All In

by Billie Jean King

  To me, Alice’s public support of Althea remains every bit as important as Pee Wee Reese famously throwing an arm around his Brooklyn Dodgers teammate Jackie Robinson on the field as a sign of support while racists were making Jackie’s life miserable. The civil rights fight was just coming to sports, and Alice was ahead of the curve. Without her intervention, who knows when or if Althea would’ve commenced collecting her six major singles titles or the Grand Slam doubles crowns she won with Britain’s Angela Buxton, who also encountered discrimination on the circuit—including from Perry T. Jones. In 2019, Angela said Jones prevented her from continuing in a tournament at the Los Angeles Tennis Club after someone saw her competing and told him, “Don’t you know she’s a Jew?”

  It was Angela who asked Althea to play doubles together in 1956, five years after Althea broke the color barrier at the majors. “No one has ever asked me before—of course I will,” Althea told her. When a statue honoring Althea was installed on the U.S. Open grounds sixty-three years later, Angela journeyed to New York from her home in England, though she was not well, to honor her late friend.

  For all of Alice’s triumphs in tennis, her personal life was touched by tragedy. One night I asked her, “Alice, have you ever been in love?”

  “Yes, with Joe,” she said as she lit another cigarette, and then took a long pull. “He got killed in the war.”

  That’s all she told me. I later read that Alice said she had married a handsome American fighter pilot named Joe Crowley. He was shot down over Germany ten days after she was in a car wreck and had a miscarriage with their first child back in the States. In her grief, Alice swallowed a handful of pills in a near-successful suicide attempt.

  Her best friend, the actress Carole Lombard, also died in a plane crash. In 1946 Alice’s right lung became so infected that most of it had to be removed. Alice missed two years of competition because of her compromised health, and whatever savings she had was mostly gone. That’s why she was working as a receptionist and moonlighting as a tennis instructor when I met her.

  Alice made an indelible mark on my life and my game. When we started working together in the fall of 1959 I was ranked nineteenth in the women’s national rankings. After our four months together I had leapt to No. 4. Alice taught me things you can only learn from someone who’s been the best in the world. She was the first of them who really explained the art and intricacies of tennis to me.

  One day during a session she walked me from the baseline almost halfway to the net and pointed down, saying, “This is the service line, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She swept her racket back and forth in front of us and said, “This is the midcourt?”

  Again, I said yes.

  “Billie Jean, this is where most matches are won or lost. It’s the players who miss these—the easy ones, the gimmes—that lose.”

  I already knew there were offensive, defensive, and neutral shots in tennis. But Alice strengthened my focus on where the ball landed, its speed and its spin, and then making smart, split-second decisions. I was losing too many matches after I got a significant lead. It was Alice who first zeroed in on teaching me a different level of concentration, intensity, new ways to think. She never gave away points—she demanded that each point be played like match point, full out. She improved my forehand technique, showing me that I was hitting the ball too close to my body.

  Another day she casually told me, “Your backhand volley is much better than mine.” I was sixteen and the immortal Alice Marble was telling me this? I felt my face redden and I said, “Oh, no, Alice. It can’t be.” She said, “I am telling you, your backhand volley is excellent.” Moments like that can work magic on a player’s self-confidence. I was determined to use my backhand volley more and it became one of my signature shots.

  Alice’s independence, self-possession, and star quality also taught me a lot about how a champion behaved in the world. She always dressed well and looked sharp. She saw no conflict between being gracious and strongly asserting her opinions. When someone was helpful or hospitable, she wrote them a personal thank-you note, which became a habit of mine, too. After we finished our regular sessions on the court that was owned by her friend Mickey Goldsen, a famous music publisher as well as a tennis fan, we would always take time to hit with Mickey or his kids as a way of showing gratitude. Alice was teaching me how to build and nurture relationships. She believed that the little things matter and that they add up.

  It’s too bad I blew our relationship in the end.

