacher Eleanor (“Teach”) Tennant, who also coached Bobby Riggs.26 Each Saturday Bety or Bill Moit would drive their daugh- ter up to Los Angeles for her weekend sessions and then pick her up on Sunday. Besides the technical help Billie Jean received, the young player began to see herself as part of the larger history of the game through her

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association with Marble: “For the irst time in my life, I sensed some kind of legacy that I was part of.” Largely as a result of Alice Marble’s tutelage, her national ranking rose from number nineteen in 1959 to number four in 1960.27 Yet this relationship with Marble came to an abrupt end, perhaps, Bil- lie Jean speculated, because Marble was not comfortable with the young player’s determination to succeed Marble and become the best player of all time. (Marble remembered it diferently: when she came down with pleu- risy and pneumonia, she thought her young charge cared more about her missed lesson than her coach’s well- being, and Marble terminated the re- lationship.) he rising tennis star also had a fraught encounter around this time with top- ranked Maureen (Mo) Connolly, who bluntly told her she would never make a champion because she was too self- centered and ego- tistical. Not surprisingly, many of the traits that made Billie Jean so good at tennis, such as her ierce ambition and large ego, oten rubbed people the wrong way. Still, as she later recalled, “to have two ex- champions as great as Alice and Maureen blast you when you’re still in your teens is prety tough. hose two incidents let a mark on me, and I still remember them vividly.”28 In June 1961 Billie Jean Moit graduated from the Long Beach Polytech- nical High School. She certainly was an acceptable student, but not a brain. “Not everyone is meant to be an A student,” she told Seventeen in 1974. “Everyone can’t be a great athlete, either.” Billie Jean never apologized for her single- minded devotion to tennis and never questioned the sacriices she made to reach her goals: “Sure tennis is demanding and it creates some tunnel vision. But I’m not really a believer in the well- rounded individual; it oten means that a person has no particular distinction.”29 She proved where her distinction lay several weeks ater graduation when she and partner Karen Hantze teamed up at Wimbledon to win the women’s doubles title, the youngest — and the irst unseeded — pair to do so. She was seventeen years old. he doubles partners were too broke to go to the traditional Wimbledon ball, but were delighted when a young Boston sportswriter named Bud Collins ofered to take them out for a cel- ebratory spagheti dinner. Ater her return to the states, Sports Illustrated selected Billie Jean Moit for its Faces in the Crowd feature, a tantalizing taste of the public celebrity that she craved for herself and her sport. In ret- rospect Billie Jean regreted that she had never set deinite targets to shoot for, other than wanting to be “the best.” “I never planned it very well — not

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in a long- term, overall way. I never sat down and said, I want to do this, I want to aim for that, I’ll set that goal. I’m sure I could have won more than twenty Wimbledon titles if I’d ploted things beter.”30 With no clear career path before her, Billie Jean entered Los Angeles State College (later California State University, Los Angeles) in the fall of 1961 as a commuter student; the following fall she took an apartment near campus. As a nationally ranked tennis player (number three in 1961), one would have thought she would qualify for an athletic scholarship, but in pre–Title IX days such scholarships for women were nonexistent. Be- cause of tight inances, she took odd jobs to pay for school, got by on $90 a month, and basically limited her competitive tennis playing to the summer, which, she quickly realized, was no way to get closer to her ambition to be the top player in the world. And yet she was geting noticed. In her return to Wimbledon in 1962, she beat reigning champion Margaret Smith (later Court) in the irst round, an enormous upset, and then made it as far as the quarterinals; she and Karen Hantze repeated their doubles victory. In 1963, she made it to the Wimbledon singles inal, where she met top- seeded Smith again. his time, Smith handily dispatched her unseeded challenger 6- 3, 6- 4.31 he press didn’t quite know what to make of the player they couldn’t resist calling “Litle Miss Moit.” Except she wasn’t exactly litle, the result of her life- long struggle with her weight. Here is how Sports Illustrated de- scribed her in 1963: “Billie Jean, the daughter of a ireman in Long Beach, Calif., stands 5 feet 6 inches tall, has brown hair, light blue eyes, a small im- pertinent nose and a weight problem.” he year before Time had called her “the chunky, bespectacled litle Californian,” drawing atention to how un- usual it was, then or now, to have a tennis champion who wore glasses. (Her career ofers a fashion Rorschach for eyewear from the 1950s to the present. She changed her glasses more oten than she did her hairstyle.) he press was just as interested in her spunky personality as her appearance. he New York Times noted ater her 1963 Wimbledon run, “he bespectacled tomboy from Southern California is the liveliest personality to hit the international circuit in years. She has courage and she has color, a combination rarely found in tennis today.”32 Driven, focused, and single- minded in her determination to get to the top, even from a young age Billie Jean Moit it the personality type likely to succeed at tennis. “I expect to win every time I step on a tennis court and I’m truly surprised when I don’t. . . . On my very best days I have this fantas-

