Tennis meets feminism
PREJUDICE AGAINST WOMEN IN TENNIS took an entirely different form from that experienced by non-whites. The problem was not that they were excluded, but the very opposite: that they were integral to it, at the centre of the game. In the old amateur days tennis was not yet regarded as a lifelong career for men and certainly not for women. On the contrary, their time on the courts could be enjoyed as a sparkling prelude to their real-life calling as housewives and mothers.
In the 1950s and 1960s exciting women players maintained the interest of the crowds. In 1958 the glamorous Brazilian, Maria Bueno, partnered Althea Gibson to the women’s doubles title at Wimbledon. The following year she won the women’s singles title. The grace and dancing quality of her all-court, serve-and-volley game made her a crowd favourite and over the course of the next half-decade she won Wimbledon twice more, defeating the Australian Margaret Court in 1964. She also won four US singles titles, the last in 1966. Besides Margaret Court, her most significant opponent was Billie Jean King, who defeated her in a close-fought Wimbledon final in 1966.
In her feminine mini dresses Maria Bueno seemed the very spirit of the early and mid-sixties when the rising hemline appeared to symbolise a new spirit of liberation. It was mistakenly assumed that the exposure of the female body in revealing garments signified a blow for social progress and women’s emancipation. But soon women began to protest that it looked more like exploitation than empowerment.
In 1963 Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique created a sensation. Here was a writer telling the world that the American Dream was a nightmare for women, especially for those educated women who, instead of finding fulfilling careers, were pushed back into a suffocating domestic regime. The book launched an international debate on the status of women. Women formed discussion groups. As the Vietnam war hotted up so did the opposition to it, but student radicalism exposed the prevailing sexism of society, even among supposedly progressive men, and by the second half of the decade women’s liberation was no longer a discussion group; it was a movement and a revolt. That Billie Jean King triumphed on the tennis court at this political moment was to change women’s tennis.
She has been described as a ‘liberal feminist’, interested in equality and equal opportunities within the existing society. She was neither a ‘radical’ or ‘cultural’ feminist – one who saw relationships between women as part of a revolutionary change in existing society – nor a socialist feminist, rejecting the whole economic system. On the contrary ‘Money is everything in sport,’ she said, ‘it made me a star.’ 1
She was shrewdly ready to embrace the ‘permissive’ atmosphere of the late 1960s and use it to popularise tennis, as the sport in which the human body, and especially the female body, was most consistently displayed for long periods. ‘Tennis is a very sexy sport, and that is good,’ she maintained: ‘The players are young, with excellent bodies, clothed in relatively little. It offers the healthiest, most appealing presentation of sex I can imagine and the sport must acknowledge that and use it to our advantage.’ 2 She pointed out that while the appearance of players was important in all sports, it was especially so in tennis, since the fans were so close to the players. Actually, they were not always close, it was rather the relentless focus of the camera and the long duration of matches, and of course, for female players, the fact that they were women.
King’s father was a fireman, her mother a housewife. She learned tennis on the public courts of California and her mother made her tennis outfits. She was good enough to play at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, still in the sixties ruled by Perry T. Jones, and it was there that her confrontation with Jones, described earlier, took place. In 1961 at the age of seventeen she won the Wimbledon women’s doubles title partnered by Karen Hantze Susman (who had been coached by Teach Tennant). The unseeded pair beat the top seeds and third seeds along the way. Two years later Billie Jean reached the singles final, to be defeated by Margaret Court. The report in the New York Times described her as ‘the bespectacled tomboy from Southern California’ and rated her ‘the liveliest personality to hit the international circuit in years. She has courage and she has colour, a combination rarely found in tennis today.’ 3
In 1965 she married Larry King, who became her manager and chief support. He never expected her to do other than continue playing tennis. Journalists, on the other hand, who described her as a ‘bouncy housewife’, were fond of asking her when she was going to retire – the implication being that it was time to settle down to her true job as wife and mother.
The greater her success, the more galling became the issue of shamateurism. In 1967 she made a series of statements on its corrupt nature, and with the open era coinciding with a growing and vociferous women’s movement, Billie Jean became a force for female equality in the game. In 1968 she won the Wimbledon singles in the first open tournament, but while the men’s champion, Rod Laver, received $4,800 in prize money, hers was $1,800.
