All In

by Billie Jean King

  Clyde relented when I asked, “Can I at least try the American twist?” I got it on the first try, and he was thrilled. After that, I was allowed to serve the same as any guy.

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  —

  Of course, me being me—which is to say, an unconventional girl with robust enthusiasm—my drive could sometimes create…complications. I’ve always said God gave me extra energy. I felt like there were never enough hours in the day for tennis and everything else I wanted to do, especially since Mom and Dad insisted that I remain well rounded.

  I had always been a very good student before I started tennis, but now they warned me that they wouldn’t let me play if I fell below a B in any major subject. That happened once when I got a C in high school chemistry. I convinced Dad to let me play again after four weeks, which felt like a lifetime to me. Before that, we had a knock-down, drag-out stalemate after my fifth-grade teacher called home one day and, to Dad’s astonishment, said that I was in danger of failing reading.

  “But how can that be?” he said. “I have to tell her to turn off the light every night because she’s reading in bed.”

  I put in the effort. My problem was that I was suffering from social anxiety and a fear of public speaking, something that still gnaws at me. I’m much more uncomfortable giving public presentations than I ever let on. As a child, it was more acute. I hated being called on in class because I would have to speak. On that particular day, my teacher had called on me to give my oral book report assignment and I froze. She concluded that I was unprepared.

  When I got home, Dad was waiting for me. He made some stern attempts to convince me, “You have to go back to school and get through your oral report.” My mom backed him up. When neither of them would budge, the conversation escalated into me trilling loudly in my ten-year-old voice, “But I can’t do it, Daddy! I can’t! You might as well punish me now!” Calmly he repeated, “Sis, you have to do it.” I stormed to my room and flung myself on my bed, where I sobbed and thrashed and wailed extravagantly for what seemed like hours. Mom eventually came to check on me. Then my dad tried a different tack. He asked me gently, “Tell me about the book you’re reading now.” It was about Peter Stuyvesant and early New York. “Why don’t you practice giving a report on it with me,” Dad suggested. And so, between my sniffles, that’s what we did. I made some notes. Before I went to bed my mom helped me give nose drops to my Raggedy Ann doll because I said Raggedy had been upset too. Somehow, I made it through my oral presentation the next day, knees knocking, and I passed reading.

  About a year later, when I was eleven, my love of tennis became an issue again. I had obsessively begged my parents for a piano since kindergarten after listening to Grandma Moffitt coax beautiful songs out of the spinet she kept in her living room. It took my parents until I was in fifth grade to save enough money to buy a used one. That also happened to be the year I started working with Clyde and found tennis. It didn’t go over too well when I sat at our piano just ten or eleven months after we got it and told my mom I thought I should stop music lessons because they were interfering with my sport.

  Oh, boy.

  She began pacing back and forth and let me have it. “We saved all those years, Billie Jean, and you wanted a piano—you got it.” Pace, pace, pace. “Now you are going to finish what you start.” Stern look. “You’re not quitting until I am satisfied that you can read music and play it well. Got it?” Hands on hips. “That’s just the way it works around here!”

  She was magnificent. My dad could never be that strict with me. After another year of lessons, maybe two, I was able to play “The Dream of Olwen” by Charles Williams straight from the sheet music at a recital. Afterward, I looked up at Mom expectantly, and she kept her word. But I will never forget what she said to me then: “You’re good enough to stop now, but I wish you would play forever.”

  Today, a Clavinova piano similar in size to the spinet we had sits in the New York City apartment I share with my partner, Ilana Kloss. I still have the sheet music to “The Dream of Olwen,” and every now and then when I try to play it again, I always think about my mom.

  * * *

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  My family worshipped at the First Church of the Brethren in Long Beach, which sat just a short walk from our home in Wrigley Heights. As if I didn’t have enough sports-minded thoughts already, the minister there was the Rev. Bob Richards, an Olympic pole vaulter who had won a bronze medal in 1948 and gold medals at the 1952 and 1956 Summer Games. He was the first athlete to appear on the front of the Wheaties cereal box, and he later worked as a television spokesman for the brand. He also became a popular motivational speaker. The newspapers nicknamed him “the Vaulting Vicar,” but we knew him as a spellbinding orator and dedicated athlete who would do his workouts on the field next to our church.

  For an aspiring athlete like me who wanted to be the best, it just didn’t get any better. I would walk with Randy on Sundays to hear Rev. Richards’s homily even if my parents had to skip a service. You can still find some of his recordings on YouTube. His stem-winding sermons were so inspirational I’d feel shot out of a cannon when he was through. Most of the time, it seemed as if he was speaking directly to me.

  Rev. Richards was an enormous influence in my life. He called sports “the language of self-reliance” and stressed how rigorous self-analysis was vital to recognize your weaknesses and work on them. Like Clyde and my father, he preached that champions in life and sports aren’t so much born, they’re made. He often used himself as an example. “You will never meet a more mediocre man than the one standing in front of you,” Richards boomed one day, his cadence rising, the emotion building as he went. “I am five feet ten, 185 pounds. Average brain, average voice. Average!