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tic, uterly unselfconscious feeling of invincibility.” She claimed she could always tell when she was going to play a great match “because I woke up in the morning feeling everything. I was so alert. I could feel the water in my hair in the shower.” Tennis mentor Frank Brennan, who irst got to know the tennis player in the early 1960s when she stayed in his New Jersey home during a tournament, enumerated further traits King possessed that were key to her success: “Singlemindedness. A pride that drove her to succeed at all costs, and a stubborn will not to be humiliated, especially in front of a crowd.” He added tellingly, “She’s a ham. he more people watching, the beter Billie Jean becomes.”33 Billie Jean Moit was an indiferent student at Cal State and growing increasingly frustrated about her prospects in tennis. In the fall of 1964 she made the dramatic decision to drop out of school and head for Australia to work with noted coach Mervyn Rose, her expenses paid by an Australian benefactor. his was a real commitment to her career; no more diletantism. Even though at times she felt like she was starting over from scratch, the im- provements from Rose’s tutelage were soon evident. She worked hard on her forehand, always the weakest part of her game, and retooled her serve. She also focused more on playing percentage tennis — that is, choosing the best shot to use in a given situation, like hiting approach shots down the line, but going crosscourt to put shots away. Determined to master full- court play so she would not be limited to a single style, she nevertheless gravitated toward the aggressive serve- and- volley game that suited her per- sonality so well. When she returned from Australia, the fundamentals of her trademark game were irmly in place.34 he decision to take of for Australia was made much harder because it separated her from Larry King, the man she would marry the following year. hey met in the fall of 1962 at Los Angeles State, introduced by a mu- tual friend who thought they would hit it of. Larry, too, was a tennis player, on scholarship, but he had no aspirations of a professional career. heir irst date wasn’t for another six months, but prety soon they realized they were geting serious. His initial introduction to her parents had not been auspi- cious (a biochemistry major, he had asked her dad about the pH of the soil in their backyard lawn, which Bill Moit found pretentious), but the Mof- its soon came around. In retrospect, they could not have asked for a more loyal — perhaps too loyal — son- in- law.35 Larry and Billie Jean got engaged in October 1964 just before she let for Australia and were married the following year on September 17, 1965. he

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wedding photos show a beaming Billie Jean (without her glasses) and a handsome Larry in a white dinner jacket, both looking very young, which they were: her twenty- one to his twenty. Explaining the problems that were evident in the marriage from the very start, King oten pointed to their youth when they got married, publicly wondering whether they should have married at all. But living together was not an option in those conser- vative times, especially with parents like Bill and Bety Moit. “I married him so I could be an honest woman,” she joked, “and then he was the one person who gave me the courage to go back to being a [tennis] bum.”36 Larry King’s background was similar to that of both of Billie Jean’s par- ents. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1944, but his family, which was origi- nally from Finland, moved to Los Angeles just ater the war. Ater losing his mother at an early age, he grew up in a blended family of two siblings, two stepsiblings, and a half- brother ater his father remarried. He had been working since he was twelve and was always happiest when he had a job to do or a problem to solve; he coupled a lifelong tendency to keep his feelings botled up inside him with a ierce determination to make something of his life. Larry was also blond and cute in a California kind of way, and quite a catch. Although they didn’t know it at irst, both their careers would be totally tied up in Billie Jean’s success in the world of tennis.37 Larry King played a critical role in the development of his wife’s career. In the 1960s he helped to plant the seeds of her feminism by pointing out how unfair it was that a second- rate player like him, the seventh player on a six- person team, had a tennis scholarship while she did not, even though she was a far superior competitor.38 He also supported and nurtured her tennis aspirations: “Billie Jean, I just don’t see how you can give up some- thing where you have the potential to be best in the world — the best of all.” In 1964 he prodded her to give up her listless pursuit of a college degree to go to Australia to work on her game; ater their marriage he continued to press her to keep on with tennis. “We felt Billie Jean’s potential was as a ten- nis player. here was no point in her becoming just another housewife. She was immensely talented. I didn’t feel her talent should be wasted.” Already the promoter, Larry recognized Billie Jean as his star product. As he once quipped with perhaps more truth than he intended, “I’m more of a business agent than a husband.”39 From the very beginning the marriage was haunted by Billie Jean’s un- certainty about her sexuality, or as Larry later called it, her “identity prob- lems.” Long before Marilyn Barnet came on the scene in 1972–73, Billie

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Jean had been exploring her sexual feelings for other women, yet in those pre- Stonewall times she lacked the political or social context to come to grips with herself as lesbian or bisexual, words she never remembered hear- ing when she was growing up. Mainly, she recalled, “We didn’t talk about that stuf then.”40 When people did start talking about “that stuf ” in the 1970s, she always held back because she feared that any revelations about her sexuality would irrevocably damage the ledging women’s tour. In addition, she was deeply afraid, rightly so, of the impact any kind of declaration about her sexual identity would have on her conservative parents.41 Even though her rela- tionships with women were something of an open secret on the tour, in those days sports coverage still respected a strict line in not reporting about athletes’ private lives, so the rumors never made it into print. And other tennis players, concerned about public fears of rampant lesbianism within women’s sports, certainly had plenty of incentives to keep mum. So Billie Jean King managed to avoid publicly dealing with the issue when it irst surfaced and, it turned out, for years aterward.42 he early years of Billie Jean and Larry’s marriage found two very young and very ambitious people trying to muddle through a mineield of chal- lenges: the wife’s confusion about her sexuality; the husband’s atempts to build the kind of successful business career he had always wanted, which depended on his wife’s public visibility and popularity; her fears of upset- ting and alienating her parents and potential sponsors if word of her bi- sexuality leaked out; the monumental changes that were about to recon- igure the sport of tennis. Even without the uncertainty about her sexual orientation, both of them sensed that a conventional marriage would never have worked for them. Larry called it a conscious trade- of in an article cloyingly titled “My wife, Billie Jean by her husband” in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1974: “If a couple wants to achieve a great deal, and if they want independent careers, they can’t live a typical life. If they’d rather be typical they have to setle for achieving less. Billie Jean and I both like to achieve.” hey proudly presented themselves as a team — “the all- American boy- girl couple,” in Grace Lichtenstein’s somewhat caty phrase — and basically said that the exact dimensions of their marriage were nobody’s business but their own.43 In retrospect Billie Jean and Larry King were bound together in ways so deep and conlicted that they defy conventional understandings. As Larry put it in the early 1970s, “We’ve loved each other for a long time even though

