All In

by Billie Jean King

  The losing killed me, but Clyde assured me it would be worth it in the long run, and he was right. I learned to take satisfaction from improving on things I was working on in matches, and not necessarily what the scoreboard said. To be a successful attacking player, I knew I had to have a strong second serve, the reflexes to snag my opponent’s passing-shot attempts down either side of the court, and the soft hands to pick off volleys as I was charging the net. In time, my shot choices did become clearer. My judgment improved. I controlled more points by making the player across the net feel pressure from me.

  In the spring of 1958, I went to the Dudley Cup in Santa Monica, which was a big event at the time. I was fourteen, and I had to overcome both a formidable player named Carole Caldwell and a brief relapse into my public-speaking phobia to win the title. After I pulled ahead in the second set and saw the winner’s prize sitting courtside I realized if I won I’d have to say a few words to the crowd. Then I lost a few points I shouldn’t have. That’s enough of that! I chided myself. You HAVE to do this. If you want to be the best you have to find your voice. No getting around it. (If you’ve ever wondered why tennis players talk to themselves, the answer is simple: There’s no one else out there to commiserate with.)

  Making that leap was a breakthrough for me. But there were still a few things standing in my way of becoming No. 1. One of them remained Perry T. Jones. As head of the Southern California Tennis Association he had the power to decide which tournaments you could enter and how much money—if any—the association would contribute to cover your expenses. Most of us were afraid of running into the Czar by chance because we were worried he’d cite us for some petty dress code violation or other trumped-up infraction. If somebody spotted him coming, word raced around the courts and we’d scatter like pigeons.

  I was now No. 2 in the Southern California Tennis Association’s rankings for fifteen-and-under girls behind Kathy Chabot, whom I had never beat. Still, I figured my standing would earn me a trip east that summer to play in the national championships in Middletown, Ohio. They always sent the top two players from our section. When the Czar summoned me to his office at the Los Angeles Tennis Club to talk about it, I could hardly breathe. At first he regarded me the way an emperor might eye a serf who had just breached the castle moat. Then he got to the point: “I don’t intend to send you to Middletown unless you defeat Kathy Chabot in the Southern California Championships.”

  “But what about Kathy? If I beat her, can she still go?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  I was happy that Kathy was guaranteed a spot. But the Czar was being unfair to me. He was breaking precedent, yet I knew there was no arguing with him. I became so determined to make sure I won my place at nationals I started training like a maniac. I rose at 5 a.m. to do calisthenics and jump rope like a prizefighter. I hit balls in our driveway for an hour and a half before school, telling myself there was no way Kathy was going to beat me. I practiced again after school. Even when I wasn’t physically practicing I was visualizing the match, picturing myself doing everything right. As I was washing dishes I’d daydream about seeing my second serves go in. In bed at night I’d imagine myself chasing down each ball, making every shot. Then I’d get up at the crack of dawn and start again.

  And I did not lose that match. The Southern California Championships, like all my showdowns with Kathy, was a battle. But my game and my mind had turned a corner. I was relentless, determined, and steadier than I’d ever been. I won 6–3, 6–3.

  Now Perry T. Jones grudgingly gave me permission to go to the nationals at Middletown. But he refused to cover my expenses. Later, when he found out that the Long Beach Tennis Patrons had stepped in to fill that void, he moved the goalposts yet again and added a new condition. “You’ll need a chaperone,” he told me.

  Mom and Dad couldn’t afford airline tickets. The only way I could get to Ohio was by train with my mother. We didn’t have enough money for a sleeper cabin, and it took us three days one way. Mom suffered from motion sickness the entire trip and held an empty See’s candy box under her chin when she felt like she might throw up. But she was a good sport.

  I, on the other hand, absolutely loved the ride. I adored looking out the window and watching the scenery blur by, noticing how the land turned from desert to prairie to lush fields of wheat and corn. I loved the clickety-clack sound of the train wheels and how the swaying motion of the cars rocked me to sleep at night. It felt like a great adventure. It was bliss for a child who yearned to do great things and fantasized about going places.