For Billie Jean, as for many feminists, equal pay was crucial to gender equality. Without her own income no woman could be independent. Marriage had long been a ‘career for women’ because it offered the best chance of security and material ease. Yet it had always been insecure, since it was dependent on the goodwill of the husband. In unequal marriage money was power and this power was held by the man. So for King to campaign for equal pay on the tennis circuit was entirely consistent with the demands of feminism; it was not merely mercenary.
She embraced open tennis, but open tennis in 1970 did not embrace the women’s game. On the contrary, promoters claimed that there was no audience for it. Men were being paid more than before, but women were being paid less and the number of women’s tournaments was in decline. War was declared when Jack Kramer, who was now running the Pacific South West Open tournament, offered a top women’s prize of $7,500, while the men were offered eight times that. Kramer was perfectly frank. It was only fair that men should receive 80 to 90 per cent of prize money or expenses because it was the fans not the promoters who were prejudiced against the women players – that is, they didn’t want to watch women’s tennis, or so he maintained. Men should also be paid more because they played more games and more sets than women.4
Kramer’s defence of his position appeared in his autobiography, published in 1979, by which time women had equal prize money at the US Open and were much closer to equality at Wimbledon (although only in 2007 was prize money there fully equalised). To Kramer this was ‘simply ridiculous’. He claimed that far from being ‘a crusader against women’s tennis’ he was merely being realistic. To his first two reasons against equality he added a third: that women were simply not strong enough to play the aggressive game, with the result that the duller defensive game would always dominate women’s tennis.
Many male players of the time agreed with him. Fred Stolle told King to her face that ‘No one wants to watch you birds play anyway. They’re not going to pay to watch you birds play.’ But it was Stan Smith who really let the cat out of the bag when he told the UK Daily Mirror: ‘These tennis girls would be much happier if they settled down, got married and had a family. Tennis is a tough life and it really isn’t good for them. It defeminises them . . . they become too independent and they can’t adapt to anyone else, they won’t be dependent on any man. They want to take charge, not only on the courts, but at home.’ 5
These comments waved a red rag to Billie Jean King. She and her doubles partner Rosie Casals approached Gladys Heldman. Heldman had edited the influential magazine World Tennis since 1953 and had promoted and supported women’s tennis throughout the 1950s and 1960s.6 At the centre of the tennis world, she was the logical person to approach and she swiftly showed her resolve by devising a women’s tournament in Houston to be played at the same time as Kramer’s Pacific South Western tour. Joseph P. Cullman, the CEO of Philip Morris, donated $2,500 to this eight-woman tournament, which got unprecedented publicity for women’s tennis backed by Virginia Slims. (‘You’ve come a long way baby’ was the advertising slogan for the cigarette in the 1970s.) Its success was such that Mrs Heldman was able to set up a whole tennis circuit for the women. Eventually the tour was so successful that it merged with the USTA (previously the USLTA), but for some years ran in rivalry with it.
The success of the tour was down to the exciting women players then coming forward; besides Billie Jean, there was Rosie Casals, the emerging Chrissie Evert and Evonne Goolagong. Evert reached the semi-finals of the US Open in 1971, aged sixteen and a half. Blonde, pretty and feminine, she was the perfect poster girl for the new professional women’s tennis; and women’s tennis became part of the tennis boom of the 1970s. In 1973 Evert reached the finals of the Rome tournament, losing to Goolagong; of the French Open, losing to Margaret Court; and Wimbledon, losing to King. But she would go on to win many finals.
Billie Jean’s biggest PR scoop was the notorious match staged between her and Bobby Riggs, winner of the 1939 men’s Wimbledon singles. This event has been remembered and described many times as a sensational contest and a huge boost for the women’s game. On 20 September 1973 a crowd of 30,472 crammed the Astrodome in Houston, Texas to watch the ill-matched pair, joined by over fifty million who saw it on television. It was also relayed to fifteen countries outside the United States, but its main impact was in America itself.
Like the Kansas City event that had heralded the open era, the event proclaimed a future for tennis of razzmatazz and unrepentant vulgarity. This match, known as ‘the Battle of the Sexes’ and/or ‘The Lobber versus the Libber’, was to propel tennis into popular culture. Mindful of the disdainful manner in which Perry Jones had treated her, Billie Jean was as keen as the most macho of the tennis top guys on a ‘less sissy’ tennis and despised the snobbery with which it was still, she felt, tainted.7
Riggs, like Billie Jean, had been an object of contempt to the tennis elite, because, as Herbert Warren Wind put it, ‘he had such a large supply of whatever is the opposite of charisma’. He was the son of an evangelical preacher; he was short, he was abrasive, he was usually described as a ‘hustler’ or a ‘scoundrel’, and he was above all a gambler. In 1939 he had laid down a bet of £100 that he would win all three of the Wimbledon events in which he played: singles, men’s doubles and mixed doubles. The odds were three to one against his winning the singles, with the doubles at six to one and the mixed at twelve to one. He did win all three and made £21,600 (equal to $108,000 dollars), then a very large sum.