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we’re not really husband and wife.” Billie Jean welcomed the respectability of being married, in efect, using Larry as her beard; Larry watched his ca- reer ambitions lourish as the public partner of his superstar wife. In their own version of an open marriage, he looked the other way when she had relationships with women, and she did the same when he had afairs. A divorce would have meant severing myriad business relationships — what Billie Jean called the “two big intersecting circles” of their lives — as well as the complicated personal ones. In the end both concluded that on bal- ance there were beneits to their public charade, even as their personal lives diverged.44 And they remained commited to their own idiosyncratic deinition of what love and marriage should entail. As Larry later told journalist Selena Roberts, “I was young and naïve, but I was her husband, good, bad, or in- diferent, you know, I’d help her with her problems. he botom line was, I didn’t see any reason to get divorced because Billie Jean had identity prob- lems. I felt that even when it all got sorted out, if Billie Jean was going to grow old and gray, she would be much beter of growing old and gray with me than with any other person on the planet.” Larry clung to that view, and Billie Jean went along, all through the tennis boom of the 1970s, through the public glare of Marilyn Barnet’s palimony suit in the early 1980s, until the couple inally divorced in 1987.45

When L arry and Billie Jean got married in 1965, he still had one more year of school. His senior year he worked nights in an ice cream factory to support his new wife and pay for their expenses, proving to a doubting Bill Moit that he was capable of taking care of his daughter. Not having much money seemed perfectly normal to both of them: “When Larry and I were in college and didn’t have a dime between us, we used to just sit and talk about our dreams for tennis.” Determined to be a good wife, Billie Jean stayed home that fall and winter, but instead of just puting her tennis racket away during the school year, as she had been doing in high school and college, she played tennis every day, thanks to the hospitable southern California climate. While Larry made plans to enroll in law school at Berke- ley ater his graduation (“Mrs. King will swap racket for recipes,” predicted the Washington Post), she set her sights on Wimbledon.46 Wimbledon always held a special place in the heart of Billie Jean King. As she joked in 1982 when she got to the semiinals at age thirty- eight before losing to Chris Evert, “I’ll think about winning Wimbledon when I’m 100.”

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She loved the traditions, the seting, the knowledgeable patrons, the respect and care for the players, but especially she loved the history: “Every time I walk onto the Centre Court at Wimbledon, I think of all those people who came before me — Suzanne Lenglen, Alice Marble, Helen Wills Moody, Althea Gibson, Maureen Connolly — all those players let me something. I wouldn’t play the way I play without them.” Continuing the legacy she began in 1961 with her doubles victory, in 1966 Mrs. L. W. King (as she was known at stodgy Wimbledon) beat Brazilian Maria Bueno in three sets to win the singles crown, her irst Grand Slam singles title. Finally the coveted number one ranking was hers. he next year she swept all three titles — sin- gles, doubles, and mixed doubles. Larry accompanied her to Wimbledon in 1966 but was miserable, “hanging around like a puppy dog.” From then on, he rarely traveled with her to tournaments.47 Yet the thrill of those Wimbledon victories was tempered by a lingering sense that it could have been bigger, much bigger. “I played some of my greatest matches in 1966, 1967,” King recalled ruefully. “Maybe 1,000 people saw them.” Or as she said in 1975, “When I really wanted atention, it wasn’t there. When I came back ater winning Wimbledon in ’66, nobody cared. To be appreciated in my own country was all I wanted, and I got nothing.”48 It is not totally accurate to say that she got no press coverage: sports reporters continued to ile stories about her with the bemused, oten belit- tling stereotypes so prevalent when describing women athletes at the time. For example, in 1966 Sports Illustrated called the twenty- three- year- old player who had just won Wimbledon “a bouncy litle girl.” Especially galling to King were reporters’ questions about when she planned to retire, which started when she was in her early twenties. “I inally had won Wimbledon a couple of times, and I’m looking at them like, jeez!” A subtext of the re- tirement questions was when the “bouncy, 23- year- old Long Beach, Calif. housewife” would setle down and have kids. “Why don’t you go ask Rod Laver why he isn’t at home?” she would huf in reply, even as she would ofer the obligatory statement that of course she and Larry wanted children, but just not now.49 At this point in her career, Billie Jean King was all dressed up with no- where to go. She was ranked number one in her sport, but she wanted more — more recognition, more opportunities, and more money, especially the chance to make a living at what she did best. To do that tennis had to leave its insular, country- club atmosphere and venture out into the main- stream of American sports. As she said in 1967 when she sat for an interview

