Mary Hardwick, the retired British tennis player, picked us up at Heathrow. She drove Karen and me to Bailey’s, a once-elegant Victorian hotel near the Gloucester Road tube station in London. The next morning, Karen and I traveled to suburban Beckenham for the Kent Grass Court Championships, a Wimbledon tune-up. We stayed with an elderly woman in a dank, poorly heated house near a cricket ground. Karen and I shared an enormous upstairs room with two beds. We were each given five blankets and a hot-water bottle.
That night Karen and I lay awake in the dark, still buzzing because of the eight-hour time difference from Los Angeles. We tried to stay warm and talk over a downpour that sounded like metal ball bearings clattering on the roof. From across the room Karen said, “Hey Billie Jean, isn’t it your high school graduation tonight? Would you rather be here or there?”
“Are you kidding me?” I said with a laugh. I had missed my senior prom and countless other things for tennis. Look where I was instead! “This is a privilege,” I told Karen. “There’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be.”
The tournaments leading up to Wimbledon are a much bigger deal in England and Europe than they are in the United States. I couldn’t believe that the crowds and reporters from newspapers all over the world came hoping to get an early handle on who might win the championships. One of my favorite writers was Gerald Williams from the Daily Mail of London. With his black Clark Kent glasses and proper manners, Gerry seemed more like a scholarly headmaster than the sportswriters I encountered back home. He was married to a Scottish tennis player, and his knowledge of tennis was extensive. He went on to become one of the great BBC tennis announcers.
Gerry developed a paternal fondness for Karen and me and showed us the ropes. He would sometimes give us a lift in his car when we needed a ride. As usual, I was full of questions: Why does everyone eat strawberries and cream during the championships? Answer: The dish was a popular treat among the rich when it was served at the first Wimbledon in 1877, and the summer’s first strawberry harvest coincides with the tournament. Who gets to sit in the Royal Box at Centre Court? Friends and guests of Wimbledon, including the royal family.
“What’s Centre Court like?” I asked Gerry one day.
“Ahhh, come along, Billie Jean,” he said. “You have to have a look at the place before the tournament starts. There’s nothing like it in the world.”
My pulse quickened as Gerry steered his little car down the narrow suburban London streets, by the brick townhouses and through the roundabouts until we were rolling down Church Road and—there it was! I was finally here! We had arrived at the black wrought iron gates of the All England Club and my first look at the place couldn’t have been more perfect. The lush grounds were empty and still. Everything inside was dark green and purple, including the hydrangeas in large planters and masses of petunias spilling out of hanging baskets everywhere I looked. I remember the smell of the just-clipped grass as we walked in and the misty plumes of water that the sprinklers threw off as we passed the empty outside courts.
We followed a paved walkway and finally, looming in front of us, I saw Centre Court for the first time, the ivy-covered showplace where the biggest matches are played. I had been dreaming of this place for so long, and it was even better than I had imagined. It stood five stories high. From the outside it seemed even more massive than I had expected, more like a twentieth-century colosseum than a tennis stadium. Once inside, we walked in one of the painted cinderblock corridors and then ascended the ramps that led to the upper grandstands. When we neared the top, Gerry said, “Close your eyes and don’t peek until I tell you.” I trusted Gerry as he led me up the last bit of stairs and said, “All right. You can look now.”
Down below was the most beautiful tennis court ever created.
I’m not sure how long we lingered there—I just know I tried to drink in every detail. As I looked around I was struck by the perfect symmetry of the place. The grass was impeccably groomed and a rich shade of green. Centre Court is so sacred that nobody is permitted to play on it the other fifty weeks of the year, except on special occasions like the Olympics. The hand-operated scoreboard was blank, awaiting its next names, but the large clock showed the right time of day. The walls and seats and railings were painted the same dark green as the rest of the grounds. The feeling was serene.
The tiered stands at Centre Court held more than fourteen thousand people and yet, once we were inside, the space felt intimate. The acoustics were astonishing, too, as I would soon find out. Even when Centre Court is packed, the crowd falls utterly quiet before each serve is struck. But during and after each point players are confronted by a wall of sound after they win a great rally, shrieks of panic when a drop shot seems likely to parachute down just out of reach, and patronizing “aaahs” when a makeable shot is missed. Sometimes the crowd gasps at double faults or titters after some points like a jury shocked by some awful courtroom revelation.
Buildings tell you stories if you pause and listen. They hold energy and history. I felt all of that that first afternoon, and every time I played Centre Court or sat in the stands as a spectator. No wonder it’s called the cathedral of our sport. I’ve sat there over the years and thought about the players who came before me, the unforgettable champions and qualifiers who played their hearts out but never made it to the top. I imagined the great players in their all-whites floating like dancers across the grass: Suzanne Lenglen, Helen Wills Moody, Alice Marble, Don Budge, Fred Perry, Little Mo Connolly, Althea Gibson—everybody who was anybody. I tried to imagine the weight and pressure they felt and the joy and relief of their victories. I swear I could sense all of it from my very first time at Centre Court, and I meant it that first day when I turned to Gerry and said, “Can we just stay here forever?”