Riggs agreed with Kramer that the women players simply did not deserve the money they earned, so inferior was their play. In May 1973 he challenged Margaret Court to a match. Played on Mother’s Day, it went to Riggs, who won easily, 6–2. 6–1. At the age of fifty-five he bamboozled Court with his ‘girl’s game’ – taught him by Teach Tennant, who had encouraged him to offset his short stature with finesse, guile and tactics.
Given the ease with which he had dispatched Mrs Court, Billie Jean knew she would have to take Riggs on. One might have thought the Wimbledon winner would have been the favourite against a man of Riggs’ age, but she went into the match as the underdog. After her triumph at Wimbledon she had flopped at Forest Hills, retiring in the third round from a match she was losing. Riggs, by contrast, had become very fit for his match against Margaret Court. He may also have been the favourite from sheer prejudice: the belief that a man was always going to be stronger and better than a woman, whatever the difference in age. Ironically, though, the contestants did not fit the gender norms of the day. A man in the audience wore a T-shirt inscribed with ‘BJK wears jockey shorts’ and she was said to ‘play like a man’ by contrast with Riggs’ girly game.
The event was preceded by ‘ten days of incessant hoopla and drumbeating’ and when it came was ‘part circus, part Hollywood premiere, part television giveaway show, and all bad taste’, thought the old guard New Yorker writer, Herbert Warren Wind. Billie Jean was carried into the arena on a litter by male attendants ‘wearing hot-pink, fuchsia and white plumes’, while Riggs was wheeled in by showgirls as he reclined in a litter. Both entered to the tune of ‘Anything you can do I can do better’ from the musical Annie Get Your Gun.
The commentating for the television audience was consistent with the raucous atmosphere and the scripting of the event as a contest of gender and, even more, as a challenge to ‘Women’s Lib’ itself. Originally the lead commentator was to have been Kramer, but King vetoed him. Instead a more neutral figure was chosen, but was backed up by Rosie Casals, King’s doubles partner, who made belligerent anti-Riggs comments from the start.
Billie Jean won 6–4, 6–3, 6–3, but to Warren Wind the mystery was why Riggs abandoned his normal game and instead played his opponent’s serve-and-volley game, at which he was inferior. But, ridiculous as the whole event might seem, it was of huge symbolic importance for King to win. Riggs may not have been too disappointed, however, since they both made a lot of money from the event, as did the promoters and, in the long term, the game itself.
There was one figure courtside – among all the celebrities and sports stars – who attracted the attention of reporters, a ‘willowy blonde’, who, said Newsweek, ‘sits worshipfully at courtside during [Billie Jean’s] workouts, oversees her diet and weight programme and attempts to shield her from most journalists’. This was Marilyn Barnett, Billie Jean’s long-time lover; but it was not until some years later that Billie Jean’s relationships with women were to erupt in scandal.
The Houston event brought feminism and sports together. There was often an underlying hint of lesbianism on the women’s tennis circuit and at this time lesbianism was a central – and divisive – issue for the Women’s Liberation Movement: it was an absolute taboo in tennis.
Personal relationships on the tour were changing. In earlier, more innocent times, it had been taken for granted that the wives of top tennis players must play a traditional wifely role, whether graciously or not. Some marriages did not last the course, as social attitudes relaxed during the later 1950s and the 1960s, but many did.
Women players could get married and retire. Even if they continued to play, as Margaret duPont did, they were not free agents. Margaret duPont’s husband, an oil man, never allowed her to compete in Australia, because he suffered from breathing problems, needed to be in California in the winter to alleviate these and wanted his wife at his side.
The couple later divorced and Margaret duPont found a new life for herself with Margaret Varner Bloss. They had reached the Wimbledon doubles finals together in 1958, losing to Althea Gibson and Maria Bueno. Later they bred thoroughbred horses in El Paso, Texas. (DuPont died in 2012.) She was part of the post-war generation that included Gussie Moran, when it seemed that three possible roles were offered to women tennis players. Gussie Moran was pushed into the role of glamour figure; many women retired into domestic life – although Lenglen, Helen Wills Moody, Helen Jacobs and other top stars did not; and the third, but never mentioned, possibility was to form relationships with other women.