  “And yet—”

  Richards often added cliffhanger pauses like that, and I would be absolutely rapt by the time he continued—“And yet, you don’t give in to your weaknesses! Nooo! You take what you’ve got and turn it into power. Run till your legs are strong! Climb rope and your arms will get strong! The difference between a champion and the rest of us is just that little bit more that a champion puts out. Why, I think of the great Rocky Marciano in boxing. He had weak arms. But he went to the local pool and he worked on those upper arms. He became heavyweight champion of the world!”

  His point was: It’s up to you. So get going.

  The Brethren sprang from the same theological roots as Mennonites. They believe that Jesus directed them to live simple lives of peaceful action glorifying God and spreading His word through good works. That sounded good to me. In our church we were told you weren’t judged by how often you worshipped but by how you acted. Were you kind? Were you good? Did you live a life of service?

  Rev. Richards also preached tolerance, which was an important validation for a girl like me who was already bumping up against conventional thinking. He told parables about his own career. After a Russian athlete congratulated him with a hug for winning gold at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Richards was sharply criticized in the U.S. for accepting the show of fellowship since the Cold War was on. He disagreed. He told us that he saw it as a moment of grace. He made a point at our services to emphasize that everyone was welcome. Some of our church members were conscientious objectors to military service, and they sat side by side with veterans who had served.

  Being part of that atmosphere at such an impressionable age captured my mind and my heart. Sometime between sixth and seventh grade, I asked to be baptized. No one suggested that I do it. The Brethren believe in free will, and that your choices are between you and God alone. So one Sunday in front of my parents and the congregation, Rev. Richards opened a curtain behind the altar to reveal a large baptism tank with a front panel framed by two sets of stairs. After I declared that I had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior, Richards stepped into the tank. I wore a white sheet wrapped around my bathing suit and descended the
stairs on the other side, prepared to be symbolically reborn. He dunked me three times as he baptized me in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I came up gasping when it was all over.

  I read the Bible every night through junior high and high school, and I often led prayer meetings before Sunday school class. I didn’t smoke or drink, and I carried a Bible with me on the tennis circuit for years. It gave me comfort as I tried to adjust to life on the road and sleeping in a string of unfamiliar homes and beds. For a while, I seriously considered becoming a missionary. (When I told Chrissie Evert that, her eyes widened and she said, “Me too!”)

  It wasn’t until I got a bit older that I began to question some of the scriptural interpretations we were taught, especially regarding women. I also learned that years after Rev. Richards left Long Beach to lead a different congregation he veered toward extremist right-wing politics—an about-face that still stuns me. He even mounted a quixotic campaign in the 1984 U.S. presidential election for a reincarnation of the old Populist Party, which now espoused white-nationalist views. It’s difficult for me to reconcile such activities with the man I once knew.

  Back then, Richards showed me how a champion could inspire others. His assertion that you could change people’s hearts and minds through sports became a bedrock, animating belief of mine too. He gave me confidence that I could transcend the contrary messages I kept getting about whether sports was any place for a girl. He was another person telling me faith and hard work could get me through.

  I never lost trust in some of the basic tenets I learned then, like the emphasis on kindness and living a life of service filled with good acts. Even now, when I face political adversaries or folks with different philosophical or religious beliefs, my background helps me have a dialogue. It’s amazing—even transformative—what you can learn and accomplish when you genuinely listen to people and engage them with respect, rather than judge them because they’re different from you.

  * * *

  —

  I began to get a better sense of the Southern California tennis landscape as I played more tournaments. In the spring of 1955, Jerry Cromwell, Susan Williams, and I were among five of Clyde Walker’s players from Long Beach who were chosen to compete in the Southern California championships at the prestigious Los Angeles Tennis Club. I was excited to know I was leaving the novice ranks and entering my first sanctioned tournament. I’d also earn my first junior ranking.

  Somehow, my mother and I were given the wrong date for the start of the thirteen-and-under bracket. We arrived a day late, but Joe Bixler, the Wilson sporting goods company rep who was checking in the players that day, was sympathetic and willing to let me make up the first round. My opponent, Marilyn Hester, was generous enough to agree. That meant I’d have to play two matches in one day if I won the first, but I didn’t care. I was thrilled to be playing on the same courts where I knew many famous players had competed, and I became more excited when Joe handed me two brand-new balls for my match. I had never played with fluffy new balls. I held them up to my nose and breathed in that new-tennis-ball smell. I rolled them around in my palms and felt the scruffy texture on my skin.

  I defeated Marilyn in straight sets, but that’s all I recall. I guess that seems odd, since it was my first sanctioned match, but it actually became a career-long pattern of mine. I rarely lingered on victories. My next opponent was Ann Zavitovsky, a big, strong girl with more experience than me. I remember that match more clearly because she had to teach me that balls that land on the lines are in. She beat me after I extended her to 6–all in the third set and I wound up with so many blisters on my feet I could hardly walk. I had never played more than two sets.

