All In

by Billie Jean King

  As I watched the news, I couldn’t understand what the French TV newscaster was saying but from his expression it seemed that something was wrong. First they showed video of Bobby smiling and waving after his victory speech in a Los Angeles hotel ballroom. I could see Rosey Grier, the retired defensive linesman for the L.A. Rams, towering over Bobby’s wife, Ethel, who was standing behind her husband. Then the footage cut abruptly to pandemonium in the crowd, horrified faces, and the image of Bobby on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen with a busboy crouching protectively over Bobby’s bleeding head.

  I was panicked as I dialed Larry in Berkeley. It seemed to take forever for the international call to go through. Larry had been watching the news, too. He told me that Rosey had wrestled the gun out of the assassin’s hand and held him down until the police arrived. Bobby Kennedy was now in surgery at a Los Angeles hospital. By midday in Paris we were told that he was in a coma, barely clinging to life.

  I had a match to play, and I didn’t know what to do beyond move forward. I shut out the sorrow long enough to get by Maria, 6–4, 6–4.

  When I went to sleep that night Kennedy was still clinging to life and when I woke up the next morning he was dead. Gone at forty-two. I sat there alone, sobbing softly in my hotel room.

  The rest of my tournament was forgettable. I felt like I was sleepwalking. I was having trouble getting the assassination out of my head. It was one of those days in life—much like 9/11 would feel decades later—when you literally wondered if the whole world had gone crazy. It was painful and disorienting to add up all the killings: Medgar Evers and JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, now King and Bobby Kennedy gone two months apart.

  That evening, I thought I had settled down enough for the semifinals. I was scheduled to play Nancy Richey, which helped me refocus a bit. We hadn’t played since March when she rallied to beat me at Madison Square Garden. Nancy had chosen to remain an amateur, and I wanted to prove what I had been saying all along: Professionals are the best of the best. But if you let yourself think of the outcome rather than each ball coming over the net, you’re inviting trouble.

  I took the first set. But Nancy played brilliantly the last two sets and smartly moved the ball around so I couldn’t chase much down. She deserved her comeback victory. The next day, she did the same thing to Ann Jones, reeling off fifteen straight points after falling behind 2–5 in the second set to take the title.

  My hope of owning all four major titles at once—a non–calendar year Grand Slam—was gone. The exhaustion of playing the NTL schedule seemed to be catching up to me as well. I had known for a while that I had chondromalacia, or trouble with the tissue behind both of my kneecaps, as a result of my car wreck. Plus, I was still on antibiotics and a nondairy diet for colitis. Now I was also diagnosed with stress-induced asthma. It was all I could do to last two sets some days.

  I withdrew from the Kent Open to recover for two weeks, which touched off speculation that I would not be able to play Wimbledon. There was no way I was going to miss it. I was now the two-time defending champion and the top-ranked player in the world, and my parents had agreed to join me in London for the first time.

  It took a lot to convince those two homebodies to fly to England. Bringing them there was a small way for me to thank them for all they had done for me. They had been hearing me go on about Wimbledon for years. I wanted them to see the center of the tennis universe for themselves.

  * * *

  —

  My parents were taken aback by the size of the stadium crowds and the elegance of the Wimbledon grounds. Mom couldn’t get over how the spectators seeking tickets for the next day’s matches lined up all night on the road outside the All England Club swaddled in blankets or sleeping in makeshift tents. I was a little worried that Dad’s temper might show during one of my matches, but I needn’t have been. Dad was on his best behavior, perhaps in part because of the unlikely new pal he made on the trip, a Roman Catholic priest named Father Roland, who was a dear friend of my coach, Frank Brennan, and his family.

  It was hilarious to see my dad, who refused to vote for John F. Kennedy on religious grounds, become fast friends with a man who doled out communion. Go figure. Larry and I had installed my parents in a room down the hall from us at the Lexham Gardens Hotel. My dad and Father Roland began taking the London tube together with my father clutching a rolled-up copy of each day’s tennis schedule. He would study it each morning and use a red pen to circle the names of all the Americans who were playing that day. “Gotta see the Americans!” he would tell me as he bustled out the door.

  Wimbledon’s decision to become an open tournament that year had sparked the rest of tennis to follow along, but that didn’t end the heated debate about whether allowing professionals was a good idea. There was a backlash in the press and among the public that the pros made tennis too “commercial,” as if that’s a dirty word. There was handwringing that money would bleed the honor out of the sport, as if we could eat or survive on “honor.” I still loved Wimbledon as much as ever, but I began to feel that Wimbledon had stopped loving me back.

  I could hear a change in the tone of the reporters’ questions. When Rosie, Ann, Frankie, and I got to the women’s locker room, we got the cold shoulder there, too, from most of the women who had remained amateurs. That hurt more than anything. When you can see things so clearly and everyone looks at you like you’ve got six heads, it’s hard on you. There was a transition going on in our sport and I felt an urgency, bordering on a sense of panic, that the women would be left behind. The idea that our pro foursome’s success might make the sport better for all women players seemed to get lost.

