At about the same time I was following Clyde around Long Beach’s public parks as a kid, Margaret and some neighborhood boys were sneaking through a hole in the fence at a private tennis club near her home to hit, using whatever discarded tennis balls they found. Margaret, the youngest of four children, grew up in a tiny rented house without much money or comforts. She left home to train in Melbourne with Frank Sedgman when she was fifteen. Tennis was her ticket out.
Margaret definitely had a tough streak in her, and she stood up for her rights when she felt mistreated. I had already witnessed that before our 1962 Wimbledon match during her standoff with the LTAA over the national team coach Nell Hopman. That took guts. Tennis was wildly popular and so much more respected in Australia than it was in America. The credit for that went to Harry Hopman, a champion player and coach for twenty-two Australian Davis Cup–winning teams, and to Nell, his first wife, who was an excellent player, coach, and promoter. Harry was well regarded, but Nell had a reputation as a cheapskate and a bully. Margaret, even at age nineteen, was having none of it.
Shortly after I arrived in Australia I was asked by a local reporter, “Why are you here?”
I said, “I quit college and came down here to work with Mervyn Rose to try to be No. 1 in the world.”
It was the first time I had ever said that publicly, and I thought it was important. I didn’t want to hide my ambitions anymore, which is what women were expected to do. The reality was that I had put my life with my fiancé and family on pause, quit college, trusted a complete stranger to keep his word, and traveled eight thousand miles to the other side of the world with no guarantees. It was a huge gamble, but I felt it was one worth taking, especially with my new coach, Merv Rose.
Merv had a reputation for being tough and quirky. He was a powerful lefthanded player who won the Roland-Garros and Australian singles championships and five major doubles titles. He also had a temper. Some folks would later call him the John McEnroe of his day. Merv was famous for breaking three rackets in a single match. Another time, it started raining during a final and he tossed off his sneakers and played in his socks and won. He had a great sense of humor, but he was all business when he was coaching. He was the first full-time coach I ever had. I adored the man.
Merv took one look at chubby me—I was carrying a soft 155 pounds on my five-foot-five frame when I arrived—and he said, “Okay, Billie Jean, let’s see if you can do some road work.” I knew the Australians were fitness fanatics, especially Emmo and Margaret, and if that’s partly how they became the best, then I was willing to run my butt off too. You have to pay the price. Besides, I was getting teased about my weight on arrival, which was always a sensitive topic for me. Instead of even calling me a Sheila—Aussie slang for a woman—I was hearing, “Here comes Two-Ton Till.” Not good. I dropped fourteen pounds by the time I left.
November is warm in Australia, but December is the real start of summertime in the Southern Hemisphere and the temperatures can be brutal, often topping 100 degrees. I sweated buckets running before breakfast to get in shape. In the afternoon I’d hit with Davidson, Emerson, or whoever else came by. In between I had a long private session with Merv starting at about 9 a.m. The other players and I were thrilled when it came time for tournaments because the matches felt so much easier than practice. Our drills made me so much stronger psychologically, emotionally, and physically.
The first thing Merv did was remake my serve by teaching me to shorten my backswing and toss the ball more forward, and higher. That gave me greater extension and more power. It also put me a step or half step into the court already on my follow-through, giving me a split second more time to react to my opponent’s return. My serve became a better weapon.
Merv also set out to retool my feeble excuse for a forehand, the shot that opponents loved to attack, and a stroke that had defied everyone else’s best attempts to fix. Like Alice, Merv told me I was hitting too close to my body. His solution was to shorten my backswing and make sure I kept the racket head in front of my wrist on the follow through for increased control and accuracy. Today we don’t teach the forehand that way—the technique is more dynamic, the swing path is longer, and the racket speed is faster. But that’s not what I was taught.
My new motion looked strange, and it felt even worse at first. I was unlearning habits I’d honed my entire life. But the result was a much better forehand.