  When I got to Ohio everything was unfamiliar, starting with the gray Har-Tru clay courts, which are made of crushed stone. The only courts I had ever played on were concrete. Now it felt like I had marbles underfoot as I ran. It was hard to start and stop. To avoid overrunning the ball on clay once you finally do get going, you have to slide into shots, something I didn’t yet know how to do. The bounces are also different, and the ball hung in the air more, which favored the pushers.

  For the rest of my life, Har-Tru would be my worst surface (far worse than European red clay, which I actually ended up liking). I hadn’t dropped a set in more than a month when I got to the nationals, but I lost decisively in the quarterfinals. Kathy Chabot and I got to the doubles finals but lost. She had trouble sliding too.

  After the tournament, some of the girls went on from Ohio to Philadelphia and New Jersey to spend the rest of the summer on the grass court circuit. I couldn’t go, and I was terribly sad as I watched their cars pull away from the hotel. When my mother saw me shoving away some tears she said, “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry we can’t afford to send you with them.”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “Next year I’m going. Even if I have to hitchhike.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time I entered Long Beach Polytechnic High School as a tenth grader my tennis successes were starting to mount. My ranking was good enough to get me on the Wilson Sporting Goods list to receive two free rackets a year. I thought I had hit the big time. My parents and our extended family had attended Poly, and finally getting there myself in 1958 seemed like another rite of passage.

  I felt a thrill every time I walked in Poly’s front door past the sign that read “Home of SCHOLARS AND CHAMPIONS” and the Art Deco metal letters beneath that that ran the length of the entrance and read, “ENTER TO LEARN GO FORTH TO SERVE.” I felt more grown-up walking across the sprawling campus with its large grassy courtyard in the middle. With more than three thousand students, Poly was bigger than some community colleges. The long interior hallways echoed with noise and spirited chatter. For the first time, I was in classes with kids of all different colors and backgrounds: Black, Brown, Asian, Native American. I loved it.

  Poly was famous for its winning football, baseball, basketball, and track teams. But the closest a girl could get to a varsity sport was cheerleading. So while Randy could daydream about playing big-league baseball—the Dodgers had announced their move to Los Angeles the year before—more hard realities were leaking into my dreams. I still saw myself competing on Centre Court at Wimbledon. And yet, at that time it was impossible for a girl to imagine a long-term future as a tennis champion or a pro athlete, except on the fledgling LPGA Tour.

  My internal conflict showed in a detailed composition I wrote for my sophomore English class that I began by imagining my life three years in the future, when I’d be eighteen:

  Here I am in New York City at 5 p.m. leaving by plane for Wimbledon, England. I still can’t believe it. In one week I will be participating in what is considered to be the Tennis Championship of the World.

  I described arriving at my London housing with an English family, how I delayed my morning practice on the grass courts until the city’s famous fog had cleared. I seeded myself eighth and wrote expansive passages about every match I played until I lost in the quarterfinals to Darlene Hard
, 10–8 in the third. I wrote a brief epilogue that included Ramsey Earnhart, a real-life heartthrob in California tennis who I had put onboard my imaginary flight to England with me. Now it was 1988:

  Here I am at home twenty-seven years later, sitting with my four wonderful children (at times they’re wonderful). After the summer of ’61 I entered Pomona College in California, spending five years and graduating with a master’s degree. I married Ramsey Earnhart—remember that boy I met on the way to the plane that day? Even though I never did achieve my ambition in tennis, I’m so glad I went ahead and received a higher education than high school instead of turning out to be a tennis bum.

  The conventional ending showed just how much I had started internalizing the standard script for middle-class white women of my generation. The boilerplate goal for a girl in my era on the cusp of adulthood was a college education at best and modest achievement, as long as it didn’t interfere with marriage and children. Women were supposed to trade in their dreams for their husband’s ambitions. It was my mother’s stated dream for me too.