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for the women’s pages of a newspaper, “hat’s the trouble with this sport. We’ve got to get it of the society page and onto the sports pages.”50 What Billie Jean King was really up against was the vestiges of tennis as a purely amateur sport, a façade (and a lie) that would be challenged and then collapse in 1968, in part because of her advocacy. Arthur Ashe, then the second- ranked American male player, said it best in 1967: “We all de- serve Oscars for impersonating amateurs.” For years tournament directors and tennis oicials had made under- the- table payments to top players to guarantee their participation, which in turn drew the spectators who made the events proitable. While no tennis players were going to get rich under this system, they could more than cover their expenses and have some let over. King herself estimated that in 1967, her last full year as an amateur, she grossed just under $20,000 (“I haggled prety good and got almost as much as the men”), which sounds like a tidy sum until you remember she had to cover most of her travel and lodging expenses. She was less successful with her long- term nemesis, the USLTA. As she recalled caustically, “he USLTA paid me $196 a week in expenses — half that if I stayed in private houses — so I could help draw crowds that put money into its pot, and where that money went, your guess is as good as mine.” No wonder Life in 1967 de- scribed the “myopic housewife of Berkeley, California,” as “the most color- ful and outspoken critic of tennis today.”51 his striving for professional status for tennis, accompanied by a desire to wrest its control from the elite, country- club set, was what initially drove Billie Jean King as a rebel in her sport; the atention to women’s issues came later. “It was the hypocrisy of the thing that bugged me the most. I wanted the chance to make money, honest money, doing what I did best. It was that simple.” As she said on more than one occasion, “I can’t even get a credit card. How can I tell them I’ve got a job.”52 Two sportswriters later called the arrival of Open Tennis “the irst giant step towards today’s all- embracing, big money professionalism.” For Bil- lie Jean King the onset of Open Tennis meant signing a contract with the National Tennis League that went into efect on April 1, 1968. She was guar- anteed $40,000 a year for two years, and she joined Ann Jones, Françoise Durr, and Rosie Casals as “the only women tennis professionals in the world who actually earned our money by playing.” he tour, which also included Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson, Pancho Gonzales, and Rod Laver, started in Europe and was nothing but a string of one- night stands; King remembered never being so tired in her life. he tour actually folded before her contract

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ended, and she went back on the regular tennis circuit. Professional tennis wasn’t quite ready for prime time yet.53 he 1968 Wimbledon was the irst major tournament played under the new rules, and both the men’s and women’s titles were won by profession- als. Rod Laver received $4,800 for his victory, while Billie Jean King only got $1,800, about par for the gender gap in prize money at the time. For King, it was her third straight title, which ironically soured her relationship with the British press and public, who loved underdogs but did not warm to repeat winners, especially brash American ones.54 And yet all was not well with her tennis career, as King later recalled: “he years from 1968 to 1970 should have been the best tennis years of my career, but because of a lot of things, they turned out to be the worst.” She was plagued by knee problems, which kept her in almost constant pain and necessitated surgery and extensive rehabilitation in 1968 and 1970. An added distraction was that when Larry inished his law degree at Berkeley in 1969 they moved to Hawaii, where he hoped to set up his practice. Not that she spent much time there, but she felt totally out of place in the social scene, plus the added travel time to tournaments on the mainland was a real burden. Rumors of a possible divorce circulated widely.55 Lurking underneath this personal and professional uncertainty was the nagging realization that in the transition to Open Tennis, the women were — in Larry King’s apt description — geting “squeezed out.” Having won round one to take the sport professional, women now found out that they had to ight a second batle: to get gender equity for women profes- sionals. his struggle consumed Billie Jean King for the next three years.56 he story of the founding of the women’s professional tour revolves around the actions of three individuals: the charismatic advocacy of Billie Jean King, the astute professional savvy and contacts of tennis promoter Gladys Heldman, and the inancial and marketing support of Joseph  P. Cullman, the chief executive oicer of Philip Morris. Ater several years of watching the purses for men’s tournaments grow while women’s shrank, plus a decline in the number of women’s tournaments overall because ten- nis promoters claimed that nobody would pay to watch women play, the inal straw was the Paciic Southwest Open run by Jack Kramer. he tourna- ment, scheduled for September 1970, ofered top prize for men of $12,500 and $1,500 for women — a ratio of eight to one. Even more galling, women players were guaranteed no money, not even expenses, unless they made the quarterinals. Kramer was never known as a friend of women’s tennis

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(King later threatened to withdraw from the Riggs match if he served as one of the color commentators for the ABC broadcast), and he refused to meet the women’s demands for at least one- quarter of the purse. In fact, he probably would have been quite happy to cancel the women’s draw and turn all the prize money back to the men.57 Tired of being marginalized and treated like second- class citizens, the women players turned to Gladys Heldman, the founder and publisher of World Tennis magazine, who quickly put together a women- only tourna- ment in Houston the same week; Joseph Cullman kicked in $2,500 (one third of the $7,500 purse) on behalf of Philip Morris for what was to be called the Houston Virginia Slims Invitational. With great ceremony and more than a litle faith, Billie Jean King and eight other women (henceforth known as the “Original Nine”), including Rosemary Casals, Nancy Richey, and Gladys Heldman’s daughter Julie, risked expulsion from the USLTA when they signed $1- a- year contracts, a moment immortalized by a photo of them holding dollar bills in the air. Rosie Casals won that irst tourna- ment, but the real winner was the cause of women’s tennis, which received more media coverage that week than it had the entire previous year.58 Ater the Houston tournament, Larry King and his business partner Den- nis Van der Meer proposed that their company, TennisAmerica, be hired to run the women’s tour, seemingly oblivious to the potential conlicts of in- terest since his wife was its main draw. Instead the players stuck with Held- man.59 By early 1971, Heldman had already arranged fourteen tournaments with combined prize money of $189,000. Because the women’s movement was taking of at the same time, the public automatically linked what Gladys Heldman dubbed “women’s lob” with women’s lib, but feminist ideology was not the driving force behind the women’s tour. “It was actually more a mater of survival than ideology,” King recalled.60 he early years of what came to be known as the Virginia Slims tour sufered from the absence of three of the big names in women’s tennis — Margaret Smith Court, Evonne Goolagong, and Chris Evert — who stayed loyal to the USLTA, which had set up its own competing women’s tour. (he USLTA acted not out of any sympathy or commitment to the future of wom- en’s tennis but rather from fear that they might lose control of the women’s side of the game entirely. he National Collegiate Athletic Association took a similar stance toward women’s sports in the irst decade of Title IX’s exis- tence.) Chris Evert was the prize that everyone wanted, because it was clear practically from the start that this talented and photogenic Florida teenager

