All In

by Billie Jean King

  “It’s so beautiful,” Rosie said quietly. “It is like a cathedral.”

  It was great to have Rosie become part of the life I settled into in Berkeley that fall. I enjoyed the break from constant travel. I continued to cook and clean for Larry, and I loved the thought of being a lawyer’s wife once he graduated. But I already had this gnawing realization that I could never fit into a “normal” or “conventional” mold, whatever that meant.

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  The Bay Area had become the center of the radical universe in America by the time Larry and I arrived late in the summer of 1966. Sometimes when we met for lunch at the student union in the middle of campus I could see where the police had cordoned off streets to stop the protest marches. Larry would tell me about smelling pot or tear gas on his way home, or how the National Guardsmen would be chasing hippies as the hippies were yelling things over their shoulders like, “The revolution is coming! The revolution is coming!” That was about as close as Larry or I got to the serious action, but you couldn’t help being struck by the spirit of rebellion.

  Berkeley was being transformed by students who had traveled to Mississippi in 1963 and 1964 to help increase African American voter registration. They came back versed in civil rights movement tactics like civil disobedience. Some even acquired a taste for confrontation, which eventually led to sit-ins and contributed to a ban of on-campus political organizations.

  Just a few miles away from Berkeley, tens of thousands of draftees were being processed and shipped to Vietnam through the port of Oakland, and Berkeley students joined the antiwar protests that were in full swing. The Black Panther movement had taken hold on campus during that time, too, and Dolores Huerta and César Chávez were deep into their labor organizing work for the striking migrant (and mostly Latinx) workers in California, which led to the establishment of the National Farm Workers Association. Dolores became one of my heroines, and I would get to know her decades later. She told me she wished she had not acquiesced when Cesar came to her and suggested, “It would be better if we had one person speaking for us, not two.” That’s how he became the public front man for the movement while Dolores was the skilled negotiator and organizer who coordinated the consumer boycott of grapes and many other actions that eventually led them to victory.

  On the other side of the bay, the flower-child crowd had flocked to Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In in January 1967, a counterculture event that drew the likes of psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary, the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, and the activist/comedian Dick Gregory. It was the precursor to San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” that left the Haight-Ashbury district hailed as an epicenter of America’s hippie movement and drug use.

  That lifestyle was completely foreign to me, but insatiably curious as I am, I would engage the hippies in discussion. I’ve never seen difference as a bad thing and I always want to learn more. Ever since I was a child watching African American children my age turned away from schools, and then when I felt discrimination myself because of gender, I’ve harbored a deep sense of outrage as well. I can’t stand injustice or unkindness of any kind. In Berkeley, it seemed like everything in American life was being reexamined, including what it meant to be a woman and women’s roles in the workplace and society. I was questioning where I fit in too.

  The National Organization for Women was founded by twenty-eight activists at a national conference on the status of women in Washington, D.C., while I was winning my first Wimbledon singles title in 1966. I played Virginia Wade in the 1968 U.S. Open final on the same night that feminists held their famous protest of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. That uprising was conceived by Carol Hanisch, the radical feminist who coined the phrase “The personal is political.”

  Hanisch and the other organizers saw the pageant as an opportunity to gain publicity for their protests against America’s treatment of women by rejecting the “vapid” symbolism of Miss America, an image they said “oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us.” They favored threatening to burn their bras instead.

  My stand on feminism—even whether I should publicly use the word—evolved over time. When Larry and I first met, he was probably more sophisticated than I was about politics in some regards. In the beginning I could be very literal, too black-and-white. When I’d remark that, say, “I don’t get what burning our bras would accomplish,” Larry might counter that sometimes it takes the people on the extreme edges to move everyone toward the middle. Which is true.

  What I’ve also found is when you’re actually doing advocacy work from the inside, you have to be strategic to get things done. You have to realize that sometimes success comes incrementally. I often felt radical inside, but outside I tried to be pragmatic and measured. I wanted to take strong stands without alienating the people I was trying to persuade, and it was a constant high-wire act. As an activist, it’s a continual challenge to find the right balance.

  That said, I already had great clarity about where I stood on my sport by the time I arrived in Berkeley. By 1967, everyone sensed that change was finally coming in the business of tennis, and I had a choice to make: I could step aside, or I could help lead. Ever since my epiphany at the Los Angeles Tennis Club when I was twelve years old, I had thought tennis could be my platform to help create a more equal world. Now that I was No. 1, I decided it was time to raise the volume and see if anyone would listen. Walls were coming down everywhere I looked, including the one that usually separated politics and sports.

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  I began speaking out more just a few months after the heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused to go to Vietnam as a soldier, but more than a year before the Black Power protests at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics led by the American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith. They were expelled from the Games for their clench-fisted salute from atop the medal stand. Carlos and Smith attended San Jose State, which is just a forty-five-mile drive from Berkeley, and they were involved with Dr. Harry Edwards, a sports sociologist and activist who was helping athletes organize protests of human rights abuses against people of color. The UCLA basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, another ally of Dr. Edwards, skipped the 1968 Summer Games completely. Soon, another African American athlete, Curt Flood, would take on the reserve clause in Major League Baseball that bound a player to his team, memorably saying, “A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave.”

