Imagine you’ve been a tennis player. You’re 18, you wear glasses, you stand
5ft 4in, you are at Wimbledon for the second time, the world has never heard
of you and you are drawn against the No 1 seed Margaret Court. You win 7-5
in the third. You win the ladies doubles that same year and, charmed by your
audacity, journalists call you “Little Miss Moffitt”. It would be the first
of many labels. Three years later you marry Larry King and Miss Moffitt
becomes Billie Jean King.
Second time you had a tennis racket in your hand, you told your friend Susan
Williams you would be the world’s No 1 player. Anything else was failure.
You didn’t so much win Grand Slam titles as amass them. Wimbledon’s grass
was your terrain de predilection – six singles titles, 10 ladies doubles,
four mixed. Your back still creaks from all the curtsying.
When that ball left your opponent’s racket, you never wanted to wait, were
never happy to contain. You came with genes hell-bent on confrontation. Why
let it bounce when you can volley it? Too small to play at the net, they
said. You showed them. Too impatient to win on the clay of Roland Garros,
they sneered. You won the French just to prove you could.
You didn’t travel to Australia that often, but not wanting to die wondering
what it would be like to win all four Grand Slam titles, you took that one
too. Six Wimbledons, four US, one French and one Australian and so many
doubles titles, you weren’t counting. People didn’t believe you when you
said mixed was your favourite, but that’s because they never understood you.
All the Grand Slam titles couldn’t hold a candle to a silly, circus match
against a middle-aged man. Ah, Bobby Riggs. The Battle of the Sexes. That
was 1973, you were 29, he was the same age as your dad, 55. Under the lights
of the Houston Astrodome, the match was played before the biggest crowd in
tennis history (30,472) and when the movie was made all those years later,
they called it When Billie Beat Bobby.
So many women thanked you, and said that seeing you murder Riggs changed their
sense of themselves. Their gratitude humbled you. Reminded you of the bigger
game and what you still had to do. This explains that when we meet in
London, two days before your 64th birthday, and I ask what it is about your
life that gives you satisfaction, you say: “All the off-the-court stuff.
After I die, it will still be there, affecting people’s lives.”
And so, with one glance backwards, she banishes all the wins and all the
titles. Not that they were nothing, but now they are not important. Once
again, you have eyes only for the big picture.
Bille Jean KIng was in London for the Sunday Times Sports Women of the Year
banquet and after receiving the Lifetime Achievement award, she spoke for a
few minutes.
Recalling her discovery of tennis, she talked about her enduring love for the
game and wondered about the significance of her award: “Isn’t this what you
get before you die?”
Her presence had a strangely powerful effect on the many athletes and sports
people present. Many were not old enough to remember King compete but
everyone felt some way affected by her journey through sport. She was a
woman who played an individual sport on behalf of half of the world’s
population and the women who came after her found a different, more
inviting, playing pitch.
We meet in a room at Lord’s cricket ground in north London. She chats with
Peter the photographer while he works. “Do you work at Wimbledon? Will you
be covering it next year,” and before they’ve done, there is talk of
catching up in the early days of July. Thirty years and perhaps the first
time you have seen a sports star treat a photographer as a human being.
King came from a working-class family in Long Beach, California. Bill was a
firefighter, Betty was the homemaker and Randy, her only sibling, became a
Major League Baseball player and spent nine seasons with San Francisco
Giants. After high school, she went to California State University, met her
husband-to-be Larry King and discovered what it was to be a female athlete.
Something she sensed all along. “We were walking hand-in-hand when Larry
said to me, ‘You know you’re a second-class citizen’. I said, ‘What do you
mean?’ And he said, ‘You’re the best athlete in this school, you’ve beaten
the best male tennis player, and you’re the university’s most famous
athlete, but you can’t get a grant’. I’d had all these feelings welling up
inside of me and Larry helped me to clarify them.
“I mean when I was 12, I knew if I could get to be No 1, people would listen.
I wanted to change so much about tennis. I didn’t like the way it was. It
was all white people, dressed in all white clothes, playing with white balls
before a crowd of polite observers. I wanted people to get excited, to be
fans and participants, not observers. I would be having so much fun if I was
playing today, my personality would fit the modern game.”
King arrived as the game was on the bridge linking amateur and professional,
and accepted the responsibility to lead women players into the new era. For
winning her first two Wimbledons, she received nothing but the $14 daily
allowance. At the time, a pervasive dishonesty existed in tennis as the best
players were given under-the-counter payments to ensure their presence at
tournaments but the game continued to call itself amateur. Of the big name
players, only King was prepared to campaign for a professional women’s tour
and when the groundbreaking deal was done with Virginia Slims, her eight
accomplices came from the second tier of women players.