Until Wimbledon was canceled because of the worldwide pandemic in 2020, I hadn’t missed the tournament in sixty years.
* * *
—
Karen Hantze and I moved to a London bed-and-breakfast once our Wimbledon fortnight had begun. We washed our clothes in a basin and hung them to dry in our tiny room. The loo was down the hall. Our landlady followed tennis closely and she was openly skeptical that two teenage Yanks like us would survive even the early rounds. She wasn’t about to waste her time on us. For breakfast the first morning she gave us each a roll and a glass of milk and wished us good luck.
The draw for singles, doubles, and mixed-doubles competitions are always posted a few days before a tournament begins, which means you can trace your potential matchup in each round if you keep winning and moving through your bracket. I never checked the entire draw before play began because I preferred to take it one match at a time and not worry about the future. But Karen, who had played Wimbledon the year before, insisted on dragging me to the board when they posted the doubles draw. We were unseeded, but we knew that Maria Bueno and Darlene Hard, the best women’s doubles team, were recovering from cases of jaundice they had picked up in France. Karen looked at the remaining names on the board and said, “Billie Jean, we can win this thing!” Then she said it again, just to be sure I got it.
I did get it, but my debut singles match was scheduled first. Yola Ramírez of Mexico, an experienced player who had just lost in the final at Roland-Garros, was the fifth seed and I couldn’t believe it when we were assigned to Centre Court. In addition to managing my nerves, I now had to do a crash course on an important Wimbledon tradition: Ever since King George V became a patron of the All England Club in 1910, the female players have curtsied and the male players have bowed in unison if a royal was present in the box when they entered Centre Court. (The tradition ended in 2003, except if the Queen or the Prince of Wales is present.) Karen and I laughed as she helped me practice sweeping my right leg behind my left and doing a little dip without tumbling over.
Even by Wimbledon standards, the opening week was abnormally wet. The matches were backed up from rain del
ays. Yola and I didn’t take the court until early evening on Wednesday, Day 3. First we made a short indoor walk from the locker room to a little holding room where some officials made us pause. The walls there were lined with photos of past champions, and I checked out a few of them. When the door flung open and we got the go-ahead to walk out, it was like being born into a bright new world. My first ground-level look at Centre Court exploded into view. I saw the scoreboard again, but this time it had my name on it. When I scanned the Centre Court stands, thousands of strangers were now in their seats, blinking back at me as I looked up at them.
Before I walked out to play, I bent over and pressed my palm against the impeccably mowed grass, then plucked a blade and rubbed it between my hands. The court felt shorn as smooth as suede. I’m here at last, I thought. The most famous tennis court in the world.
When the match started I told myself what I always did: One ball at a time. One ball at a time. It worked for a while. Yola barely beat me in the first set, 11–9. I blitzed her in the second, 6–1. Then, in what I felt was a stroke of bad luck for me, the light was too dim for us to continue. There were no stadium lights at Centre Court in those days, let alone a roof. I was frustrated as Karen and I went back to our B&B. I told her I thought I could have won the match if we had kept playing. Now, anything could happen, and a few novel things did.
It’s hard to imagine this today, but Karen and I were totally on our own that entire month we were overseas—no parents, no coaches, no agents, no chaperones. We had been feasting on candy bars and Wimpy burgers, a London treat. I made some other really bad choices, too, like deciding to take Ex-Lax because I heard it might help me drop some of the extra weight I had gained. I tried it for the first time the night of my suspended match with Yola. I figured how much could some little chocolatey squares hurt me? Answer: I was up all night running down the hall to the loo. Way to go, Billie Jean. I was not in good shape the next morning. It didn’t matter. Yola went after my forehand in the final set and won easily.
At least Karen and I were still alive in the doubles draw. We were loose and giggly. Karen was technically perfect and just beautiful to watch, but she was also more deliberate and reserved than me. Already, I was getting a reputation as a talker on court. If I didn’t like a line call, I said so. But most of my noise was directed at me: “C’mon Billie! Move! That shot was El Choko!” Sometimes we had to avoid looking at each other to avoid cracking up.
I was shocked when we made it through to the finals, even though Karen had called it. We finally impressed our landlady, too. As Karen and I kept winning, she added orange juice, then eggs and bacon to our breakfast menu. By the time we reached the finals we were “her girls” and we were served whatever we wanted. We invited her to be our guest at the title match.
Our opponents were two Aussies, Jan Lehane and Margaret Smith. They had won the Australian Championships that year, so nobody gave Karen and me much of a chance against them. I saw for myself why Darlene Hard said Margaret would be the next big thing in women’s tennis. She was a tall, powerful girl who stood five feet nine and moved exceptionally well. She was a spectacular athlete, too. But in a pattern that I saw even in that first match against her, Margaret was a front-runner. If she got a big lead, she was unstoppable. When the score was close or she trailed, she could have trouble, susceptible to nerves as she was.
