All In

by Billie Jean King

  I watched with great interest as the staid old All England Club, of all places, hosted an all-male pro tournament as a trial balloon event shortly after Wimbledon in 1967 to see how the public would respond. Centre Court was made available for the competition, another huge break with tradition. The event was a huge success. Thirty thousand people bought tickets. The BBC televised it live. This could be the answer that tennis needed. But again, where were the women?

  I kept pushing for change. I told reporters in the States, “There is no way amateur tennis is going to be available to everyone if only rich kids could play.” I said the USLTA, a nonprofit organization run by volunteers, had no incentive to grow the sport, adding, “They seem more devoted to their five o’clock happy hours at their clubs.” The USLTA was content to keep amateur tennis “pure,” which to them meant no salaried jobs, no lifeblood endorsement money for players, no reward for playing in tournaments other than the glory of the title and another trophy for the shelf. I could never understand it.

  Everybody wanted to interview me now. I was No. 1 in the world, and I kept talking. When Perry T. Jones publicly ripped all players who wanted open tournaments—the Czar said he wished he could drop an atom bomb to stop the effort—I spoke up again, even though I was in the middle of the U.S. Nationals. I said tennis was “fifty years behind the times.” I asked how anyone could live on the $28 per diem I was earning at Forest Hills despite being a Wimbledon champion and the world No. 1.

  At one point during the tournament, I took a walk down a gravel path and around the grounds with the USLTA president, Bob Kelleher, a federal judge whom I respected and liked. He said he wanted me to win the Sullivan Award that year, which annually goes to America’s best amateur athlete. I told him as much as I appreciated that, I couldn’t worry about amateur honors when I didn’t know how long I could even afford to keep playing tennis. I wanted our game to be pro. He told me I had to be patient. Soon we were raising our voices.

  “Let me tell you something,” Bob said. “You’ve got to keep quiet or you’re going to be suspended.”

  “Fine! Go ahead!” I shot back. Then I went on to sweep the singles, doubles, and mixed-doubles titles at Forest Hills with Rosie and Owen Davidson, the same as we had at Wimbledon. I did not shut up. I was not suspended. Your racket can do a lot of talking for you.

  I was in Australia in December 1967 when Wimbledon officials, buoyed by the summer trial event they had run, dropped a bombshell: They announced that Wimbledon would be the first major to welcome pros and amateurs, starting in 1968, in defiance of the International Lawn Tennis Federation. The All England Club president, Herman David, called amateurism “a living lie” and said even the pros who had been banned before could return. When I heard that, I yelled, “Yes!”

  The other big news at the Australian Nationals was that Margaret decided to end her brief retirement after marrying Barry Court, a merchant and yachtsman who came from a prominent Perth political family. She took his last name, so I beat Margaret Court in the Australian final. I had now won the last three Grand Slam singles titles and I had a total of five major singles championships overall. But my ability to make an honest living or gain financial security for Larry and myself had improved very little.

  Other than Margaret’s return to the tour, the talk of the 1968 Australian Nationals was Who’s turning pro? A New Orleans tennis promoter named Dick Dixon reacted to Wimbledon’s decision by announcing that he was starting an all-male professional troupe called World Championship Tennis. The Texas oil tycoon Lamar Hunt was the WCT’s financial muscle. The first players they signed, led by John Newcombe, were called “the Handsome Eight.”

  By January 1968, George MacCall, a former U.S. Davis Cup captain, declared that he was starting a rival pro outfit called the National Tennis League, and he’d signed Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Fred Stolle, Pancho Gonzalez, and Andrés Gimeno. George was in Melbourne to recruit more talent, including Roy Emerson and, to my surprise, me.

  Revolutionary change in tennis was coming. The ILTF, rather than picking a fight with Wimbledon, said in March 1968 that each national association could decide how to operate for itself. The rest of tennis had joined the revolt Wimbledon started, triggering the most significant event in tennis history: The Open Era had begun.

  I was twenty-four, and I had been playing on the amateur circuit for nearly a decade. When the news became official, I danced around our apartment in Berkeley and said, “Larry, isn’t it great?”