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was going to be central to the future of the sport. Billie Jean lew to Florida to meet with the Evert family, but Jimmy Evert, Chris’s conservative dad, made the decision that she would not join the Slims tour. As Chris recalled several decades later, “in my defense, at just 16 years old, I wasn’t a feminist,” adding, “I wasn’t burning my bra because I wasn’t even wearing one yet.”61 While many of the women tennis players resented or snubbed this ris- ing star with her two- isted backhand and icy composure, Billie Jean King went out of her way to befriend her. Having such an atractive and appeal- ing star, especially when television was beginning to discover that tennis could be a proitable addition to its sports menu, was going to help them all, she reasoned. hat, however, didn’t keep King from wanting to beat the young aspirant. At the U.S. Open in 1971, where the sixteen- year- old had a phenomenal run of victories, Evert and King met in the semiinals. Billie Jean feared that the women’s tour would have no credibility if she, its lead- ing moneymaker, couldn’t beat this kid, no mater how talented and poised she was. Age and experience triumphed, and King won handily, dispatching Evert back to start her junior year at St. homas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale. King went on to beat her doubles partner Rosie Casals in the inal and repeated as the U.S. Open champion in 1972.62 In the early years of professional tennis, there really wasn’t enough money or fan interest to support two competing tours, and in 1973 they agreed to merge into a single organization. One casualty of the merger was the outspoken Gladys Heldman, with whom the USLTA establishment re- fused to work; having been the facilitator for the revolt, she was forced out just as her vision was paying of. “I was out, but the war was over and that was the most important thing,” she recalled graciously as she stepped aside and returned to World Tennis. When the tour began in 1971, the minimum purse was set at $10,000; by 1973, the igure was $35,000. he following year ater the tours combined, it was $50,000. No one doubted anymore that fans would pay money to see women play. According to King, women ten- nis players made more gains between 1970 and 1973 than in the entire thirty years before.63 Even with Gladys Heldman gone, Virginia Slims stayed, proving a criti- cal, and controversial, ally to the new women’s tour. he Virginia Slims slo- gan — “You’ve come a long way, baby” — copied and, many believed, de- meaned the ideas of modern feminism. In 1975 the New York Times noted that at base the rationale behind the women’s tour was to promote cigaretes and the slogan “served the purpose perfectly as it identiied a commercial

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product and a woman’s sport with women’s liberation, a triple- pronged as- sault that must have seemed irresistible.” his didn’t bother Billie Jean King one bit, who enthused about the slogan, “I love it. I think it’s true. I’m in this (Women’s Lib and Lob) whether I like it or not. I just want to play tennis.”64 his partnership was forged at a moment fraught with uncertainty for the tobacco industry as a whole: the Surgeon General’s report linking smoking with cancer had appeared in 1966, and cigarete advertising was banned from television as of January 2, 1971. Nevertheless the tobacco company reaped enormous beneits from this decades- long association, as the Philip Morris marketing manager admited as early as 1976: “When we started out, we had no idea where we were going. We were doing the women a favor. Our name was carrying tennis. But within a year and a half that all began to change. he sport began to carry the product. We had been instrumental in developing a popular sport and we were beneiting from our association with it.” A spokesperson for Virginia Slims put it in even stronger terms in 1983: “We [Virginia Slims] wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Billie Jean King.”65 While King always admited that it was a “real moral conlict” about whether to accept money from a company whose product was associated with lung cancer, she argued that women’s tennis needed the money or “we’d be at the mercy of male oicials as we always have been.” King justi- ied the support because the company never asked women tennis players to smoke and because cigaretes, however unhealthy, were legal. Weighing the costs and beneits, “I came to realize that Slims was doing us and the sport so much good that I’d have to live with my misgivings. You give a litle to accomplish something big.” Or as she was quoted in Sports Illustrated in 1972: “If I hadn’t played — I’ll be truthful — there wouldn’t have been a circuit. I wasn’t about to deprive 80 girls of a living, and I do know people who drink and smoke a lot and also play great tennis.” She never wavered in her belief that the tour had made the right choice, even though this as- sociation meant that women’s tennis — and her name — was forever linked in the public mind with cigaretes. Others have not been as charitable, and lingering criticisms about Virginia Slims’ sponsorship dogged the tennis star — rightly — for the rest of her career.66 As her pragmatic approach to sponsorship suggested, for Billie Jean King professional tennis was always made up of equal parts business and enter- tainment. As she told Sports Illustrated in 1972, “We’re in big business, and