“For three years we had two tours and because of their governments [Martina]
Navratilova and Olga Morozova had to play the other tour. Chris [Evert],
Margaret [Court], Virginia [Wade], they let us do the pioneering work and
they weren’t very nice to us. If you go back and look at the old quotes;
they played for the love of the game, we played for the money. When we got
backing and money, we were all playing together – I wonder why?
“I tried not to get upset with them. Forgiveness is important. Our job was to
have one voice and win them over. I said to our girls, ‘Who are you close
to, who could you persuade?’ Ann Jones was given two players to win over,
Rosie Casals was given two more, Judy Dalton another two and so on. We
lobbied them for almost three years. Then Virginia Slims came in on our
side, they had the money and if you have more money, generally you win.”
In 1971 King became the first woman athlete in history to earn more than
$100,000 in one season but she resisted the temptation to see the game from
a personal point of view. For winning the US Open in 1972 she received
$15,000 less than men’s winner, Ilie Nastase, and afterwards she vowed not
to defend her title unless the prize-money was equal. In 1973, the US Open
became the first major tournament to offer equal prize-money for men and
women.
That was the year Riggs finally persuaded King to play him. He had already
enticed Margaret Court onto the court and though she was the best women’s
player in the world, she was comprehensively beaten. Riggs had won Wimbledon
in 1939 and went on to win three US Open Championships in the 1940s. After
his 6-2, 6-1 victory over Court, he targeted King. “I want the women’s lib
leader,” he said.
What was meant to be a winner-take-all $10,000 match became the most famous
match in the history of tennis. Riggs was a male chauvinist, King was a
women’s rights activist and if he, an overweight 55-year-old, could beat
her, a supremely fit 29-year-old, all women would have felt defeated.
Advisors told King to study the tape of how Riggs had beaten Court.
“Before it started, Bobby presented Margaret with a bouquet of flowers. She should
have belted him over the head with the flowers rather than accept them. I
watched two or three points on tape and said, ‘I don’t need to see any more
of this’. Margaret didn’t understand what she was getting into, I don’t
fault her. She was so afraid of losing to him, she froze.”
The match in Houston took on a life of its own. ABC paid $750,000 to broadcast
it, Howard Cosell anchored the coverage and 50m watched it. Riggs and King
received $150,000 each and Riggs also received a severe beating, 6-4 6-3
6-3. “Bobby was a man I liked and admired. But he was born in 1918, so it
was no athletic feat for me to beat him. But what it represented, in terms
of social change, it was everything.”
A lot of sportswriters covered the Riggs/King match but, King noted, not one
of them was a woman. A couple of days before the match she told Roone
Arledge, head of ABC, that she wouldn’t play if the network used Jack Kramer
in the commentary box. King knew Kramer to be anti women’s tennis and though
Arledge at first tried to placate King, he ended up dropping Kramer from the
broadcast.
The following day’s San Francisco Examiner captured the mood across the US and
beyond. “Pigs are dead, long live the king”. A week before Riggs died in
1995, King called him.
“You promised me a rematch, Billie,” he said. “You just hold up and you’ve got
it,” she replied.
The ground was broken by King and her fellow pioneers, and conditions for
women have improved every year since then. Sony Ericsson now backs the
women’s tour and ensures a level of equality that the pioneers dreamt about.
“We now have the best players we’ve ever had,” says King. “I don’t know why
we’re not talking about Justine Henin all the time because, for her size,
she’s the greatest athlete we’ve ever seen. I don’t know why she’s not more
appreciated – she’s not blonde, she’s not cutesie-wootsie but the way she
has evolved as a tennis player is unbelievable. She’s improved so much at
the net, she’s much stronger off her forehand, she has turned a terrible
serve into something better than adequate and she’s learnt to recover during
a match. People need to understand what they are seeing here.”
By 1981, King’s career was winding down. Her achievements on and off the court
had been formidable and then one evening in Florida, after returning to her
hotel room, she found a message in her room saying the Los Angeles Times had
called and they wanted to ask her about “the suit”. A woman called Marilyn
Barnett had filed a palimony suit and all hell would break loose in King’s
life.
Still married to Larry, she’d had an affair with her assistant Barnett who
threatened to make public King’s personal letters before eventually filing
her lawsuit. It would eventually be kicked out of court. “It was very hard
on me because I was outed and I think you have to do it in your own time.
Fifty per cent of gay people know who they are by the age of 13, I was in
the other 50%. I would never have married Larry if I’d known. I would never
have done that to him. I was totally in love with Larry when I was 21.”