  Larry set his jaw and shook his head no. “Just watch, Billie Jean. Once men get open tennis, they’re going to squeeze the women out.”

  “C’mon, Larry!” I said. “We’re all friends! Why would they do that?”

  Chapter 10

  It took me about two seconds to tell George MacCall I’d play on his National Tennis League tour. George had hoped to sign Margaret as well, but she demanded to be paid more than me, which George wasn’t willing to do; I was now the world’s top-ranked player and Margaret’s comeback had begun unevenly.

  When George asked me who else he should approach, I suggested Rosie, Ann Jones, and Françoise Dürr, whom everyone called Frankie. They all jumped at the chance. I knew we were all good communicators as well as top players, and our mix of nationalities and personalities would have appeal wherever we went. We knew we had to be able to sell our sport. No women had toured as pros since Althea and Karol Fageros nearly a decade earlier, and four women had never been featured on the same card at once.

  My last match as an amateur was an unforgettable three-set collapse against Nancy Richey at the newly renovated Madison Square Garden. That defeat was on a Saturday, and on Monday, April 1, 1968, I was back in Los Angeles with Rosie, Frankie, Ann, and Roy Emerson. We held a press conference to sign our exclusive pro contracts with George. I felt like a mountain had been lifted off my back. Larry and I could actually breathe a little. The shamateurism hypocrisy was over, and we could finally earn a living in tennis out in the open, the way it should always have been.

  I quickly landed my first endorsement, a radio deal with Maxwell House that I wouldn’t agree to until I tried their coffee. I was also provided with a Hertz VIP card and my first charge card (American Express). To me, the cards were a sign of stature. At the time, even working women continued to have trouble getting a credit card or loans unless their husband, father, or employer signed for it. It was one of the injustices Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped change.

  Bob Kelleher, the same USLTA official who had urged me to pipe down during the 1967 U.S. Nationals, was now involved in making Forest Hills an open tournament, and he negotiated my two-year, $80,000 contract with George MacCall. I was promised more earnings if I surpassed a certain level of prize money at the events we played. George lured Emmo to our group with a guarantee of $75,000 a year, and I read that Rod Laver had signed with us for even more.

  Was I worth only half of what the top men were paid? You can guess my answer. But I was finally getting a living wage for doing what I loved, and I knew I couldn’t take on all the issues at once.

  The NTL’s opening professional tournament was scheduled to start at the L.A. Forum six days after we held our press conference in Los Angeles, and we sold fourteen thousand tickets by midweek. Four thousand tickets were bought by area businesses for under-resourced kids from Inglewood and the surrounding neighborhoods, which thrilled me. It felt as if another dream I’d always had—moving big-time tennis out of the private clubs and spreading it everywhere—was finally coming true. Before our event at the Forum, our MacCall pros were going to offer free clinics in Watts and East L.A. The plan was to mark courts on the streets in chalk, pass out free rackets, and have the pros show the kids some basics.

  Then everything came to a crashing halt. On Thursday, April 4, we heard the news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated that evening in Memphis. The shock and pain I felt was overwhelming. Dr. King was s
tanding on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel and turned to grab his coat when he was shot dead by a sniper. The next day I saw the now-famous newspaper photo of him sprawled on the ground while three aides pointed in the direction of the rifle shot. The horror of the moment was piercing.

  I loved Dr. King and his vision and the spellbinding way he spoke. Just the day before he was murdered, Dr. King had given his incredibly moving “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech and eerily alluded to perhaps not living long enough to see his dreams come true. Now the country was convulsing with grief and anger. He was dead at thirty-nine.

  Riots broke out in more than two hundred cities and towns across America for days, though not in Los Angeles, where we were. The only thing I can guess was that maybe the city’s ongoing recovery from the 1965 Watts riots helped keep the lid on the violence. Thirty-five people died in the Watts uprisings and more than $40 million in damage was done as L.A. raged and burned for four days. Dr. King had actually come to Watts forty-eight hours into the riots, hoping to ease tensions. Maybe that memory lingered.

  The Sunday after Dr. King’s death was declared a day of mourning in Los Angeles, and events were canceled everywhere—including ours. I used the free time to listen to a recording of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech over and over. Years later when Martin Luther King Day became a national holiday, a TV station in New York used to air his speeches in chronological order. What a gift.