  All of that paled in comparison, though, to something else that happened that day. When my mother and I arrived that morning at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, we were told all the junior players were lining up to take a photo on the front steps. I was happily taking my place with the others when a pear-shaped man with a penguin’s waddle approached. In front of everyone he said, “You! Little girl! Out! You can’t be in the picture wearing shorts. You need a skirt or dress.”

  That was my first (but hardly last) run-in with Perry T. Jones, president of the Southern California Tennis Association, whose headquarters was at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Though the club only required players to wear white, he made his own additional rules. Everyone called Jones “the Czar” because he commanded his kingdom like a tyrant. He had rigid ideas about how players should look, talk, and act. Over the years I found some of his stances infuriating and others hysterically funny. Once Susan Williams and I won an award as high schoolers, and, at the banquet, the Czar presented each of us with a new racket and…a baby doll. Seriously?

  On that first day I met Jones, I was only aware that my poor mother, who had made me those beautiful shorts, was mortified. She was so upset she bought a new bolt of white fabric and began sewing me a new dress that night, using a coffee cup to trace out the scalloped edges of the hem. It never occurred to me to be humiliated by Jones’s rebuke. I was upset for my mom—and then I got angry. I had already played plenty of other sports wearing shorts. I had already played plenty of other sports and never had an adult act like this. So why was tennis so unwelcoming?

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” I told her. “I’ll show him someday.”

  It only made me want to win more.

  I spent that summer and the ensuing ones playing as many matches as I could. But I had to learn to balance my drive with my temper. I guess I came by it honestly. Dad always taught Randy and me that winning wasn’t the most important thing, but boy, did he hate losing. He was ejected from some of his night league basketball games for fighting. Mom and I would be watching from the stands while his teammates dragged him off the court, still screaming and making a fuss. We’d turn to each other with an embarrassed look that said Oh, my God! And yet, while we could have done without the spectacle, I loved my dad’s intensity and I’d defend him. “Mom! He’s just competitive! He can’t help himself!” I’d say.

  My dad knew better, though. When I began playing tennis I sometimes threw my racket on the ground if I got frustrated. Once I made the mistake of doing it in front of Dad at a tournament. He was quiet but boiling the entire drive home. As soon as we were out of the car he marched me into the garage.

  “Billie Jean, give me your racket. You obviously don’t care about it,” he said, firing up his power saw.

  “No, Daddy! No!” I cried. “I promise I won’t throw it again!” It was my only racket. He took it from me anyway, and my eyes widened when he held the wooden neck of it an inch away from the whirring blade. Again I yelped, “Please, Daddy! Don’t!” After a long pause spent looking at me, he switched off the saw and handed my racket back. Then he warned me, “I’m taking you off the court if you have an outburst like that again.” I meant it with all my heart when I promised him I never would. (Not that it lasted. Forever is a very long time.)

  By the summer of 1956, just before I entered eighth grade, I was starting to win a lot of matches and happy to begin getting some notice in the Long Beach Press-Telegram. The writers were calling me a “local whiz” and “the Long Beach tennis wonder.” Still, I had never seen my name on the front page of the sports section until, one day, there it was—a headline that screamed, “Moffett Eliminated.” What! They misspelled my last name, and under the same headline, there was a brief account of my 6–0, 6–0 quarterfinal loss at the National Junior Public Parks tournament.

  “What is wrong with these people?” I snapped, throwing the paper down on the kitchen floor.

  Then I noticed my dad and mom watching me.

  For the next ten or fifteen minutes, Dad patiently led me through why I had to let it go. He explained, “Yesterday is not important. You should learn from history, but you can’t change it. It’s done.” He told me how important it was to live in the moment, because that�
��s how athletes succeed. Then he made a rule: From that day on, I could not read my press clippings—and I didn’t for the rest of my career. I still have to be forced to read anything about myself.

  When my parents died some sixty years later I found boxes and boxes of magazine and newspaper articles about Randy and me that they had saved for us. I had no idea.

  After that embarrassing loss, I was still practicing as hard as ever. But I was missing shots that I should’ve made and I didn’t know why. The answer became clear months later when my eighth-grade science teacher showed us a slide show in class and I couldn’t read the captions.

  When my parents took me to the optometrist we learned I was shockingly nearsighted. Luckily, my vision was easily corrected to 20/10. With glasses, I now had the eyes of a fighter pilot. My tennis improved immediately, although I could be in trouble if it rained or the lenses fogged up during a match. I was even more concerned when people told me there had been only one major tennis champion by then, male or female, who wore glasses: Jaroslav Drobny of Czechoslovakia, the 1954 Wimbledon champion.

  I decided that was another thing I’d have to change.

  * * *

  —

  Tennis doesn’t really have an off-season in Southern California, because the hard courts and perfect weather make it possible to play year-round. There was a tennis event in a different city just about every weekend. For my parents, that meant the expenses piled up for gasoline, meals, and entry fees for tournaments, which was a strain for us back then.