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until people face reality we’ll be dabbling in nonsense forever. . . . If we can get the money, we deserve it.” She asked rhetorically, “Do female entertain- ers get paid less than male entertainers? No. heir pay depends on whether they draw at the box oice. Entertainment value, geting people through the turnstiles, that’s the name of the game.” When critics pointed out that men played three out of ive sets while women played two out of three, King would reply, “People don’t want to see stamina; they want to see skill.” (Bud Collins put it another way: “Sometimes a shorter opera is much beter than a long one.”) Nor did she shy away from exploiting the sex appeal of both male and female players. “I think tennis is a very sexy sport,” she said, “and that is good. he players are young, with excellent bodies, clothed in relatively litle. It ofers the healthiest, most appealing presentation of sex I can imagine, and we in sport must acknowledge that and use it to our advantage.”67 his emphasis on professionalism runs through Billie Jean King’s public statements in the early 1970s much more than feminism. To her mind, a sport was not taken seriously in America if it wasn’t professional; if women’s tennis — and by extension, women’s sports — was going to win the recogni- tion it desired and deserved, it needed a professional basis. Jerry Diamond, an early tennis executive associated with the women’s tour, summed up Billie Jean King’s vision: “She made it possible for women to earn a living playing tennis. . . . It’s as though she invented the NBA or pro football, OK?” When she testiied before Congress in 1973 in support of the Women’s Edu- cational Equity Act, she noted, “As an amateur, I was saying the same things I am saying to you today, and nobody could care less.” She was right.68 Billie Jean King was never shy about the importance she placed on money, even though her open pursuit of that goal oten dismayed tennis purists. As she told Life in 1971, “Money is everything in sports. It made me a star.” hat was the year that King made $100,000 in earnings, the irst woman in sports to reach that pinnacle. (By way of comparison, the aver- age income in 1971 was $10,600, and the average price of a new home was $25,200.) Her feat earned her a somewhat stilted congratulatory phone call from President Richard Nixon, and also, she hoped, the respect of the average sports fan: “ ‘Big money’ is the common denominator. he guy in the factory can relate to me. He says, ‘If she makes all that much, she must be good.’ ” Some players on the tour, however, resented the money King received, and wondered if her activism wasn’t just a way to grab more at- tention — and cash — for herself. As one player told Grace Lichtenstein,

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“Whatever Billie Jean says she’s doing for us, she’s really doing it for herself.” Jealousies and resentments aside, without Billie Jean King there probably would not have been a women’s tour, and everyone knew it.69 Of her nonstop activism on behalf of women’s tennis in the 1970s, King later observed, “People thought I was angry. I wasn’t. I was determined.” In joint pursuit of maintaining her number one ranking and establishing women’s tennis on a sound footing, her life became “an endless succession of not only tennis but also public appearances, airport lobbies, interviews, motels, meetings, and dirty laundry.” Before every tournament, she would ly into the city, rent a car, and then visit local media outlets to try to drum up publicity for the tournament and for women’s tennis in general. Chris Evert remembered playing Billie Jean King in a “sluggish” night game in the early 1970s. “Later I found out she had spent all day in New York for meet- ings regarding tour sponsorship. She was always one to put the group ahead of her own tennis.” Evert added respectfully, “Every sport needs a Billie Jean King.”70 All this activism took its toll. In her 1974 autobiography, writen to capi- talize on the Riggs match, King put it this way: “But being Number One was a twenty- four- hour job, and my personality just didn’t allow me the luxury of leting up at all, even for a minute.” She sounded more tired, and more damaged, when she revisited that period in her 1982 memoir: “I have never been the same since 1972. hose couple years were so intense. I just gave, gave, gave, and aterward there was something that just wasn’t there for me to draw on anymore.  .  .  . Making women’s sports acceptable, and making women’s tennis, particularly, into a legitimate big- league game was a crusade for me and I threw my whole self into it in ways that exhausted me emotionally as much as they did physically.”71 his headline from the Washington Post on February 22, 1972, didn’t help: “Abortion Made Possible Mrs. King’s Top Year.” A year earlier she had gone of birth control pills because of complications; she thought her period was regular enough to be safe, but she miscalculated. (Actually she and Larry spent so litle time together that many friends were surprised that he man- aged to get her pregnant in the irst place.) A strong believer in a woman’s right to choose and still commited to the possibility of having children in the future, she made the decision to have an abortion in California, with Larry’s strong support. In 1967 California had been one of the irst states to liberalize its abortion laws by allowing hospital commitees to approve so- called therapeutic abortions when pregnancy would afect the physical

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or mental health of the woman, or in cases of rape or incest, as long as the procedure was performed by a doctor in an accredited hospital. Calling it “the simplest operation I’ve ever had,” King did have two main gripes: the cost ($580, which she thought was outrageous for such a quick procedure) and the fact that her husband, not she, had to give consent for it.72 What for her had been a totally private decision that she had shared with only a few friends became a mater of public controversy a year later when she signed a petition that stated, “I have had an abortion. I publicly join millions of other women in demanding a repeal of all laws that restrict our reproductive freedom.” Inspired by a public manifesto by 343 prominent French women stating that they had had abortions, a New York feminist named Barbaralee D. Diamonstein enlisted the support of ity- three prom- inent women including Gloria Steinem, Judy Collins, Susan Sontag, Nora Ephron, and Billie Jean King to kick of a comparable American campaign. his was an exceptionally courageous act then: women, especially well- known public igures, simply did not talk about abortion, which remained illegal in most states. (Roe v. Wade was not decided until January 1973.) he petition appeared in the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine, which came out in January 1972. A month later sportswriter Mark Asher asked King about the petition for an article in the Washington Post and she hedged, saying she strongly supported the right to abortion and that “whoever has to have the baby is the one who should make the decision.” When the article latly stated that she had had an abortion, it was not quoting her directly, but the damage was done, especially when it was picked up by the wire services. King had never told her parents about the abortion, and they were morti- ied to learn about it from an article in the Los Angeles Times.73 And yet what began as a moment of personal courage soon became sur- rounded by obfuscation. When the story was picked up in Time a month later the article repeated King’s general support for abortion reform but stated that, despite signing the ad, she had not had an abortion, quoting her as saying, “I wish I’d known more about the ad before I agreed to sign it.” Her 1974 autobiography discussed the abortion unapologetically and said Larry had seen the petition in the mail and told her she would probably want to sign it, which she did. “I was almost sure the petition said that we signees were only in favor of legalized abortion, not that we’d had abortions ourselves,” she asserted then. Her 1982 autobiography did not mention the petition, only the criticism she received for having an abortion. But in an HBO documentary in 2006 and a recent book by Selena Roberts, Billie