  Keep moving, Dr. King once said, “and if you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, keep moving forward.”

  * * *

  —

  Our MacCall group flew from America to Europe to kick off a month-long stay in France and Britain. Before I joined the National Tennis League, I’d heard tales for years about barnstorming pros hopping from town to town, setting up a temporary court in a gym or a rec hall—or even on a rooftop—to play an exhibition match, then pulling up stakes and moving on to the next gig. It’s the sort of thing that sounds romantic, like running away to join the circus once seemed. But I couldn’t really imagine what it was like until I lived it.

  Within two weeks, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. I knew it was going to be hard work, but at one point I counted eighteen matches in twenty-one days. My knees, which were wonky even in the best of times after my car accident, were soon barking from the wear and tear. Every day, the pattern was the same: Arrive. Play. Move on. Repeat.

  We began by hopscotching all over the south of France, then up to Paris, Lille, then back to the south again to Pau and Aix-en-Provence. It was a blur. We were often flying in or out of some little regional airport that had a windsock flapping on a pole, and we were always connecting through Toulouse. If I never sit on a runway in Toulouse again, I’ll be happy. Then our troupe would pile into a van for some hours-long drive that was often spent teetering on the edge of some winding mountain road with no guard rails. Once at the venue, we’d jump out, hustle to change into our tennis clothes, then head straight to the court. We never knew what we’d find. Often, there wasn’t even a locker room.

  Cannes was the site of my first professional match. It was played in a tin-roofed gymnasium in a thunderstorm. The downpour was so deafening we couldn’t hear the umpire, let alone the ball hitting our strings. The air was so humid my glasses fogged up. We were playing before a hundred people, if that. At one point I walked up to Vic Braden, George MacCall’s second in command, and shouted over the machine-gun patter of the rain, “This is really exciting, Vic. I’m sure it will all be worth it someday!”

  Vic nodded and laughed.

  In the Po Valley, we played outdoors one night on a just-made black asphalt court that was laid to the exact dimensions of the playing surface and not an inch more, leaving a three-inch drop to navigate when we had to chase the ball to the out-of-bounds areas. Did I mention that the balls also turned sticky and charcoal black right away? In other venues, we had to brush cobwebs off the showerheads and toilets, or the water ran brown. Some places smelled of mildew, or worse. We woke early, ate on the run, and slept in hotels with faded sheets and lumpy mattresses, if we slept at all.

  As shaky as the conditions often were, those were cherished days for us. Everyone was figuring out this new world order as we went, and it was so much fun traveling together, learning from each other, discussing our vision for our sport. Laver, Rosewall, Gonzalez, and Gimeno had toured for years with Jack Kramer’s pro outfits, and they were like soldiers on a battlefield. They could sleep anytime, anywhere. Stolle, Emerson, and the four of us women had more adjusting to do. We all grew closer. Sometimes we were so wired after our matches we’d go to a local bar to wind down. The Aussies badgered me until I finally sampled beer, but my limit was one and done. Sometimes we’d drop coins in the jukebox and dance till 2 or 3 a.m., get up by 6 a.m. and do it all again.

  The only two autographs I ever asked for when I was a starstruck kid were from Pancho Gonzalez and Tony Trabert. Now I was playing mixed doubles with Gonzalez some nights and listening to his stories, including some about his own run-ins with Perry T. Jones at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. His given first name was Ricardo, and he disliked the nickname “Pancho,” a patronizing nod to his Mexican American roots. Even at forty, Gonzalez remained a study in elegance and one of the most intense competitors in the sport. Gussie Moran once said that seeing Gonzalez play was like watching a god patroling his personal heaven. Seeing him up close, I understood what she meant.

  Rosie, Ann, Frankie, and I became as tight as sisters during that tour. Rosie, who was still only nineteen, had been calling me “Old Lady” for a couple years now, ever since I stumbled clumsily during a match we played. Now she never called me anything else. Other people called her “Rosebud,” or “the General.”