  Alice was not well, and she slept with a big green oxygen tank next to her bed. I could hear her hacking and coughing in her room when I stayed overnight. Every time Alice would fit one of her cigarettes into her little white plastic holder I wanted to stop her and beg her not to smoke. I could tell the cigarettes were making Alice sicker, and I worried about her. Every time Alice coughed it reminded me of my father’s sister, Gladys, who died at thirty-six after a long and painful fight with cancer.

  All of that was somewhere in the back of my mind one Friday evening when the phone rang in our kitchen and I ran to pick it up. It was Alice. She sounded awful. “Billie Jean, I’m sick in bed with pneumonia,” she said. I could hear her rattling and gasping over the line. I didn’t know what to say, and I blurted, “Well, I guess that means I won’t be coming tomorrow.”

  “You selfish little brat,” she snapped. She said I was rude and thoughtless and that I didn’t care about anything but myself and tennis. Then she hung up on me.

  I dropped the phone and ran into my bedroom. I was already crying as I flopped facedown on the bed. My mother was right behind me, saying, “Sis! What happened? What’s wrong?”

  Mom called Alice immediately to apologize after I explained. Normally, my parents would have made me make the call, but I was too upset to talk, too afraid of making another mistake. Looking back now, I wish I had gotten on the phone and told Alice myself that I didn’t mean to sound so selfish, and that I was so sorry she was sick. Maybe that would have changed her mind. But I’ll never know. Alice told my mom I should find a different coach. We never worked together again.

  Alice lived another thirty years. She later said that because of our weekends together she discovered that she really liked coaching. She quit the doctor’s office job and started training players full-time and organizing tournaments. When I won my first Wimbledon singles title in 1966, Alice wrote me a lovely, touching note. I wrote to her, too, and when I saw her at tournaments we were always cordial. But the abrupt end of our working relationship remains a regret. I was still young, but I was getting the sense that it didn’t just take a village to raise a tennis champion. The higher altitudes of tennis could be a brass-knuckles place.

  Chapter 5

  I went from an A student in tenth grade to Cs and Ds in eleventh grade, even in subjects I enjoyed like biology and Spanish. I was getting a world-class tennis education, but my head was no longer in school. Along with playing tennis in my senior year, which began in 1960, I was dating a boy named Barry, my first deep love. He was an eighteen-year-old from Pacific Grove who was on his way to the University of California at Berkeley, where he played on the tennis team. I had dated other boys but I can’t explain the chemistry between us because beyond tennis, we weren’t alike at all. I was freckled and pale. He had dark hair and olive skin. He was studious. I was obsessed with tennis. He was Jewish. I wasn’t.

  I was serious enough about Barry, who was a year older, to wonder if I should apply to a college in the Bay Area too. But my grades had dropped off so much that the better universities like Berkeley were probably out of reach for me. Barry and I were also spending nearly all our time apart. The inevitable finally happened. A “Dear Billie” letter arrived. I found it on our piano, just like the other letters he used to send me.

  I don’t know how much our breakup had to do with religion. The funny thing is, Barry
and I both ended up in life relationships with nice Jewish girls.

  I debated throughout the 1960 presidential campaign with my conservative father. His dislike of Catholics, including John F. Kennedy, traced back to his biological grandmother being forced to surrender his mom for adoption at the Catholic-run home for unwed mothers where she was living when Blanche was born. I think Richard Nixon was the first Republican that Dad, a staunch union man, ever voted for. He explained it by grousing that he wasn’t about to vote for the son of an Irish Catholic bootlegger just because Kennedy was a Democrat.

  I, on the other hand, was ready for the New Frontier that Kennedy spoke about on the way to winning the election. I argued with my father that Kennedy’s faith shouldn’t matter and reminded Dad that he’d always told me that freedom of religion was a protected right in America. Kennedy was forty-three years old, our youngest and most dashing president ever, and I loved his inaugural address, in which he declared that “the torch has passed to a new generation of Americans.” I was inspired by his talk of ushering in a new progressive era, and the ways he challenged every individual to funnel energy into lifting the nation and the world.