  In my mind, nothing illustrated the multilevel conflicts going on within America by the spring of 1967 as much as the firestorm surrounding Ali. As Cassius Clay, he had shocked the world by knocking out Sonny Liston to win the pro heavyweight title in 1964. That’s the fight where Ali jumped the ropes and began screaming, “I am the Greatest!” He often told a story about coming home to Louisville from the 1960 Rome Olympics and throwing his boxing gold medal into the Ohio River because he was refused service in a restaurant because he was Black. After being mentored by Malcolm X and others, he changed his name and converted to Islam. He refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army, on religious and moral grounds, uttering his famous line, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” Eventually, he was stripped of his heavyweight title.

  I read and admired Malcolm X’s autobiography, but I was too much of a pacifist to totally buy into his “by any means necessary” credo. I had been raised in a religious tradition that advocated the sort of nonviolent actions that Dr. King favored. I didn’t agree with everything Ali said then, either, but I strongly supported his choice to speak out against the war and to declare himself a conscientious objector, even if nobody was asking me at the time.

  I hated the Vietnam War. It made no sense to me. Why were we fighting there? What would “winning” even look like? Every week there were photos in Life magazine and news coverage on TV that brought home the horrors of the war—bloodied soldiers lying facedown in the mud, mother
s weeping over their lost children, caskets coming home draped in flags.

  Larry and I talked about Vietnam a lot. American soldiers were dying at a rate of more than two hundred a week in 1967. I was thankful that both Larry and my brother were in school. For the time being, they had student deferments from the draft. But if I didn’t want my brother and my husband drafted, how could I fault Ali? There was something about Ali’s manner and message that I connected with immediately. Once we began running into each other years later at charity banquets and sports events, we became quite friendly. We often talked about how you never know if you’re going to touch someone’s life or they’re going to touch yours, regardless of gender, creed, or color, so you have to be open and alert. Every time I saw Ali, he would lean toward me with that mischievous look on his face and make me laugh by whispering in his raspy voice, “Billie Jeeeean, you’re the Queen.”

  Muhammad paid dearly for his activism. He was suspended from boxing for three years, stripped of his title, and called a traitor by his critics. Yet he never let bitterness gain a foothold in his heart, at least that I could see.

  Around the same time Ali’s saga was playing out in 1967, another sports story caught my attention. A twenty-year-old university student named Kathrine Switzer registered as K. W. Switzer to run the all-male Boston Marathon. Racing authorities had always claimed that the 26.2-mile distance was too strenuous for women—I was tired of hearing that nonsense—and Switzer was determined to prove them wrong. About two miles into the course, a race official named Jock Semple saw her and tried to rip off her bib number while screaming, “Get the hell out of my race!” Photographers captured the moment.

  Semple was knocked to the ground by Switzer’s boyfriend, Tom Miller, a 235-pound former All-American football player and nationally ranked hammer thrower who was running beside her. Switzer completed the race about an hour behind the first female finisher, Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb, who raced unregistered for the second straight year. (Gibb wore nursing shoes because running sneakers weren’t made expressly for women then.) The Switzer-Semple story made international headlines.

  It would be another five years before women could officially enter the Boston Marathon, and twelve years before the women’s marathon was finally added to the 1984 Summer Olympics and won by America’s Joan Benoit. Chauvinistic attitudes in sports are slow to change. In 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, head of the International Ski Federation, was still saying that women should be banned from Olympic ski jumping because the hard landings might impact their ability to have children. A women’s Olympic ski jumping event wasn’t added until 2014. And that change came only two years after the ground shook, the azaleas parted, and the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, admitted its first two women club members. Civilization did not end.

  When I looked around tennis, I thought the USLTA’s treatment of women and its stance on amateurism were both outdated. Lawn tennis started in the English countryside as a social pastime for wealthy Victorians, and women had always been part of the tradition. And yet we were treated as second-class citizens, even if we played on the same size courts and in many of the same tournaments as men. To a lot of us, merely allowing women in the door wasn’t good enough.

  As far as amateurism was concerned, the traditionalists always resisted allowing professionals to compete at the major tournaments. As early as 1960, some progressive officials brought a proposal to the International Lawn Tennis Federation to annually sanction a dozen or so “open” tournaments, meaning that both amateurs and professionals could be in the same draw. The measure lost by five lousy votes.

  I often wonder how different my life would have been if I could have played pro tennis from the beginning of my career. I remember sitting in my dressing room cubicle at Wimbledon at ages eighteen and nineteen, looking at the older women and thinking, Why are you happy to be amateurs when the guys can be pros? You retire from hitting balls for ten years and you’ve never had any income coming in, you’re not trained for anything. What are you going to do with your life?