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Jean King claimed she never saw the leter and that Larry signed her name without telling her, which certainly puts a very diferent spin on it. here is enough evidence from the time to dispute that retrospective assertion, but the shiting story — and blame — is yet another example of Billie Jean King’s tendency to put expediency ahead of principle when it came to her public image.74 Not all the publicity she received in 1972 was so painful. hat September she won her third U.S. Open title. In December she and UCL A coach John Wooden were named Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year by Sports Illustrated, the irst time a woman had been honored. Showing her tendency to assume that what was good for Billie Jean King was good for everyone else, she saw it as “a three- way triumph: for me, for women’s tennis, and for women everywhere.”75 Soon ater the division between the Virginia Slims tour and the USLTA- backed tour was healed, and all the top women players were competing in the same tournaments. And in 1973, a truly stunning turn of events: the U.S. Open became the irst major tournament to award equal prize money to men and women. he fact that Wimbledon did not meet that standard until 2007 conirms what a far- sighted breakthrough for equality it was.76 here was one inal item on Billie Jean King’s activist agenda: the estab- lishment of a players’ union. As far back as 1964 King had tried to organize an informal “strike” by women players over the unequal under- the- table payments they received, but no one else wanted to rock the boat. he need for an organization to stand up for women’s interests and speak in a uniied voice seemed like a no- brainer to King, even if her fellow athletes didn’t yet see it that way: “So oten, athletes look everywhere else for the answer to their problems but to themselves. Yet they’re the people who are unhappy with the status quo! Athletes have to be convinced that it’s in their self- interest to set up and control their own organizations.” King made her inal push at Wimbledon in June of 1973, when she invited all the women profes- sionals to the Hotel Gloucester and then had one player lock the door until they agreed to form the Women’s Tennis Association (W TA). In addition to her success as a labor organizer that June, King also won a coveted Wimble- don triple — singles, doubles, and mixed doubles championships.77 his frenzied, twenty- four- hours- a- day lifestyle provides the context for the Batle of the Sexes match with Bobby Riggs: it was yet another com- mitment on an already overcrowded athletic and professional agenda. he match was oicially announced to the press in July, with the requisite media

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event in New York City to start the publicity juggernaut in motion. For the rest of the summer, King kept up her commitments on the women’s profes- sional tour, knowing that if she bailed from any of the tournaments, she would leave the organizers in the lurch. She was also struggling with inju- ries and medical problems, including a bout of hypoglycemia. At the U.S. Open in early September, she defaulted to Julie Heldman, raising concerns about her physical condition. But when the night of the Riggs match inally arrived three weeks later, she was as ready as she ever would be, and her preparation showed. Ater her victory, journalist Grace Lichtenstein pro- claimed her a “national folk heroine — an athletic Eleanor Roosevelt.”78

The Battle of the Sexes cemented Billie Jean King’s stature as Amer- ica’s irst female sports superstar. King loved her role as the self- described “mother of modern sports” because it gave her the platform to “make social change” at the same time it provided the basis for her successful professional career as a tennis star and women’s sports advocate. She also craved the public adulation that celebrity brings. She oten paraphrased Bill Bradley’s description of playing basketball before an adoring crowd, “I just want to go out there and eat up all those love vibes.” Using her celebrity and fame as a bully pulpit to bring her feminist- tinged brand of tennis to a wide national audience, she became one of the most well- known athletes of her time.79 American history is full of iconic sports heroes, but until Billie Jean King they were almost exclusively men. Sportswriters and pundits have long debated what elevates a journeyman athlete into an icon, and there seem to be no general rules, except that in each case the athlete comes to stand for something more than just himself and his individual sport. Legendary sports heroes such as Babe Ruth, Knute Rockne, Jack Dempsey, Mickey Mantle, and Jackie Robinson were very much of their times yet also some- how transcended them. hese heroes loomed large in the nation’s con- sciousness, embodying American ideals of hard work and fair play, upward mobility through sports, and the physical grace and perfection of athletic performance. Of course the unsullied public reputations of some of these heroes, so “Godded up” by adoring sportswriters that they seemed almost superhuman, rarely matched their oten tawdry of- ield lives, but the pub- lic showed no thirst for such details. In earlier and less intrusive times, such inconvenient facts were considered strictly of limits.80 For most of the twentieth century there was no way for a woman to win the kind of celebrity status that male sports heroes held. Sport was like a