  It was also Rosie who nicknamed Ann Jones “Annie Oakley” after Ann fell off a horse at Maureen Connolly’s ranch in Texas (she wasn’t hurt). Ann was, at twenty-nine, the oldest woman among us and she didn’t suffer fools gladly. She came from Birmingham, an English industrial city about one hundred miles north of London, and her working-class parents were both table tennis champions. Ann was a table tennis world finalist too, before she switched to lawn tennis. She said she wanted to get out in the sunshine.

  And Frankie Dürr, well—Frankie might’ve been the most colorful of us all. She was born in 1942 to French parents in Algiers and her family had to dodge bullets to escape the Algerian uprising against France in the 1950s. While we were touring she was dating a tennis player from the Caribbean who moonlighted as a calypso singer on the French Riviera. Frankie had won Roland-Garros the year before the MacCall tour, so she was already a star in her home country, and an absolute godsend when we needed a translator in small towns where no English or Spanish was spoken.

  Trouble was, Frankie still had such a heavy accent and eccentric English that sometimes we felt like we needed a translator to understand her. On the court, she made us laugh when she missed an easy shot because she would pound her racket into the ground while crying, “Sheet! Sheet! Sheet!” (Later, Frankie and the Dutch star Betty Stöve, who spoke six languages, used to kill time at our women’s tournaments by playing poly-lingual games of Scrabble that were impenetrable to the rest of us but provoked some comical word challenges between them. “We know what we’re doing!” Frankie would say.)

  I suppose George MacCall could’ve mounted a smoother tour, but his heart was in the right place. He would turn out to be as disorganized as he was charming, and I never got paid all the money I was promised. I think most of us didn’t. But this was an exciting first for women, and though we knew there would be more challenges ahead, we were on our way.

  In late April we flew to England for the official kickoff of tennis’s Open Era at the British Hard Court Championships in Bournemouth, the first sanctioned tournament where pros and amateurs could compete together. It should ha
ve been a great moment, but right from the start we had trouble with the lopsided purses. The men’s winner would get $2,400 and the women’s winner $720, a bad omen for women’s tennis. George refused to enter the four of us. The prize money we won went toward paying our guarantees, so I couldn’t blame him for letting only the guys play.

  Still, it drove us crazy to sit in London watching the televised matches from the lounge at the Lexham Gardens Hotel. We all threw pillows at the TV when Virginia Wade won the singles title, beating Winnie Shaw, another Brit. The women’s prize money went unclaimed because Virginia was an amateur and couldn’t collect it. That was a good deal for the Bournemouth organizers. Not us.

  George was soon threatening to have our entire troupe—men and women—boycott Roland-Garros in late May if the prize money didn’t improve. When the tournament landed more sponsorships, bumping up the total purse from $20,000 to $64,000, with $3,000 going to the men’s singles titlist and $1,000 to the women’s champion, George decided to send us to Paris. Easier said than done.

  That month, leftist students took over the city’s universities and marched through the streets to protest an array of issues. Millions of French workers went out on sympathy strikes. The country was practically shuttered for nearly a month and the protests reached such an angry pitch that French president Charles de Gaulle had secretly fled to Germany at one point, fearing a revolution. Luckily for us, Frankie was accustomed to French strikes, and she knew what to do. We flew from London to Amsterdam, rented two cars, and drove the 320 miles to Paris. The Champs-Élysées was flooded with demonstrators when we got there. There had been clashes elsewhere between protesters and police. It was unnerving, even scary, as we drove to our hotel.

  At Roland-Garros, the grandstands were nearly deserted. I was the top seed for the tournament and had little trouble getting through to the quarterfinals, where I was matched against Maria Bueno. We were scheduled to play on Wednesday, June 5. When I woke up that morning, I switched on the television in my hotel room. I knew that in California, where it was just after midnight, the Democratic presidential primary had concluded and I wanted to see if Robert F. Kennedy, whom I loved, had won. I met Bobby in 1965 when he was a New York senator and he presented me with my finalist trophy at Forest Hills. I believed that he was our country’s best presidential candidate. He said he was going to end the war in Vietnam and continue to support the civil rights fight. Despite all the chaos going on, he filled me with hope.