We know little of the romantic inclinations of most of those players who never married, or even if they had any. Lottie Dod, Wimbledon women’s champion in 1887 at the age of fifteen (and still the youngest woman ever to win there), who moved on from tennis to golf, cycling, archery and mountaineering, appears to have had at least one intense friendship with another woman, which ended in a quarrel so bitter that their differences ‘were never resolved’,8 but it is fruitless to speculate as to the nature of their feelings. No openly acknowledged lesbian relationships ‘sullied’ the tennis courts until the 1980s. If men’s tennis had been dogged by the slur of effeminacy, women playing tennis had for the most part avoided the accusation that they were too butch – although Coco Gentien remarked bitchily of Elizabeth Ryan that ‘she was always accompanied by a friend even more masculine than she was, the Irish croquet champion, Florence Walkerleigh, who looked like a kind of enormous turkey’.9 More usually, the presence of women on the court had from the beginning been perceived as possibly a dangerously erotic spectacle for men.
Their very presence had raised the question of whether the sport was appropriately masculine because sporting activity is a significant part of masculine identity. By contrast, a too-sporty woman ‘brings into question the “natural” and mutually exclusive nature of gender and gender roles. If women in sport can be tough minded, competitive and muscular too, then sport loses its special place in the development of masculinity for men. If women can so easily develop these so-called masculine qualities, then what are the meanings of femininity and masculinity?’ 10
It may have been an open secret within the sport that Billie Jean King had close relationships with women, but it was not until her former lover sued her for ‘palimony’ in 1981 that the general public was made aware of this – and King lost all her advertising endorsements within twenty-four hours. Marilyn Barnett had been a hairdresser when she met Billie Jean, who was a client at the salon where she worked. She became officially Billie Jean’s secretary and unofficially her lover. After the relationship ended Marilyn claimed a settlement from her former lover on the grounds that she had contributed significantly to her career and success. Despite the publicity, King was still reluctant to acknowledge the importance of the relationship, which she referred to as ‘a very private and inconsequential affair’. (She did not ‘come out’ completely until 1997.)
This was not simple cowardice. Her relationship with feminism was very important, not just to her, but to the game and to her efforts to obtain financial equality in the sport between men and women. So her reluctance to be openly lesbian can be understood as part of an attempt to protect the sport she loved from the slur of deviancy, lest this should damage its popularity as well as hers.
Long before gossip, innuendo and outright revelation spewed out all over the tabloids and later across the web, the connection between women’s sport and same-sex relations had been a submerged theme. Just as there was a chicken-and-egg question whether blacks excelled in sport because they were somehow genetically programmed to do so and were therefore that much more different from white people, or whether they entered sports because other avenues of advancement were closed to them, so a similar question was posed in relation to women. Were some women attracted to sport because they were potential lesbians or were lesbians more suited to sports than heterosexual women?
Women participated in sports in growing numbers throughout the twentieth century, but women’s sport was never taken as seriously as men’s and attracted comparatively little press and broadcasting coverage. It could therefore, paradoxically, be a haven for women who were not interested in marriage, family life and traditional gender roles, whether they were gay or not.
Peter Bodo regarded professional tennis as a boon for them. He commented ambivalently that lesbians constituted a distinct constituency in tennis. The anti-traditional life on tour suited them, he felt, and it became, at times, almost a world unto itself.11
So the sport that was considered insufficiently masculine because women participated, later came to be seen as encouraging too much masculinity in its women players. Partly because there was so much stigma in being a muscular, masculine woman, players such as Chrissie Evert worked even harder on being and appearing feminine.
To label a woman athlete as a ‘dyke’ was a means to discredit her and her achievements, because a lesbian was not a ‘real’ woman. In this view sexual deviance goes hand in hand with female athletic prowess, suggesting that there is something wrong or transgressive about women’s desire or ability to play sports.12
The controversy would recur. For the moment the 1973 Houston contest was a turning point in the convergence of sport and entertainment. The definition of ‘entertainment’ might be far from what Perry T. Jones, Julian Myrick or indeed Dan Maskell would have wished, but it was to dominate the rest of the decade, not least on account of the new personalities in the men’s game and the very new way in which they behaved.