Merv also wanted me to examine how I thought the game. He was a huge proponent of percentage tennis, which basically means hitting the shot that gives you the best chance to win the point with the least amount of risk. That was a bit hard for me to reconcile because I loved the aesthetic joys of the game, the satisfaction that comes with hitting a perfectly placed shot on the run or playing a beautifully constructed point, and the charge you feel when the crowd responds to your showmanship or dramatic shots. What Merv stressed is that every decision should be for a tactical advantage, period. He would tell me to watch other players closely and then quiz me afterward: Why did someone choose a particular shot? Why did it work or not work? His approach was so rigorous I sometimes got headaches from how hard I was concentrating.
I was working more than I had ever worked before, and a leap of faith was required because it didn’t pay off right away. Between training sessions I was traveling all over Australia to compete. In Adelaide, I lost a three-set match to a little-known fourteen-year-old when I had thirty-five double faults with my new serve. More upsets followed. Mastering my new forehand took time too. The Federation Cup was going to be played in Melbourne at the end of January, followed by the Australian Nationals. The tennis world would be coming to us. I wondered if I was going to make a fool of myself when it did.
“Keep at it, Billie Jean,” Merv kept repeating. “It might take months or even a year, but this is going to pay off.”
“Why are you changing so many things? Why?” Lesley Turner said to me one day in the locker room after another dreadful loss. “You’re already No. 4 in the world!”
I said, “Lesley, you are so sweet. And I hear you. I probably could stay top eight the rest of my career. But I want to be No. 1. I came here to become No. 1.”
I spent my birthday and Christmas alone, and I was so happy when my dear friend Carole Caldwell, who was by then Carole Graebner, arrived to play the Federation Cup with me in January 1965. Larry and I tried to stay in touch by writing, and he was working some extra hours so we could afford a few long-distance calls. But it was hard being apart for so long. Having Carole in Australia was wonderful. She had married Clark Graebner, a top player who was later one of the protagonists in John McPhee’s classic tennis book, Levels of the Game. For the Federation Cup we were a two-woman team, and I served as playing captain because the USLTA didn’t send a third player. Australia won the cup, 2–1, by sweeping both singles matches from us. We played in suffocating humidity and sweltering temperatures that topped out at 107 degrees. It was amazing we didn’t get heatstroke.
I made it to the final of the Australian Championships, but Margaret beat me in straight sets, again denying me my first Grand Slam singles title. And yet, as uncharacteristic as it was for me, I actually wasn’t that devastated. I knew I was still adjusting my game and, having seen Margaret up close for four months now, I wasn’t that surprised when she ended up running off a fifty-eight-match winning streak that year, or a 105–7 overall record. Everyone was starting to wonder if she was unstoppable.
When I flew home from Australia, I knew in my bones that I was better situated to compete than I’d ever been before. I was a full-time player now, fully committed, expertly trained, and fitter than ever. Larry and I were thrilled to be reunited, and we began planning our September wedding.
When I went back on the road that summer, Margaret and I kept missing each other. At Wimbledon, I won the doubles with Maria Bueno, who had asked me to play after Karen Hantze Susman took a break to h
ave a baby. But Maria beat me in the semis of women’s singles and won her second straight Wimbledon title. Margaret and I didn’t meet again until the U.S. Nationals. Once again, it was a final.
When I walked on the court that day I knew Margaret was playing some of the best tennis of her life. But I was too. I was using that solid percentage game I had learned in Australia, and it was working. I thought I had her at 5–3 in the first set—until Margaret caught fire and swiped it. I was ahead 5–3 in the second set, too. To my shock, I didn’t win another game. Final score: 8–6, 7–5. What had just happened?
At first I was devastated and angry at myself. I left the grounds and took a long walk with Frank Brennan on Continental Avenue in Queens, and I told him, “I’m so upset I can’t breathe.” It was my fourth consecutive loss to Margaret in a Grand Slam. I wasn’t making mistakes that day so much as she kept playing better. She poured it on.