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boys’ tree house with a “No Girls Allowed” sign posted outside: women athletes were shut out from the popular professional and amateur sports that built the careers of sports legends in the irst place. To be sure, some female athletes enjoyed a certain notoriety, even fame, at the height of their careers: Gertrude Ederle was lionized in 1926 ater she swam the English Channel; Helen Wills Moody and Suzanne Lenglen won renown in tennis in the 1920s and 1930s. Babe Didrikson Zaharias, one of the best all- around athletes of all time, won three track and ield medals at the 1932 Olympics and later dominated the women’s professional golf tour until her prema- ture death in 1956. But Americans at midcentury weren’t ready to embrace a talented female athlete, even one named Babe, with the same degree of idolatry accorded to the legends of baseball, football, and boxing.81 Starting in the 1930s and 1940s, black athletes provided a new kind of sports idol more connected to the social and political issues of the day. Like women’s sports, black athleticism had a long and rich history, but it mainly played out in segregated venues out of sight of mainstream America. When an African American athlete entered the white realm of organized sport, that moment was necessarily packed with meaning. For example, Joe Louis’s victory over German Max Schmeling in 1938 was widely interpreted as a blow to Hitler’s theories of racial superiority.82 Without Joe Louis there probably would have been no Jackie Robinson, and no integration of Major League Baseball in 1947. Seven years before the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Robinson entered the vanguard of the civil rights revolution when he broke the color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Showing how sport can indi- rectly inluence politics and society, sportswriter Roger Kahn observed, “By applauding Robinson a man did not feel that he was taking a stand on school integration or on open housing. But for an instant he had accepted Robinson simply as a hometown ball player. To disregard color, even for an instant, is to step away from old prejudices, the old hatred. hat is not a path on which many double back.”83 Both Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson were referred to, somewhat patron- izingly, as “credits to their race.” By the 1970s conditions were inally ripe for a female athletic superstar such as Billie Jean King to emerge as a “credit to her sex.” Unlike Babe Didrikson Zaharias just iteen years earlier, or Althea Gibson, who broke the color line in tennis when she won back- to- back Wimbledon and U.S. Open titles in 1957 and 1958, Billie Jean King was the beneiciary of a fortuitous set of circumstances, starting with the fact that

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tennis was ready to burst into a new level of popular acceptance and thus provide a professional vehicle to sustain her career and build celebrity rec- ognition. Simultaneously the women’s movement and the passage of Title IX put questions of feminism and women’s sports squarely on the national agenda, which in turn maximized interest in women’s sports and created a mass base ready to embrace a female superstar. Once again timing is everything, and Billie Jean King was never shy about seizing the moment. In 1978 sportswriter Robert Lipsyte put the ten- nis star in a category with Joe Namath and Muhammad Ali as celebrity ath- letes “whose impact on the nation’s psyche was as deep and signiicant as their efect on the games they played.” In addition to their prowess in their chosen sports, all three had something more: “Call it magnetism or sex ap- peal or charisma, it allowed people to use them as extensions of their hopes and daydreams as living symbols of the ultimate.”84 Nowhere was this more in evidence than the Batle of the Sexes. As a popular sports superstar, Billie Jean King quickly moved beyond just tennis to become a symbol for something even bigger: women’s rights and women’s changing roles in society. Sportswriter Frank Deford, who wrote some of the most probing early proiles of her and later collaborated on her autobiography, predicted in 1975 that she would be the most sig- niicant athlete of the twentieth century, more so even than Muhammad Ali. Unlike civil rights “irsts,” “hers is a deeper and wider legacy: she has prominently afected the way 50% of society thinks and feels about itself in the vast area of physical exercise.” He then put his inger on why individuals like King were so important to the larger process of social change: “Still, the fact remains that in the modern United States, in the modern world, the promulgation and acceptance of sharp new atitudes — what are called movements or trends — uterly depend on the emergence of a personality to embody the philosophy. . . . When was the last time you saw two minutes of an idea on the six o’clock news?” Like her friend Gloria Steinem, a media superstar who personiied the goals of second- wave feminism for the coun- try as a whole, Billie Jean King personiied the women’s sports revolution in popular culture. In turn, her talent for keeping herself in the public eye allowed her to weather the critical transition for any athlete when playing days are over and retirement looms.85 In 1975 Billie Jean King won her sixth (and inal) Wimbledon singles title, crushing Evonne Goolagong Cawley 6- 0, 6- 1, and promptly announced her retirement, calling herself “the most fortunate woman athlete who ever

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lived up to this time.” hirty- one years old, she was just plain tired — tired of keeping the tour going, tired of the travel, tired of the politics. Plus she needed another round of surgery on one of her knees. “Now I can have beer and ice cream,” she gleefully told the press.86 Not surprisingly, the retirement did not stick. he next year she was back on the tour. “Retiring was the best thing I ever did,” she said, “because I learned that I didn’t want to be retired. I drank my beer and I ate my ice cream, and I saw myself geting sot and fat and said, ‘Hey, that’s not me.’ ” Ater considering other career options and opportunities, she realized that what she really loved best was playing tennis. And she felt she could still be competitive even as she aged: “I still had the ability. And I missed the game. As you get older, you acquire a diferent perspective. You realize the joy and love of what you do. It’s like a Horowitz playing the piano, or a Nureyev dancing. You keep remembering how much you like it.” To naysayers who questioned why she was still playing at the then- ancient age of thirty- six, she replied: “People forget that I didn’t have these opportunities until I was past 25. I know what I’ve got. I know it’s a privilege to be here. Tennis is what made me. Why should I leave it if I can play at a level that makes me happy?” Validation of that outlook came at Wimbledon in 1979 when she eclipsed the record previously held by the venerable English player Eliza- beth Ryan and won her twentieth title paired with Martina Navratilova in women’s doubles. She inished her career with thirty- nine Grand Slam titles overall.87 Billie Jean King used to joke that she could get high just by hiting a backhand. She took physical as well as emotional pleasure from the game: “Sometimes I go up for an aggressive volley and really smash it, and I ind myself thinking, ‘How unladylike — but how great it feels.’ Any kind of ex- perience that is so close to perfection can’t be bad, can it?” For her, tennis was “a medium of self- expression”: “I love that the ball doesn’t come over the net twice in the same way in a lifetime and that I’m always in the process of inding new solutions.” As her active playing days on the women’s tour- nament were drawing to a close, Billie Jean King could draw satisfaction from what she had accomplished in the 1960s and 1970s for women’s tennis and for women in general. Luckily ater 1972 it was not up to her alone to ight the good ight where women in sports were concerned, thanks to “two funky litle Roman numerals” called Title IX.88