Karen and I broke Margaret’s serve in the second game of our match, and we never let up the pressure. We pulled off the upset, 6–3, 6–4. On match point I remember letting out a yell and throwing a ball in the air. Then I saw our landlady standing and clapping like crazy in our competitor’s box. At eighteen and seventeen, Karen and I became the youngest doubles team to win a Wimbledon title. We still hold that distinction. She and I were each handed a Duchess of Kent Challenge Cup, the winners’ trophy. Soon the wonderful Boston sportswriter Bud Collins approached to congratulate us.
Bud always called himself a hacker, but he was a good enough player to win the U.S. Indoor Mixed Doubles Championship with Janet Hopps that summer. He had coached tennis at Brandeis University (one of his charges there was a young student activist named Abbie Hoffman) before switching to sportswriting for the Boston Herald, and then The Boston Globe. He became one of the greatest chroniclers and raconteurs tennis has known and literally wrote the encyclopedia on modern tennis.
Bud was a passionate booster of the game, and he and I had a shared disdain for the stuffiness in the sport. As his retort to tennis whites, Bud began covering tournaments in the loudest, most flamboyantly patterned trousers he and his tailor could cook up. It was his trademark by the time he began working as a TV commentator, starting at WGBH in Boston. Eventually, he moved up to the major networks, including NBC, the first in America to broadcast Wimbledon—though at first only the gentlemen’s singles final, and on tape delay.
Karen and I didn’t know that our doubles win entitled us to attend the formal Wimbledon Ball until Bud told us. When we said we had too little money between us to afford celebratory Wimpy burgers, let alone buy gowns for the ball, he offered to take us to dinner that night at a little Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge, not far from Harrods department store. We had a great evening discussing tennis nonstop from the appetizers through dessert, and a lifelong friendship was born.
When Karen and I returned to our B&B, we threw our clothes into our carry-on bags to catch the next flight back to the States. Pan Am, the airline we booked, knew we had won the doubles title and they said they’d arrange for a limousine to pick us up and take us to Heathrow. At the airport, there was another man waiting for us at the curb to check us in and take our luggage. Once we were onboard the plane, our pilot made an announcement from the cockpit—“Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to inform you there are two Wimbledon champions aboard our aircraft”—and some passengers applauded. Then the flight attendants fussed over us the whole way back.
I couldn’t wait to tell Clyde Walker about all of it. I considered our Wimbledon title a gift to him, my parents, the sponsors who paid my way, the city of Long Beach, every last soul who had ever helped me. I had visited Clyde in the hospital before I left because he wasn’t doing well. His last words to me were his usual reminder, “Just have fun.”
Karen and I flew to Philadelphia after Wimbledon to begin the summer grass court season. I had been there for three days when I learned that Clyde had died of cancer. He was sixty-nine years old. His wife, Louise, told me the only thing that kept him going the last week of the tournament was waiting for our results each day. He passed away knowing that he finally had his first Wimbledon champion. He was so much a part of my life—my coach, my mentor, my dear friend who felt more like family—that I still often catch myself wondering, What would Clyde think if he saw this? I still talk to him almost every day.
Chapter 6
I had one remaining summer commitment before I returned home to start my freshman year of college. I was thrilled to be selected to play in the Wightman Cup again—but this time for the U.S. women’s team, not the junior squad. The Wightman Cup was the closest thing in tennis then to being on a big-league team since there was no women’s pro tour or Federation Cup yet. Nor had tennis been reinstated at the Olympics.
I loved how we were sharply outfitted for the Wightman Cup in tailored white jackets with a fancy American eagle crest sewn on the chest pocket. I earned my first per diem payment from the USLTA on that trip—$14 a day—along with my plane ticket to play in Chicago. To underscore that we were representing our country, our names weren’t on the scoreboard during the matches at the Saddle and Cycle Club. What you saw instead when you looked up was just “U.S.A. v. Great Britain.”
The British team was led by the veterans Angela Mortimer, who had just won the 1961 Wimbledon singles title; Christine Truman, the Wimbledon runner-up; and Ann Haydon, the reigning French champion. They were joined by an impressive newcomer, Deidre Catt. The press was calling
it the strongest British team ever assembled.
Because our best players, Darlene Hard and Nancy Richey, were ailing, our Wightman Cup roster looked like we were sending out sacrificial lambs. We were the youngest U.S. squad ever. Our top three players were eighteen and under: Karen Hantze, Justina Bricka, and me. We also had forty-three-year-old Margaret Osborne du Pont as a doubles player/coach, and twenty-one-year-old Gwyneth Thomas. But none of the pre-competition predictions mattered to us once play began. Soon we teenyboppers had pulled off the biggest upset in Wightman Cup history, sweeping the first four matches played.
My first Wimbledon doubles title a month earlier, and now this. I had never won a junior singles national title, let alone an international competition. It was the most fun I’d ever had on a tennis court. Then I flew home, and nobody outside my family seemed to notice how dramatically my life had changed. I was back to being Billie Jean Moffitt from 36th Street in Long Beach.
* * *
—
These days college coaches would fall over themselves to recruit a player who had already won a Grand Slam doubles title at seventeen. But sports scholarships were almost nonexistent for women when I began college in the fall of 1961. The 1972 passage of Title IX, the federal law that mandated equal opportunities for men and women at federally funded institutions, was still eleven years away.
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