All In

by Billie Jean King

  Randy ended up playing Major League Baseball for twelve years as a relief pitcher with the San Francisco Giants, Houston Astros, and Toronto Blue Jays. I went on to win thirty-nine singles, doubles titles, and mixed doubles titles at the four major or “Grand Slam” tournaments—the U.S. Open, Wimbledon, Roland-Garros (also known as the French Open), and the Australian Open—and accomplish a few other special things. I don’t think there is just one factor that explains our athletic success. I think a combination of lucky genes, incredibly devoted parents, opportunity, and chance all played a role. We were fortunate to grow up in Southern California with its perfect weather for developing athletes year-round. Sports was the air we breathed.

  The term “snowplow parent” hadn’t been invented when we were kids, but it wouldn’t have applied to my folks anyway. They supported us but never pushed us to be sports stars. They concentrated more on being life coaches. Even my ultra-competitive father, who was a terrific athlete, never cared if we won or lost our games. “Did you try your best and have fun?” he’d ask, same as my mother did.

  My parents always treated Randy and me equally, which was unusual for many families then. But when I didn’t share the same love of shopping or painting my fingernails that my mother did, I would notice the look on her face. She earned a cosmetology license the year she was engaged to Dad, and she was always so stylish in her pinched-waistline dresses and impeccable hair and makeup. I eventually learned that she had been a fast runner and terrific swimmer as a girl and used to body-surf in fifteen-foot-high ocean waves before she married my dad. On our swimming outings, Randy and I would thrash around, but she’d just float serenely, bobbing in the rolling waves like a cork. I’m sure I inherited some of her athletic talent, but she always played her abilities down. She had strong ideas about what was “ladylike.” She was happier (and far less conflicted) when I told her I was eager to sign up for cotillion like the other girls.

  Later, once I started to question my sexual orientation, it was hard for me to forget those kinds of messages, or the day my hot-tempered father was driving Randy, my mother, and me to a tournament when I was about thirteen. We passed two men walking together down the street, and it triggered Dad’s memory. He told us a story about a man in the service who propositioned him. “I’d have clocked him if he hadn’t backed off,” my father said. I believed him.

  The competing cues and emotions were hard for me to reconcile at times, but I also knew that people on both sides of my family had repeatedly demonstrated an independent streak. In the end, that was the temperament I gravitated toward, too. Both the Moffitts and the members of my mother’s clan, the Jermans, came from mining and oil-geyser towns on the western frontier. They kept their heads down and worked, worked, worked. But they also bucked convention and seemed incapable of remaining quiet or complacent once they were fed up with something. They were passionate, gritty, action-oriented people.

  I was named after my father, Willis Jefferson “Bill” Moffitt, a hardy Montana boy who grew up in Livingston, a railroad town on the banks of the Yellowstone River. When my dad was thirteen, his mother, Blanche, packed him and his two siblings into the family’s Model A Ford and drove off from their home, leaving his father, William Durkee Moffitt Jr., behind with a hangover and a knot on his head. Blanche had cracked a window screen over W.D.’s skull for coming home violent and drunk one too many times. She pointed the car west and didn’t stop until she reached the Pacific Ocean at Long Beach, where she knew nobody. I guess she thought that if she was going to start over it might as well be in the sunshine rather than in the shoulder-high drifts of Montana snow. She and W.D. never lived together again, but they never divorced, either. He sent Blanche a bit of money each month to help support them. Blanche enrolled their three children in Long Beach’s first-rate public schools, where they thrived.

  Dad went on to become a basketball standout at both Long Beach Polytechnic High and Long Beach City College, where he occasionally competed against Jackie Robinson, then a four-sport star at Pasadena Junior College. (My father had a cherished photo of them playing on the same court.) Dad was strong-jawed and handsome, and he loved dancing to big-band music in the seaside ballrooms. So did my mother, Mildred Rose Jerman, who everyone called Betty. She was seventeen years old and still in high school when they started dating. Later, she wore my father’s miniature basketball trophy on a chain around her neck, even after it chipped her front tooth one day as she leaned down to take a sip from a water fountain.

  After their third date she told her mother, Dot, she was going to marry him.

  “Well, has he asked you?” Dot said.

  “No, but he will,” my mom replied.

  Dot never seemed overly warm to me, but she was considerate and gentle. Blanche was different. My father’s mother was a hard-edged woman who chainsmoked Chesterfields, drank black coffee all day, and was full of colorful sayings such as “If they don’t watch it, I’ll lay ’em out in lavender!” She was tough, but then she’d had some staggering disappointments in her life even before she abruptly packed up her children and left W.D.

  She was born Hazel Campbell in 1897 in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a Scottish teenager who was living in a home for unwed mothers, and she was given up for adoption before she was three. Her new parents, Jefferson and Georgia Leighton, changed her name to Blanche and moved with her to Butte, a mining boomtown in central Montana. Her mother opened a candy shop there, and her father worked as a carpenter. Blanche became such a gifted pianist she was sent back east to train at the Boston Conservatory for two years. But she had to come home when Georgia died and her father stopped paying her tuition. Blanche took a job working at the railroad depot in town, and that’s how she met W.D., who was a brakeman on the Northern Pacific line. They moved to Livingston after they married and rented a house just beyond the tracks, where they could hear the whistle and rumble of the steam locomotives passing by, or step outside and look down the street and see the Absaroka mountain range rising in the distance.