As I dissected the match with Frank, I realized something that would change my life, something Margaret seemingly already understood: The difference between a champion and the rest of the field is having the ability to lift your game when you’re under the greatest pressure. I had played conservatively against Margaret when I should have been in her face, going for my shots, playing to win. It’s something Roger Federer expressed similarly after he began lashing winner after winner in the fifth set to beat his longtime nemesis, Rafael Nadal, in their epic 2017 Australian Open final. Federer said, “I just kept telling myself, ‘Victory goes to the brave.’ ” I played it too safe against Margaret that day. That’s why I lost. Now I was convinced that I’d unlocked what created the gap between us—and how I could erase it. I knew I could beat her.
As I finished my walk with Frank, I said, “I’m going to win Wimbledon next year.”
* * *
—
Like so many other things in our life, the wedding date that Larry and I landed on was governed by tennis. We chose a Friday evening, September 17, 1965, so our tennis friends could attend between the end of U.S. Nationals and the start of the Pacific Southwest Championships. Many of them were in our wedding party. Sue Behlmar and Marcos Carriedo, our L.A. State teammates, served as attendants along with my brother, Randy, and Larry’s siblings, Mary Ellen and Gary. Carole Graebner was a beautiful matron of honor. My dear friend Jerry Cromwell was there too.
We had the ceremony at the First Church of the Brethren, just four blocks from my childhood home. It was an old-fashioned wedding. I borrowed my cousin Donna Lee’s wedding dress because we were the same size and I figured, why buy a new one? I took my vows in a veil and her beautiful gown of white Chantilly lace. The train was trimmed with pearls and sequins. We splurged for a bouquet of white roses for me. Larry wore a black bow tie, black pants, and a crisp white dinner jacket. We looked just like the little couple they put on top of wedding cakes.
My dad was teary-eyed as he walked me down the aisle. Mom looked radiant. Larry’s stepmom and his father were beaming. Everyone waved goodbye as we drove off to our honeymoon. Though Larry and I used to spend hours making out while we were dating, we didn’t have sex until our wedding night. Being a virgin until marriage wasn’t that uncommon in those days. He was twenty, I was twenty-one, and it was a far more naive time. We spent the weekend at a lodge in the mountains.
When I look back at those wedding photos, I’m struck by how fair and slender Larry was, how young we both looked, and how happy we were. We were so much in love. I thought we’d be together the rest of our lives, have two to four kids, the whole nine yards.
* * *
—
Nobody can really tell you how married life should be. You figure it out as you go. Larry had one year left at L.A. State, and I decided to go back to school as well that fall. We moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in Alhambra, a suburb near campus. We had $300 between us, a bed, and a few other pieces of furniture. Larry and I loved children and agreed we wanted to have them someday—just not yet. We thought we should wait until he had his law career going and I stopped playing competitive tennis. This was a fairly unusual choice then; a lot of our friends were already on their second child.
Beyond that, I was determined to be a conventional “good” wife. I told myself my life wasn’t about just me now, and I wanted to be there for Larry much like my mom had been for my dad. I hardly played tennis that fall and winter. Larry had a full course load and he was working the night shift at the Seal Right ice cream carton factory, a job he got after he asked my father for permission to marry me and Dad said, “Well, how are you going to support her, Larry?”
I took a job as a coach in Pasadena for a junior tennis community program for $32 a day. I would take Larry a homemade lunch and sit with him at 2 a.m. while he ate. When Larry came home in the morning the apartment would be clean, the laundry folded. We’d sleep a few hours and head off to school. Some days I’d stroll by the window of one of his classrooms just because I thought he was so handsome, and I’d think, Oh no! when I’d see him nodding off because he was so tired.