  I was trying to become the first woman to win Wimbledon three consecutive years since Maureen Connolly, a significant achievement. But the crowds’ polite clapping as I made my way through the draw began to feel halfhearted, maybe even a little passive-aggressive at times—never more so than when I saved a match point in the second set against their home girl, Ann Jones, and rallied to win our semifinal in three sets. I’d have almost preferred to hear boos. At least that would’ve been honest. I was no longer the spunky little underdog who amused everyone on arrival with her stream-of-conscious chatter and giant-killing upsets. I was one of the invading pros. But I wasn’t about to apologize for it. As I told a British TV interviewer who suggested that my ambition might turn people off, “I’m out here to win…In America, we’re brought up very differently than English children. ‘Did you win or did you lose?’—that’s all that they ask at home. They don’t care about the rest. You’re a loser and that’s it.” By the time I edged Judy Tegart in our tense final 9–7, 7–5, I told myself I had to get thicker skin. But it helped to know I wasn’t the only pro who felt vindicated. All of us felt we had something to prove that year.

  Rod Laver was playing Wimbledon for the first time since he’d been suspended six years earlier for turning pro on one of Kramer’s tours. Though Rod won his third career Wimbledon title by beating Tony Roche the day after I beat Judy, he said he actually felt the proudest on the opening day of the tournament. Then he explained why.

  Rod said when he captured his first Wimbledon title in 1961 he received an All England Club necktie, the same as all the men’s winners did then in lieu of prize money. When he turned pro two years later, he received a stern letter from the All England Club ordering him to never wear the tie again. He’d been banished.

  “I took enormous satisfaction from dragging out my old purple and green Wimbledon tie that had been unceremoniously yanked from my neck, and putting it on,” Laver said after he won the 1968 title, adding that he wasn’t the only former champion who felt that way. Thirteen former winners in the men’s field had returned to Wimbledon now that it was open to all. Pancho Gonzalez was in the men’s draw after two decades away, and Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad appeared for the first time in twelve years.

  I think Mom and Dad
had to leave the United States and experience Wimbledon to truly understand the scope of our fight to transform tennis, not just the thrill of seeing me win the most important tournament in the world.

  Chapter 11

  The new professional life I was leading had repercussions for Larry and me beyond putting me back on the road for weeks at a time. When the ILTF opened pro tennis in March 1968, a lot of the promoters were caught flatfooted. Larry and I had anticipated the need for more professional tournaments, especially for women. He and a group of his law school friends quickly got together with another Bay Area pal, Hap Klopp, who had just bought the North Face outerwear company, to stage an event at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.

  We called it “Tennis for Everyone,” a progressive play on the old country club cliché “Tennis, anyone?” In coming years, Larry and I would stage more of them, pairing the pro tournaments with free clinics we’d hold during the week, often on public courts in communities where tennis wasn’t usually played. Larry and I had been wanting to do something like that for under-resourced youth in the Bay Area since we moved to Berkeley. Our idea was to get children involved early and give them a lifetime sport to care about.

  Our first event in Oakland offered $10,000 in guaranteed prize money, and the field was built around seven of us from the MacCall tour, four men and the other three women. Given the debt I felt to Althea for being my long-ago inspiration as a child, we invited her to play with us as a pro, and we were thrilled when she accepted the last spot in the draw. Even at forty, Althea was still lean and athletic. The fans who came out for that first Tennis for Everyone event saw African American and Latinx champions playing our game, not just white people from effete clubs, which is something I had always wanted. Larry did too.

  Larry didn’t tell me until afterward that he had taken $5,000 of our money—in fact, all of our savings—and risked it on the tournament. I couldn’t believe it. Why didn’t he discuss it with me? By that point I had never made more than $7,000 a year and Larry was still a year away from graduating law school. I take chances, but I’m a big believer in financial stability, and having at least some “rock” money on the side that you only touch in an emergency. I was stunned and alarmed at the risk he unilaterally took.

  Luckily for us, that first Tennis for Everyone tournament was a success on every level. It earned about $5,000. And that’s how Larry the Lawyer became Larry the Promoter. Larry always said it was a curse to make money on his first tennis event because he immediately thought he was an expert. And he had the bug.

  The next year we lost $10,000 on the same tournament because it rained so hard in Oakland the authorities were warning motorists to stay off the Bay Area bridges. The bad weather virtually eliminated our walk-up ticket sales.

  When we first got together, Larry had told me he never wanted to be broke, as his father was always struggling. I took that as a sign that Larry would be frugal with money, the same as me. I was wrong. To Larry, avoiding his father’s fate meant taking risks to try to get ahead. There was something he liked about having ten balls in the air and being right on the edge of disaster, figuring it out as he went along. As soon as he had money in his hands, he was chasing the next big idea. He always thought he’d win. In the coming years, he invested in such things as inventing a smokeless ashtray and a national roller hockey league, in addition to all the ventures that were ultimately successful.