  My father was born in Livingston in 1918, two years before his brother, Arthur, and two years after his sister, Gladys. Blanche used to say W.D. was a nice enough man when he was sober, but he was a nasty drunk. Sometimes he’d beat her in front of their kids, and one day my dad, then only twelve, finally had enough. As W.D. wound up to take yet another swing at Blanche, my father stepped between them and told W.D., “If you hit her again, I’ll kill you.” W.D. backed off.

  Montana was a progressive state then, and I always wondered how it impacted my father’s egalitarian views about women. The state legislature approved a woman’s unlimited right to vote in 1914, four years before the rest of the country. Two years after that, Montana’s Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. The state still had a Wild West feel, and women were already working on ranches and in other fields usually reserved for men when America entered World War I in 1917. After that, they filled even more jobs that Montana’s departed men used to do.

  My father grew to be just under six feet tall and powerful as an ox. After finishing his associate degree at Long Beach City College he was offered a basketball scholarship to Whittier College. He lost his scholarship when he had to skip his first semester because of acute appendicitis. It was 1940, and the country was still digging out of the Great Depression. He went to work full-time running the produce section in a grocery store and never returned to college. By then, his brother was working in a coat hanger factory to help Blanche keep their family afloat, and Gladys was trying to work her way through nursing school. It was a wonder Dad had the money to take my mom dancing when they were courting.

  Mom and Dad always said they had only $3 between them when they were married on May 17, 1941. My father landed a job with the Long Beach police force, but he said the work tested his faith in humanity. He often felt bad for the troubled souls he encountered, not knowing what hardships they faced. When Ame
rica entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, my father and his brother enlisted in the Navy. I have a photo I love that shows them with big smiles on their faces, looking so handsome in their sailor whites. Mom, who was only twenty, found out she was pregnant with me ten days before my dad shipped out. They hadn’t planned on a baby so soon, and she was anxious and scared.

  Dad was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, when I was born on November 22, 1943. He sent a handwritten card that read “For my little daughter who I haven’t seen, but will be holding in my arms soon, I send all a father’s love, for always and always.”

  For a strong-willed and opinionated man, Dad could be a real softie. Throughout his life he never stopped getting teary-eyed at the playing of our national anthem. Rather than rejoin the police when his Navy years were done, he took a job with the Long Beach fire department and stayed there for thirty-five years. At one point, Mom wanted him to study for the officer’s test, which would mean a bigger paycheck, but Dad liked the action. He was an engineer, driving the trucks and maintaining the pumps. Sometimes he’d take me to the fire station when I was young and hold me in one arm as we slid down the brass pole. He’d let me play with Old Sam, the house cat who would slide down the pole too when he heard the alarm sound. There was an Associated Press photo to prove it.

  Dad insisted that we all kiss each other good night and say “I love you” before we went to bed, for the same reason my mother named me after him when he was away during the war: My father’s work was dangerous, and there was no certainty he would return home. One of my dad’s scarier nights on the job involved the injury of a coworker and the death of two others during the massive Signal Hill oil refinery fire that rocked Long Beach in 1958. The blaze left ash and droplets of oil falling from the sky and took three days to put out. You could see flames shooting out of the hilltop plant from our home.

  Later in life my dad liked to talk about the good things he remembered about his firefighter days and Montana childhood. He returned to his home state again and again to fish the rivers and breathe the crisp mountain air. But the memories of his unstable upbringing never left him. Mom was the same regarding hers. He and she were a perfect match in that way, too.

  * * *

  —

  My mother’s father, Roscoe “Rocky” Jerman, was born in northern Pennsylvania, but his family moved to the dusty oil-drilling town of Taft, California, in the late 1800s. There is a sepia-toned photograph of Rocky at age nineteen, the tallest among a group of oil workers standing on the massive rotary platform of a drilling rig. For a while he tried bare-knuckle prizefighting, but his main line of work was oil leasing, well drilling, and wildcat speculating. His life was a series of booms and busts.

  I’m not sure my mother knew the details of how Rocky met my grandmother, Dot, or even who Dot’s parents were. My grandmother’s death certificate listed her parents’ names as “unknown.” I have no idea how she got to California or who fathered Dot’s first child, whom she named Doris after herself. Dot and Rocky were married and living in Taft when my mom was born on May 26, 1922. Three years later, Rocky and Dot moved to Long Beach and eventually split up, leaving Dot to fend for herself with her two children. Rocky remarried quickly and didn’t want anything to do with them.

  Dot eventually had at least six husbands, by my mom’s count. (When my mother mentioned that to me once, I saw tears in her eyes and tried to console her by saying, “Don’t worry, Mommy—it’s not a record.”) Mom told me about a night Dot had to sneak out the back window with her to escape an abusive man she married after Rocky. But beyond that, my mother rarely talked about those chaotic years. Dot got a job at a commercial laundry operating a big steam press, and finally married a kindhearted man, a Navy veteran named James Kehoe, who treated my mom and her sister like his own children. He was the grandfather Randy and I knew and loved.