  I didn’t see a pathway. In 1964, I quietly tried to organize a group walkout at Forest Hills when a few other American women were complaining about various things, including the seedings and how the USLTA was giving more under-the-table money to foreigners than us to participate. I was only twenty, but I said, “Well, I’m willing to refuse to play.” I was seeded third and had more to lose than some of the others, but none of the unhappy players would join me. They were afraid.

  By 1967, the push for open tennis intensified. Jack Kramer’s traveling pro tour continued to dangle rich contracts and consistently siphoned off the best male amateur talent. Not that he helped any women. While Dennis Ralston, a top male player then, could turn pro and deflect the purists’ complaints about taking money by pointing out that he had a wife and kids to support, I didn’t have the pro option. I was putting my husband through law school by hoarding every dollar of expense money I could get, and we were barely making it. As usual, Larry worked hard. Now he was a pot scrubber for $100 a week at a sorority on campus where they also gave him dinner.

  It bothered me greatly that if I was an Australian, European, or South American player at my level, I wouldn’t have had to worry about money. The USLTA’s international counterparts were far more lax in their definition of an amateur. A top seed could make a thousand dollars just to be in the draw of some overseas tournaments, which is why so many Americans wanted to stay in Europe before and after Roland-Garros or Wimbledon. Yet the USLTA kept yanking the choke chain.

  The Australians were particularly brazen about supporting their stars. Bob Mitchell paid for Margaret’s apartment and gave her a weekly salary with no job requirement other than to play tennis. Volkswagen loaned her cars to drive. Slazenger paid her to use its rackets. Her countrymen Roy Emerson and Tony Roche were among those who had lucrative consulting jobs for equipment makers or other companies. When Kramer offered Australia’s Neale Fraser a $60,000 guarantee for two seasons on his professional tour, Fraser turned him down, saying it wasn’t worth it after the aggravation, expenses, and taxes he’d face as a barnstorming pro. He could make nearly as much as a phony amateur. It was a sweet life.

  I was raised to be honest, and I took integrity seriously. But now I was taking money under the table too—“the Green Handshake,” we called it—from tournament promoters, national association officials, and their sidemen. Every time I’d walk into a tournament I’d think, We’ve got to change this. I had to be my own agent and negotiate the payments I landed for me and sometimes Rosie, if we were playing doubles. I hated the wink-and-a-nod hypocrisy, but unless you had a rich spouse there was no other way to survive.

  The system became known as “shamateurism.” Arthur Ashe once said, “We all deserve Oscars for impersonating amateurs.” When purists complained that the pros Kramer signed were corrupting the sport, he scoffed, “A tennis professional is just an amateur who has started to pay taxes.” It was true, and everyone knew it. (Larry and I always reported my expense money to the IRS as income.) Tennis association officials were behaving like feudal overlords. They told us where to play, when to play, what not to say. They maintained power by keeping the amateur players dependent on the crumbs they rationed out. And sometimes, you couldn’t even count on crumbs, especially as a woman.

  My former doubles partner Karen Hantze Susman wanted to retire from tennis gradually, on her own terms. She was still the fourth-ranked woman in the U.S. by 1965 even though she’d cut back on her schedule as she and her husband were setting up a post-tennis life in St. Louis. Even in her finest moment, she had endured being diminished by the press as the “twenty-two-year-old housewife who won Wimbledon” in 1962. Now, when she entered the U.S. Nationals, she was left unseeded. That was a problem because only a handful of the top seeds got expense money. When Karen said she’d have to withdraw from the tournament if they didn’t pay her the $28 per diem, USL
TA officials called her bluff. Karen then defaulted her opening match against Margaret. The USLTA retaliated by suspending Karen from competition for six months.

  Karen was so disgusted and hurt she didn’t play singles again on the national level for thirteen years and never won another major. I never forgot that. Larry and I invited her to make a comeback when we started World TeamTennis, and Karen played one season with us.

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  By the time I returned to the circuit in March 1967, I’d had it too. I did some newspaper interviews before taking off for the South African Championships, my opening tournament of the year, and now I said what a lot of us had been thinking for a long time: The amateur tennis system in America had to change or we would continue to get our butts kicked on the international stage. I added that America was wasting its young talent and there wasn’t enough expense money for established amateurs like me to continue. “The Australians always are the best in amateur tennis because there is a whopping financial payoff,” I said. “They’ll always have the edge on us until the tide changes.”

  Later that year, I was part of our winning Wightman Cup and Federation Cup teams. I also swept the singles, doubles, and mixed-doubles titles at Wimbledon, the pinnacle. My compensation at Wimbledon for all that was a £45 gift voucher.

  I kept up my steady drumbeat of protests. I was derided as cranky and impertinent for telling a Chicago Tribune reporter that women’s sports stories needed to be moved off the society pages and onto the sports pages. When I came home from my Wimbledon sweep, not a single photographer or reporter was waiting to ask me a thing about it.