  We were already apart for weeks at a time now because of my touring schedule and Larry’s law studies, and we thought if Larry became a promoter it might draw us closer together. But from that very first Oakland tournament in 1968 we realized we needed to book two hotel rooms when we were both working. He needed to be on the phone night and day, and I needed my rest. Sometimes we’d get adjoining rooms so we weren’t completely separated. But it was another sign that we were starting to spin off in different directions. Sometimes our lives felt like Irresistible Force meeting Immovable Object.

  When Larry was washing pots at the sorority, he told me he used to go to their mixers for something to do while I was gone and dance with some of the girls because, as he said with a laugh, “They considered me ‘safe’ because I’m married.” But he never once told me not to pursue a tennis career. I, in turn, never wanted to stand in the way of him chasing fulfillment. I think we both felt that’s part of loving someone. It was just excruciatingly hard at that age to know how to reconcile it all as a couple.

  When Larry accepted a summer internship with a white-shoe law firm in New York City he was entertaining the idea that Manhattan might be a good place to settle down and build a practice. After a few weeks of staying with one of my former host families on Long Island Larry came to dislike the grinding commute and took a room in the city to be nearer his office and save time. Unfortunately, that was the summer the city’s garbage truck workers went on strike, and the Manhattan streets were a steaming, pungent mess. He decided that the concrete canyons of New York City weren’t for him.

  I advanced to the final of the first U.S. Open, as the U.S. National Championships were now called. I spent the night before my match against Virginia Wade in my hotel room with my left knee propped up on a guitar case while tears rolled down my face because of the pain. It took Virginia only forty-two minutes to dust me off in the championship match the next day. The only bright spot of those two weeks for me was watching Arthur Ashe become the first African American male player to win the tournament. It was moving to watch Arthur make history with his father and brother present, and later to see him land on the cover of Life magazine.

  Knowing I couldn’t put off knee surgery any longer, I checked into Pacific Hospital in Long Beach that September. When I woke up from the operation, the pain was excruciating. It made sense when my terrific surgeon, Dr. Donald L. Larsen, came into my room and told me how much damage they had found behind my left kneecap. But when he added, “Don’t count on playing Wimbledon again,” I was stunned. Then I became upset. I sat in bed thinking, This can’t be the end. It can’t be. Pro tennis has just begun, I’m still a month away from my twenty-fifth birthday and I’m going to miss out on my dream? After fighting so hard? For a few days, I remained distraught. Then I said to myself, No. No way it ends here! I am going to play again. And I’m going to win.

  I was back on the court in a month. I returned to Berkeley to recover, and Larry would soft-toss me tennis balls as I stood leaning on a crutch I held under my left armpit while swinging my racket with my right hand. Sophisticated rehab regimens didn’t exist in those days, so I followed what the doctors told me to do, like taking hot baths to improve the range of motion in my knee. Years later we learned it was better to apply ice after workouts. Still, I felt good enough by January 1969 to enter the Australian Open. I knew I wouldn’t win it, I just needed match play. That meant hitting the road again, and more weeks apart from Larry.

  We were spending even more time talking about the Vietnam War now because Larry’s student deferment would end in June 1969 when he graduated. It was a stressful time. Both of our fathers had enlisted during World War II and the idea of service had been drilled into us: When you are called, you go. After a lot of long, late-night discussions, Larry decided to join the Army Reserve. If he volunteered rather than wait to be drafted he had a chance of staying out of Vietnam and could begin his law career. I saw the wisdom in that. But I was unhappy when Larry accepted a job with the Honolulu law firm of Pratt, Moore, Bortz & Case.

  Larry had fallen in love with Oahu on a past visit there, but his desire to go to Hawaii was problematic. I wanted him to be happy, but practically speaking, living in Hawaii meant I’d have to fly five or six hours to get to tournaments on the West Coast, twelve hours to get to the East Coast, and Europe was half a world away. Also, there was no top-flight pro tennis culture in Hawaii. Who would I practice with?

  I began to feel conflicted, a bit unsettled, unsure where we were headed when he refused to reconsider
. The philosophical fault lines that were starting to show in our relationship, our communication breakdowns, the long separations from each other, had all been in play with Larry and me for months. I was starting to wonder if Larry and I would have been better off if we had been able to live together first instead of marrying so young, before we’d even seriously dated anyone else. We had always agreed we wanted to have kids, but we were always putting it off for some reason. Now it was the advent of open tennis and waiting for his career to start. I still loved Larry and he loved me, but I was starting to question what I was doing—even who I was.

  When we first began dating, I had told Larry that I sometimes felt attracted to women as well as men, and that a woman and I had kissed once in college. I had never told anyone that before. I felt there was no one safe to confide in. But after Larry and I became very serious, very quickly, I thought I had to tell him. I didn’t know how to make sense of it myself. I don’t know if younger people today realize how shame based and dangerous it was in the 1960s to be gay, how complete the curtain of silence was, how insidious the fear of scorn and reprisals was, how deep the closet went.