  Looking back now, I can see that both my parents carried a generational sense of loss and yearning. They were generous with affection and constantly urged Randy and me to be observant and respectful of other people. But talking about intimate or painful feelings was never their style. They were married for sixty-five years and determined to leave the dysfunction and instability of their childhoods behind. They told us so. The best way they knew how to accomplish that was by imposing a rigor and a discipline on themselves that was passed on to us. If you wanted something, you worked and waited for it—case closed. Integrity was paramount. They refused to complain or dwell on the past; the past was something you couldn’t fix. All that mattered was here and now. Quitting or making excuses was also not allowed. If the subject of a divorce involving someone we knew came up, they’d hastily assure Randy and me that it would never happen to them because, well…it just wouldn’t. “We’re going to be together forever,” my mother would say. “Family is the most important thing.”

  My parents were both loving, devoted, complicated people. Especially my dad. Most of the time he was funny and charming, the kindest, most patient guy in the world. He was known as one of the coolest heads in the fire department under duress. When there was a family crisis, Dad was always the first one called. As a rule, the bigger the problem, the better he was. But he was unpredictable. You never knew when something would set him off or provoke a rage. It could be hitting his thumb with a hammer, or me making a noise in the hall when he was asleep after pulling another twenty-four-hour shift. Dad would get a look in his eyes that you didn’t want to see, because you knew he was ready to blow.

  My father was never violent with us, but he could be scary. Once when I was a little girl he lifted me in the air and began screaming in my face, chiding me for something I had done. He didn’t seem aware of how long he was squeezing my arms until my mom began yelling, “Bill! Bill!” and I was saying, “Daddy, Daddy, put me down!” We ended up laughing after he blinked, caught himself, and lowered me to the floor. I was like Dad in that respect: fast to blow up, quick to move on. My mother, on the other hand, would fall quiet and grow distant when she was uncomfortable or disapproved of something, shutting down discussions altogether. To me, the silence felt somehow worse.

  I can see now that I learned to compartmentalize my own feelings from an early age. I was a highly inquisitive, energetic kid who would probably be labeled hyperactive or hypervigilant today. I asked a million questions. I was always analyzing things. I became acutely sensitive and extremely attuned to reading the feelings of everyone around me, hoping to prevent trouble or just make sure everyone was okay. When my dad was asleep I felt safe because he was home. But when he was up and agitated I was on high alert, eager to calm things down. I became good at knowing how to get my dad in a good mood, when to nudge back, what buttons to press.

  Those impulses spilled into things outside my family, too. If I was picking sides for one of our neighborhood games I’d make sure some of the worst players were not chosen last, just to make them feel included. I figured everyone wants to belong. If Randy or I saw someone getting picked on at school or on our block, we became the anti-bullying squad. Other kids noticed. I was surprised, for example, when they elected me president of the school glee club though I was the worst singer in the group. I think it was because I was already learning to lead.

  Long after my parents retired and moved to Arizona, my mother finally told me a little more of her personal history, but never all of it. She just smiled a little cryptically and said something that, for better and worse, became a deeply embedded coping mechanism of my own: “Every family has its secrets, Billie Jean.”

  Chapter 2

  Mom moved back in with Grandma and Grandpa Kehoe to await my birth after Dad left for the Navy. Later, when the Douglas Aircraft Company sent Boy Scouts door to door to recruit housewives for four-hour factory shifts as part of the war effort, my mother signed on. She became one of the legendary “Rosie the Riveters” at the plant, which churned out C-47 transports and B-17 bombers. Today ther
e’s a park in Long Beach to honor the women. By the time I was learning to talk those war-era women workers were getting laid off across the country to make way for the returning soldiers and sailors. It was as if everyone was expected to snap back to the old standards. The pressure to conform was strong.

  African Americans who had fought against facism overseas were often subjected to the same Jim Crow segregation practices in the military that they experienced in civilian life in the States. Women were supposed to return to their housework and raise kids. Aspiring to anything beyond the sanctioned female careers—nurse, secretary, teacher—was treated like a quixotic quest or, worse, an act of self-indulgence that might prevent male breadwinners from supporting their families. (Before 1974, an adult woman couldn’t get a credit card in her own name unless her father, husband, or employer signed for it. In some states, women still couldn’t serve on juries.)

  During the war, many folks tasted an independence they hadn’t known before. Something had to give, and eventually a lot did. Just not right away.

  My mother, strong and resourceful as she was, seemed completely sold on the prevailing idea that a woman’s path to fulfillment was marriage and children. I loved to spend time with her, and I could always count on her to stick up for me when it was important. But she had a traditional view of my place in the world, too. One day when I was playing a spirited touch-football game in the front yard with the neighborhood boys, she ordered me into the living room. I had no idea what I had done.

  “Billie Jean, you have to be a lady at all times,” she said.

  “But Mom, what does that mean—‘be a lady’?”