  I still wanted to believe that I could lead a life without limits. But as I got older and looked around, it increasingly seemed like the world was telling me something else.

  * * *

  —

  I’m often asked when I first questioned my sexuality, and I can only say it was a gradual awakening that didn’t start until college. I know many people who say they knew they were gay in elementary school, but when I was growing up I had no idea. For the longest time I felt different. But I didn’t know why. I didn’t have the words.

  People self-identify now when it comes to sexuality and gender, and I think it’s a fantastic, positive development. Who you are is about how you feel inside. But it’s hard to convey to many people today how different the world was for LGBTQ+ people then. Hardly anyone talked openly about gays and lesbians. It was literally dangerous to be gay, and almost unheard of to be out. Homosexuality was still criminalized in many states. The American Psychiatric Association, the largest organization of its kind in the world, listed homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973 and didn’t completely remove “sexual orientation disturbance” until 1987. Ignorance and fear, slurs and prejudices, acts of violence abounded.

  I had crushes on plenty of boys beginning in grade school, and I loved that my parents were matter-of-fact about what goes on with our bodies. Mom gave me the birds-and-the-bees talk when I was in fifth grade. When she got to the part about how babies are conceived I said, “Ewwww. That’s not fun, is it?” and she burst out laughing.

  Beyond that, I can summarize the standard message girls received about sex in those days in three words: Don’t. Get. Pregnant. Remember, in the 1950s there was no birth control pill. The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision affirming a woman’s right to get a legal abortion wasn’t handed down until 1973. Unwed girls and women who got pregnant endured serious shaming. They were often told they “had” to get married or they disappeared from school, sometimes never to return.

  Those kinds of messages—and other tensions over gender roles—crept into our family once Randy and I were seriously into sports. Our parents took side jobs because they barely had enough money to pay the bills. I sensed how Dad felt he had to live up to a standard of manhood that could be every bit as inhibiting as the rules women faced. He was uncomfortable that he couldn’t provide enough with his firefighter’s salary. His schedule allowed him to moonlight at a plastics factory. Mom sometimes sold Avon or Tupperware. She later took a job as a receptionist and a bookkeeper at a local blood lab. Before long, she was running the place and it was turning a profit, which she and the owner considered a triumph. But my father was occasionally insecure that Mom was working outside the home. They used to have long, intense discussions about work, sometimes even arguments. But the magic was that they talked it through.

  “Your mother should’ve married someone with money,” he’d tell me.

  “Daddy, she wouldn’t trade you for anything in the world,” I’d reply.

  Our exhausted parents became tired and cranky so often that Randy and I finally sat them down for a talk one night. We begged them to quit their side jobs. We said it wasn’t worth it. When we offered to quit our sports instead, their eyes started to water. “You’re not on earth to take care of us—we wanted you,” my mother said.

  Luckily, my tennis successes were continuing to pile up, which earned me some financial help from local tennis patrons. My father did quit his second job eventually. By January of my sophomore year I was No. 2 in my section of the state. By summer vacation I had kept my vow and earned my way onto the East Coast grass court circuit—and I didn’t have to hitchhike to get there.

  I was also chosen to tour with my first national select team, the 1959 U.S. Junior Wightman Cup squad, which was a huge honor. The cup was founded in 1923 by Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman, a great pre–World War I champion from California. Women’s teams and girls’ teams from Britain and the United States competed in five singles and two doubles matches. The cup went to whichever country’s team won four matches first.

  Southern Californian public-park players dominated our roster. The six of us who were on that junior team—Kathy Chabot, Pam Davis, Karen Hantze, Barbara Browning, Carole Caldwell, and me—remained friends for life. Few of us realized how good we were until we started competing back east that July. I took my first-ever plane ride to get there on a four-propeller Constellation that droned along at just over three hundred miles an hour. It took us eleven hours to fly from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, our starting point for the grass court circuit.

