CHAPTER 15

BILLIE JEAN KING

Competitive

I ONCE HAD THE OCCASION to interview Billie Jean King for a magazine story about 20 female fitness icons. This meant contacting the representatives of 20 celebrities and almost celebrities. Let me tell you, there were a number of women who were thrilled to participate—that is, if I could just guarantee they would somehow be featured above the others. If I could give them more words or a larger photo, they were in. Not Billie Jean. Her rep didn’t even ask those questions. Billie Jean called me right up without fanfare and we talked for an hour.

She really is a one-for-all, all-for-one type of difficult woman. Since fifth grade, her desire for the world has been kitchen-sampler simple: equal opportunity for everyone. The moment she played her first game of tennis in 1953, at a country club where the family of her grade school chum were members, she thought: I’m crazy about tennis, but where is everyone else? Where are the poorer people, and where are the darker people? Battling to become number one and fighting for fairness became the twin goals of her young life.

BEFORE SERENA AND VENUS, before Monica and Steffi, before Martina and Chrissy, there was Billie Jean, generally considered to be the mother of contemporary women’s tennis. Born on November 22, 1943, she grew up playing on the public courts of Long Beach, California.^*1 She would go on to win 39 Grand Slam titles, including 12 singles, 16 women’s doubles, and 11 mixed doubles. The list of wins on her Wikipedia page is six and a half inches long. (I know, because I measured it.) In 1972 she was named the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year.^*2 In 1987 she was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame, and in 2009 President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I’m a generation younger than Billie Jean. But we grew up about 25 miles away from each other in Southern California, and I recognized her species of jokey, nonchalant girl-jock cool right away. She told me a story about how, in 1959 when she was 15 and already playing on the pro circuit, she needed to get out of a class early to make a big tournament. But her teacher said if she left, he would give her a zero (worse than an F). She said, “But you let boys go early for basketball and football games all the time.” He said patiently, as if she were stupid: “That’s completely different. They’re boys.” Billie Jean is in fact not stupid, and she heard him loud and clear: Even if females are playing a sport at an elite, professional level, they don’t matter. (Her parents permitted her to skip class that day, and true to his word, her teacher gave her a zero.)

At Wimbledon in 1961, Billie Jean and doubles partner Karen Hantze Susman pulled off a jaw-dropping upset, becoming the youngest players to win the women’s double title. Billie Jean was 17. For the next several years her performance was spotty, and she realized that if she wanted to be the best, she’d have to practice longer and harder than everyone else. Five years later, her work paid off. In 1966 she won her first singles title, at Wimbledon, and by 1967 she was ranked the top women’s player in the world.

In 1965 at the age of 21, she married Larry King, whom she’d met at California State University, Los Angeles, where they were both students.^*3 “We got married so we could have sex!” she admitted. (Clearly she was not one of the millions who purchased Sex and the Single Girl.) Billie had no clue that she was attracted to women. Her family was homophobic, she was homophobic, and in those days, suburban Southern Californians rarely gave a thought to the nuances of sexuality. Anyway, Larry was Ken doll handsome and supported her tennis career. What wasn’t to like?

As Billie Jean blossomed, so did the women’s movement. If Gloria Steinem (see Chapter 3) was the voice of the feminist revolution, Billie Jean King was the body. The female body in motion: running, jumping, swinging, thwacking, and holding that giant Wimbledon serving platter–trophy thing over her head.^*4

Before Billie Jean, most people believed the whole point of “professional” women’s tennis was providing spectators with the sight of comely women prancing around gracefully in very short skirts. When they fluidly reached up to tap the ball, and the skirts got even shorter, the sport of women’s tennis got even better. But Billie Jean was a competitor. She wasn’t there to provide a floor show. She was quick, and cultivated a wicked net game. She wasn’t afraid to get in her opponent’s face. She was outspoken, and back-talked when she received a lousy call from the line judge. The fact that Billie Jean took her game seriously and was there to win made her, in the minds of sports commentators of the time, extremely difficult.

She really had no sense of humor when it came to unfair awarding of prize money. In 1968, she won the Ladies’ Singles at Wimbledon and earned £750, while Rod Laver, the men’s champ, took home £2,000. At the 1970 Italian Open, men’s winner Ilie Năstase won $3,500, while Billie Jean won $600. As the seasons passed, and as tennis became more popular, male winners won increasingly bigger pots, while female champs were paid less and less. At one point the ratio of prize money was 12:1, for no good reason other than the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), the governing body of professional tennis, simply wasn’t interested in equity, and the male players had no interest in sharing the pot.

Together with eight other female players, Billie Jean quit the USLTA in protest. The Original Nine, as they were dubbed, signed on to the Virginia Slims Circuit for a token dollar bill.^*5 They hustled like crazy, selling tickets, doing interviews, playing at whatever venue could guarantee an audience. Eventually, Virginia Slims would become the Women’s Tennis Association, today the primary organizing body of women’s tennis, founded by Billie Jean. At the time, however, male players—as well as the women players who stuck with the safety (and discrimination) of the USLTA—thought the Nine were nuts to risk their careers. But sometimes, you have to choose nutty. Sometimes, you have to walk away and risk everything. It would have been impossible for Billie Jean to continue to tolerate the inequity, and she had no choice but to make the leap.