Scotty Deeds, our tennis coach, helped us earn a little more extra money by getting us jobs keeping statistics for L.A. State’s basketball team and passing out hot dogs and Cokes in the press box during football games. Still, Larry and I were barely squeaking by. Our idea of a big outing became sharing a twenty-five-cent ice cream sundae in the student union. Eventually, I had one of those moments like Scarlett O’Hara has in Gone With the Wind where she vows she’ll never go hungry again. One night I told Larry, “I can’t keep living like this!” I was serious.
By December, Larry had received a response from the Boalt School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, his first choice, one of the top law programs in the country. Initially, he was unsure whether he should apply there. His terrific LSAT score ranked in the top quarter of the top 1 percent nationally, but working full-time had adversely affected his grades. I urged him to try for Berkeley anyway, telling him, “C’mon Larry, what’s the worst that can happen?”—a remark that sounded brave until the envelope arrived and we were too scared to open it right away. We finally mustered the courage to quit staring at it and sat down on the bed to read the letter together. We were shaking as Larry unfolded it and he said, “Oh, my God…”
When I looked, I saw that it read “Welcome. And congratulations…”
“Yes!” I yelled.
At about the same time, we learned that I would end the year ranked No. 1 in the United States for the first time in the USLTA rankings. That was a thrill, too. We agreed that Larry would finish his spring credits and graduate in June, but I would stop classes again and resume being a full-time player. As it turned out, I would never return to college. It was the first big thing in my life I didn’t finish, and falling just short of completing my degree still bothers me. But I was all in.
I got a big taste of tennis’s insider politics almost immediately. When the USLTA board convened in February for what was usually a rubber-stamp approval of the year-end rankings, I was forced to share the 1965 top spot with Nancy Richey, who had been bumped down to No. 2. It was the first time the ranking committee had been overruled in eighty-one years. The backroom effort was led by Stan Malless, a USLTA big shot who ran the Midwest section. A few people told me, “Stan was mad at you and he was emphatic” because I had skipped his National Clay Court Championships that year. He joined Al Bumann, president of the Texas association, in lobbying for Nancy. Nancy’s father, George, was a well-connected teaching pro in Texas. He was so competitive he forbade Nancy and her brother, Cliff, who was also a top player, from speaking to opponents on tour, a habit they loosened only when they got older.
I was furious about the ranking machinations and told reporters so. And while the USLTA was undercutting me, the South African promoter Owen Williams had reached out to me and said he was willing to pay me $1,100 in expense money plus round-trip airfare to travel to Johannesbur
g for the prestigious South African Tennis Championships in March 1966. That was more money than I had ever seen at that point, and light years beyond the $14 to $28 per diem the USLTA paid us. The foreign players used to laugh because the USLTA paid them more to compete at our U.S. Nationals than it paid us. I was starting to think that just about everything about amateur tennis was rotten.
Agreeing to play in South Africa at that moment in history required a bit of soul searching. The fight to isolate South Africa because of its apartheid system wasn’t nearly as pitched as it became, but there was a simmering debate by early 1966 about whether visiting or staying away from South Africa was the best strategy.
Nelson Mandela had been sentenced to life in prison twenty months earlier. The International Olympic Committee had voted to ban South Africa from the Summer Olympics after prodding from activists in Britain and Europe. But in America, the push for the wide-ranging cultural, economic, and sports boycotts that South Africa eventually suffered wasn’t widespread yet. Most of the world’s top tennis players still went to South Africa then, if invited. Even Arthur Ashe, the only prominent African American player on tour, kept petitioning to play there because he felt he could make a bigger statement by showing up. It would be another decade before Arthur changed his mind about supporting the boycotts in the mid-1970s.
I had no idea what I’d find if I traveled there. I did know that when I looked around we were neck deep in our own horrible struggles over segregation and racism in the United States, and that conflict was global. I thought a lot about how I had traveled to play in Moscow at a time when Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were high, though not everyone agreed with that trip. Our government’s philosophy then was that it made more sense to engage people. Ultimately, I decided to go to South Africa.
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