  Idealism was in the air, and I was feeling it, too, until a disturbing incident that I’ve never discussed anywhere else, except in therapy. I was invited to take a road trip through Nevada and Arizona with two of my favorite female teachers and their families. They were traveling in separate cars to visit an out-of-state friend. I think I was invited along to babysit the small children that both couples had. I won’t use the teachers’ names here to protect the privacy of their children. Let’s just call them Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Jones.

  I rode the outbound leg of the trip with Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their son, who was maybe three or four at the time. Things got strange soon after we arrived at our destination. I was settling into a guest bedroom in their friends’ house when Mr. Smith perfunctorily knocked on my door and let himself in. I was sitting on my bed reading, and I was startled. He pulled up a chair to sit close to me by the bed.

  “You’ve been around a lot, haven’t you?” he began.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  “You know. You play tennis all over the place. You must have been with a lot of guys.”

  “What are you talking about—I’ve never slept with anybody!” I said truthfully. I couldn’t believe this was happening, and I was frightened. Why was he here? Why was he acting so inappropriately and so unconcerned that his wife and son were in the next room? I asked Mr. Smith to leave, and he reluctantly did. When I heard the door click, I jammed the chair frame underneath the doorknob, just to be safe.

  Today a sixteen-year-old girl might handle that situation differently. She might use her cell phone to reach someone she trusted for help or call an Uber and get the hell out of there. But I didn’t see an easy way out. I felt like I couldn’t tell his wife or friends because I didn’t know if they would believe me. It would be my word against his.

  I kept my distance from the Smiths the rest of that week. When it came time to drive back to Long Beach, I told my other teacher, “I really want to spend more time with you and Mr. Jones. Can I ride with you?” When Mrs. Smith interjected, “Oh no, we live closer. We’ll take her,” I was immediately anxious but again felt I had no choice.

  At one point during the long drive back to Long Beach I was stretched out in the rear area of the Smiths’ station wagon and dozing not far from their little boy, who was fast asleep. We were driving across the pitch-black California desert when I heard Mr. Smith announcing, “I’m tired.” Then Mrs. Smith said, “Oh honey, why don’t you lie down in the back and let me drive?”

  We pulled over, and soon Mr. Smith was lying next to me. I turned away, but when the car started moving again I felt his hands on my back—then his right hand slid over my shoulder and down the front of my blouse. “Stop it!” I said in a hushed voice, yet as defiantly as I could. He ignored me as I shoved his hand away, and he tried again. My heart was beating out of my chest. “No!” I said over my shoulder, twisting farther away. The little boy was still slumbering next to us, and Mrs. Smith just kept driving. How did she not hear me? Mr. Smith refused to stop, so I turned back toward him now to confront him. Again I said, “Stop it!” Unfazed, he touched my breasts with one hand as he moved his other hand to grope between my legs.

  That’s when I gritted my teeth and punched him so hard in the chest it stunned him. He stared at me, and I kept my left fist clenched as I told him in a cold, hushed voice, “If you touch me again I will tell my dad. And he will kill you. I mean it. He will kill you.”

  That stopped him. He pulled away.

  The second the Smiths’ car stopped in front of my house I threw open the door and ran up the front steps with my bag. I took a deep breath to steady myself before going inside to see my parents and I gave them a big hug and acted as if nothing had happened. I wasn’t kidding when I said my father would’ve tried to kill Mr. Smith for assaulting me. I didn’t want my father to end up in prison, so I told no one.

  Six decades later, the memory was revived by the torrent of similar or worse abuse stories that the #MeToo and TIME’S UP movements brought bubbling up. As we’ve learned, too, from the widespread abuses of boys by clergy members, the fear of speaking up about abuse is an all-too-common scenario, especially when there’s a power imbalance involved. For a while after my episode, I flinched whenever I ran into older men in certain situations, or if I saw a man who resembled the one who assaulted me. I sometimes would sit in our living room looking at my father and thinking, He has no idea what happened. In time, I pushed the incident out of my mind.