In 1973, onetime U.S. men’s champion and self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig Bobby Riggs challenged Billie Jean to a “Battle of the Sexes.”^*6 Riggs was hoping to make a buck, while also stemming the tide of so-called “women’s libbers” blasting “I Am Woman” on their car radios and refusing to be ordered around by their husbands like the family dog. That he was 55 and Billie Jean was 29 mattered not to him. He was a huckster and hustler, crude and rude, a proto-troll in the era before the Internet, and he targeted Billie Jean because of her feminist activism. He would tell whoever would listen that women should stay in the bedroom and the kitchen—and that he could handily beat any woman because females lacked emotional stability.

Billie Jean declined the challenge, fearful that the cause of women’s equality—and her fledgling women’s tour—would be endangered if she lost. But things were changing for women, and they were changing fast. In February 1972, the U.S. government began accepting the honorific Ms. on official documents. In June 1972, the Supreme Court passed Title IX.^*7 On January 22, 1973, women were granted the right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy. When Australian Margaret Court accepted Riggs’s challenge on Mother’s Day, 1973, and was thoroughly trounced, Billie Jean felt she had no choice but to play Riggs when he challenged her for a second time.

On September 20, 1973, 30,000 spectators at the Houston Astrodome and 90 million viewers around the world watched as Riggs entered the stadium surrounded by a gaggle of cheerleaders he called “Bobby’s Bosom Buddies.” When King entered, carried by the Rice University men’s track team on a litter like Cleopatra, the announcer opined that King was “…a very attractive young lady, if she would ever let her hair grow.” (For the record, she wore her hair in a stylish shag.)

As for “emotional stability,” Riggs could hardly know how wrong he was. Billie Jean was holding it together like a boss. In the bathroom stall before the match, she heard women standing at the sinks talking about how they’d just placed bets against her. Not only that, but her personal life was in turmoil. After years of trying to convince herself otherwise, she was in the process of accepting that she was gay. She continued to love her husband, Larry, but she was in love with her secretary, Marilyn Barnett. They would go on to have a clandestine relationship that lasted seven years.

Still, King steeled herself and beat Riggs like grandma’s old rug, in straight sets 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.

Upon his defeat Riggs jumped over the net, shook her hand, and said “I underestimated you.”

Why yes, Bobby. Because men like you always underestimate women.

BILLIE JEAN WAS NOT ONLY an advocate for women’s equality. In April 1981, she also unwittingly became one of the first pioneers of gay rights. The love affair with Marilyn had run its course. Marilyn, apparently unhappy that she’d invested so much in Billie Jean and her career with nothing to show for it, slapped her former lover with a palimony suit, which also outed Billie Jean as gay.

In early May, just three days after the news broke and against the advice of both her publicist and attorney, Billie Jean held a press conference and admitted to the affair. “I’ve always been aboveboard with the press, and I will talk now as I’ve always talked: from my heart,” she said. “People’s privacy is very important, but unfortunately someone didn’t respect that. I did have an affair with Marilyn, but it was over quite some time ago.”

I wish I could say that speaking her truth set Billie Jean free—that within weeks of being outed, she was hitting the gay bars and linking arms with iconic feminist writer Andrea Dworkin. But it wasn’t that easy. In footage of the press conference, you can see that her beloved parents are stunned. Her mother is both scowling and tearful. Within 24 hours, Billie Jean lost all of her endorsements. Within five years, she and Larry were divorced, about which she felt terrible. In the movies, she would have been rewarded for her courage in confessing the truth. In the real world, she suffered for quite some time. Then she picked herself up and went on.

WHEN I ASKED BILLIE JEAN KING what she wanted to be remembered for, she cited World Team Tennis. Founded with her ex-husband Larry in 1973—the same year she beat Bobby Riggs—WTT is the only pro tennis league where men and women, privileged and not, play on the same team, together.

“Equal pay, equal treatment, equal respect. Equal everything, you see?” said King.

She made it sound so easy; it was anything but. Still, it’s easier to be difficult when you know in your heart that you’re right. Billie Jean was and is, and so she continues to fight.

^*1As I grew up playing on the public courts of Whittier, California, I can assure you that they were crowded, with torn nets and faded lines and mediocre players like me on the next court, swearing loudly and hitting a nonstop stream of wild balls into the middle of her game.

^*2She shared the award with basketball great John Wooden; the award is now known as the Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year Award.

^*3Not that Larry King. This one was a law student who also played tennis on Cal State L.A.’s champion men’s team.

^*4The Ladies’ Singles trophy is a salver that bears the mystifying name The Venus Rosewater Dish. If there isn’t an all-girl punk band called Venus Rosewater Dish, there should be.

^*5They were Billie Jean King, Rosemary Casals, Judy Tegart Dalton, Nancy Richey, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Valerie Ziegenfuss, Julie Heldman, and Kerry Melville Reid.

^*6It was such a momentous historic occasion that A-listers Emma Stone (as Billie Jean) and Steve Carell (as Bobby Riggs) starred in the 2017 movie.

^*7No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.