  The tour was my first full immersion in the old-school East Coast tennis establishment. My world expanded in ways I couldn’t have predicted. The Long Beach Tennis Patrons, the Century Club, and a few other local sponsors paid for me to tour, giving me just enough funds to get by. In the amateur tennis tradition, we saved money by staying as player-guests most of the time in the homes of tennis fans and wealthy supporters who were unfailingly welcoming, generous, and kind.

  The Los Angeles Tennis Club and the show-biz swells there had always seemed swanky to me. But what I experienced on the East Coast, playing at venerated country clubs, experiencing day-to-day life with old-money host families who sometimes lived on sprawling estates, was a different kind of rich. Our team was on the move every week. It was quite an education.

  Carole and I were chosen to room together, starting in Philadelphia. Our hosts were the Freunds, who lived in the upscale neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. Compared to California, everything in Philly seemed old and historic to me, from the Revolutionary War–era monuments to the cobblestone streets to the aged twin beds that Carole and I were assigned in the Freunds’ top-floor bedroom. The mattresses sagged so much in the middle that my bum nearly touched the floor. Philadelphia was also where I discovered Bassetts Ice Cream, a delicious local specialty I couldn’t stop eating.

  Staying in private homes was a great way to meet people and learn how to get along with all types. I had to learn more of the social graces that were part of the tennis circuit culture, such as socializing during mixers at the elite private clubs that hosted our events. There was a pattern to these conversations. I’d be holding a glass of water in my hand, chatting with club members who were drinking highballs. One of the older men or women would inevitably lean over toward fifteen-year-old me and say, “So, tell me young lady, what are you really going to do with your life? Or are you going to be a tennis bum?”

  I am doing what I want with my life, was what I wanted to say. Instead, I’d smile politely and say nothing, or assure them that I planned to attend college and marry because I knew that’s what they wanted to hear.

  When we arrived in South Orange, New Jersey, our next stop after Philly, I got to play the newly crowned Wimbledon singles champion, nineteen-year-old Maria Bueno of Brazil, on a sticky summer afternoon. She bare
ly beat me, 6–4, 6–4, in a gritty match.

  As I was packing my rackets, I was still replaying some points in my head and feeling a bit low about shots I’d missed. A man with black-rimmed glasses and a big, friendly smile came over and introduced himself. “Hi. I’m Frank Brennan,” he said. “Don’t let this get you down. You’re going to be No. 1.”

  Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. I was so taken aback I just stared at him.

  Frank told me that he was a tennis coach who always checked out new players at the tournament. In the coming years, this generous, helpful man would become an influential mentor and contributor to my game. That first day, he had noticed that I was still playing with nylon strings and said he’d get me some Pakistani-made natural gut strings. Gut is more expensive but strongly preferred by top players for the better spin and control it helps create. He also explained that he was a self-taught player who worked for the U.S. Post Office and ran his own tennis camp on the weekends.

  Soon after our first encounter, Frank invited me to his home in Fairlawn, New Jersey, for dinner with his family. I was accustomed to orderly dinners at my home, but mealtime with the Brennans was an Irish American free-for-all. He and his wife Lillian had nine kids—soon to be ten—and the “Amen” at the end of grace was like a starting pistol. Silverware flashed. Crumbs flew. There were so many Brennans they attended church in shifts.

  The Brennan family would become like an extension of my own. I began staying with them on my trips back east, and Frank started coaching me. Clyde Walker was still my coach in Long Beach, and to his credit he never minded when someone else wanted to help. Frank was the first coach who traveled with me to some of my events. Eventually, he quit his post office job and ran an indoor/outdoor tennis facility that he built with a business partner, and I’d return there with other top players to hold clinics. His chats with me about strategy helped sharpen my game significantly. But he could also be blunt. He was the man who made the searing offhanded remark to me that “You’ll be good because you’re ugly” after predicting I could be No. 1. We were seated at the dinner table when he said it, and Lillian and a few of their kids told him, “That’s horrible!”