  My ability to suppress such unpleasant experiences rather than deal with them caused me a lot of angst later in life, when I habitually ignored, buried, or hid what was really going on. Of all the values my parents instilled in us, the most important was integrity. You didn’t lie. You didn’t cheat. You stood up for what is right. But I couldn’t be true to myself or anyone else about some things, especially when the truth seemed explosive. That’s a hard and lonely place to be. I would come to know it well. I was mastering what my mother meant when she told me, “Everyone has their secrets, Billie Jean.”

  * * *

  —

  In the spring of my senior year the USLTA ranked me No. 4 in the United States in both singles and doubles. When Harold Guiver, the businessman who had wanted to send me to Wimbledon the previous summer, made the offer again, I said yes. I felt I had put in the work and reaped enough results, thanks to Alice Marble, to earn a ticket to the center of the tennis universe. I will always be grateful for a favor that Perry T. Jones did for me that year as well, because I might not have done it for myself. He called me into his office at the Los Angeles Tennis Club one day and told me that Wimbledon had changed its rules and would no longer allow players to compete in both the juniors and the main draw, so I had to choose one.

  “What do you think I should do?” I said.

  The Czar said, “I think you should play the Wimbledon main draw.”

  Though the two-week tournament is located in the village of Wimbledon, technically it is hosted by the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club. The club formally refers to the Wimbledon fortnight as simply “the Championships,” as if the event resides on a plane of its own. Which it does. Wimbledon’s history stretches back to 1877 for men; women joined play in 1884. I had been reading about the place and the origins of tennis in Victorian England since I was a little girl. To be No. 1, you had to win Wimbledon.

  My roundtrip airfare to London and other expenses would cost $2,000, about as much as a new Volkswagen Beetle. Harold personally pledged some seed money and started a fund-raising drive to come up with the rest. He approached the Long Beach Tennis Patrons, the Century Club, local mom-and-pop businesses in Long Beach, even friends of friends. So many people chipped in. I didn’t think things could
get any better until Karen Hantze, my recent Junior Wightman Cup teammate, approached me one day at the Los Angeles Tennis Club and asked me to play doubles with her at Wimbledon. I’m living a dream, I told myself.

  As much as I enjoyed the self-reliance and independent thinking that singles require, I’ve always loved doubles more. I like the variables, the strategy, the camaraderie and collaboration involved. Most of all, I love being on teams. Being able to share victories or ride out setbacks together was a welcome change from always going it alone as a singles player.

  Karen and I had to sort out an early technicality about our partnership. Both of us typically played the left side of the doubles court, which is supposedly the dominant player’s side. We flipped a coin to decide who stayed there. I lost. It turned out to be perhaps my luckiest coin toss ever. Having to learn to play on the right side, too, made me a much more versatile player. Ken Rosewall, one of the great Australian champions, once told me the most important point of every game was the first point, because it’s how you establish momentum. Since every new game starts with a serve to the right court, there was more pressure on me to execute my service return there. I loved the added responsibility.

  Karen and I got a nice sendoff when we left home in early June to play a couple of the British warmup tournaments before Wimbledon. We posed for newspaper photographers at Los Angeles International Airport, two California teenagers heading abroad wearing our ready-for-England coats and self-conscious smiles. We held up our rackets like the pros do so the Wilson logo was visible for the cameras, even though nobody was paying us to do it.

  A day later I caught my first glimpse of England through the early-morning haze as our plane neared Heathrow Airport. The fields and foliage down below were so intensely green it seemed surreal. As we descended, the panorama of sparkling lakes and red-roofed houses came into sharper focus, and soon I could see the hedgerows and cars driving on the wrong side of the road. My knees were bouncing in place even before we landed. When I stepped off the plane my lungs filled with the cool, damp air. I had been here so many times in my mind it felt like déjà vu. I was anxious, but in a good way. Like the feeling you get when you’re falling in love.