She was the first professional sports-woman to admit she was gay. What most
troubled King was the hurt caused to her parents. When she was young her
mother had often used a quote from Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own
self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then
be false to any man.” It was a philosophy to which the young
Billie Jean subscribed but when it came to the most important issue in her
life, she could not discuss it with her parents. “I wanted to tell the truth
but my parents were homophobic and I was in the closet. As well as that, I
had people tell me that if I talked about what I was going through, it would
be the end of the women’s tour.
“I couldn’t get a closet deep enough. I’ve got a homophobic family, a tour
that will die if I come out, the world is homophobic and, yeah, I was
homophobic. If you speak with gays, bisexuals, lesbians and transgenders,
you will find a lot of homophobia because of the way we all grew up.
“One of my big goals was always to be honest with my parents and I couldn’t be
for a long time. I tried to bring up the subject but felt I couldn’t. My
mother would say, ‘We’re not talking about things like that’, and I was
pretty easily stopped because I was reluctant anyway. I ended up with an
eating disorder that came from trying to numb myself from my feelings. I
needed to surrender far sooner than I did.
“At the age of 51, I was finally able to talk about it properly with my
parents and no longer did I have to measure my words with them. That was a
turning point for me as it meant I didn’t have regrets any more. My father
has since passed on but my mother is still around and she’s fantastic. Ilana
Kloss has been my partner for a long time now and when I speak to Mom now,
she will always say, ‘And tell Ilana I love her’. That’s taken years and
years.”
She still plays tennis regularly and says that her forehand now is vastly
better than “the shocking forehand” she struggled with in her prime. Larry,
her incredibly supportive former husband, never wanted a divorce, but when
she finally divorced him, he said that if ever he re-married and had a
child, he wanted her to be godmother to his first-born. She is godmother to
Larry’s son and she talks about her five godchildren with fondness.
And then she’s away again, talking about Muhammad Yunus’s book, Banker To The
Core and his work in alleviating poverty in Bangladesh. “Yunus started
lending to women in the 80s, micro-lending, and by lending to women, he has
changed things. Men didn’t pay him, 99.6% of women did. By lending to women
in poverty, he ensured children were housed, clothed and fed. The first
generation children from these families are going to college now.
“When an oppressed people are given an opportunity, they will make the best of
it and you must never, ever, underestimate the human spirit.”
King crowned
On November 20, Billie Jean King was presented with the 2007 Sunday Times
Sports Women of the Year Lifetime Achievement award for her contribution to
sport both on and off the court. King had travelled from the United States
to attend the event in London. ‘When we first used to play, we used to get
$14 a day,’ she said, on receiving the award from Dee Dutta, corporate
vice-president for Sony Ericsson, sponsors of the WTA Tour. ‘We did not even
have press conferences back home for us and I would like people to think
about the media because without them, no one would know what we look like or
what we feel. No matter our colour, our religion, sport brings us together.’
Never afraid to make her views known, in 1967 she criticised the United
States Lawn Tennis Association for what she described as ‘shamateurism’,
where top players were paid under the table to guarantee their entry into
tournaments.
The reign of Billie Jean King
- Billie Jean King won 12 grand slam singles titles, including six victories
at Wimbledon (1966, 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1975)
- In 1972 she won Wimbledon, the French Open and the US Open
- She won 67 singles titles, 101 doubles titles and 11 mixed doubles, amassing
almost $2m in prize-money
- Turned professional in 1968 and retired in 1983
- Ranked No 1 in the world five times between 1966-74 and was in the top 10 for
17 years (beginning in 1960)
- Oldest player to win a professional title by winning in Birmingham in 1983,
aged 39 years, seven months, 23 days
- First female athlete in any sport to earn more than $100,000 in a single
season
- Holds a record 20 Wimbledon titles combined in singles, doubles and mixed
doubles. She won 39 Grand Slam titles (singles, doubles, mixed doubles)
- Won the singles, doubles and mixed doubles titles at Wimbledon in 1973, one
of three players to accomplish a Grand Slam triple crown in the open era
(Margaret Court and Martina Navratilova are the others)
- In 1973 she won the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ match against 55-year-old Bobby
Riggs, who had been one of the best players in the world
- The Riggs-King match was played at the Houston Astrodome in front of 30,000
spectators and a television audience estimated at 50m. King won 6-4 6-3 6-3
and said afterwards: ‘I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn’t
win that match’
- Before the start of the open era in 1968, she worked as a playground
instructor
- She was one of the prime movers in securing equal prize-money for women
- In 1972, King won the US Open but received $15,000 less than the men’s
champion Ilie Nastase. She said that if the prize-money was not equal by the
following year, she would not play. In 1973, the US Open offered equal prize
money for men and women
- She was the first president of the Women’s Tennis Association in 1973
