All In

by Billie Jean King

  We called a players’ meeting for the following morning to revisit taking the prize money off the table. The gathering took place in a conference room at the Houston Racquet Club after an instructional clinic we held but before the first match of the tournament was scheduled to begin. Gladys, the tournament organizers, and the two Slims marketing officials joined us.

  I argued that we should defy the USLTA, and Rosie agreed that reverting to shamateurism was unacceptable. Patti Hogan expressed amazement that the USLTA was actually encouraging “a return to the very evil that open tennis was supposed to have eliminated.” But if we rejected that condition, the other issue we would have to address was how to transcend the USLTA’s threats to suspend us or withhold sanctioning our event. Then the answer came to us: Gladys could sign us as contract pros for that week, same as George MacCall and Lamar Hunt had done for the men on their tours. Past precedent suggested that both the club and our tournament should be considered outside the USLTA’s jurisdiction, although given the present climate, who could be sure?

  “But I can’t pay you,” Gladys said.

  “Then make it one dollar,” I told her. “A dollar contract is as binding as a trillion dollars.”

  Our livelihoods hung in the balance. The stakes were huge. It was 2:45 p.m. now, forty-five minutes before the first match was set to begin, and reporters were in another area of the club waiting to talk to us. The players asked everyone but Gladys to leave our meeting room. We voted unanimously to defy the USLTA—to play and risk being suspended. Then Gladys dictated a one-sentence agreement that Patti Hogan wrote down on a notebook. It read “We, the undersigned, declare ourselves under contract to World Tennis magazine, at a guarantee of $1 per player.” As each of us added our signature, Gladys handed us a dollar bill.

  I can’t remember if my hand was shaking as I took my turn signing, but I do recall that my heart was thumping and my stomach was churning. This was revolutionary. We had finally decided to control our own destiny.

  I hurried out to a pay phone and called the USLTA’s Alastair Martin. I wanted to do things right, so I asked him one last time if the USLTA would offer any more tournaments for women to play that year. He told me nothing had changed. So I told him, “Well, then I’m sorry, Mr. Martin, but you’ve left us no choice. I didn’t want you to read this in the newspaper tomorrow without me calling you. We’ve decided to play.”

  I hung up the phone, ran to where the others were, and said, “We’re a go!” And that’s when we lined up and The Houston Post’s Béla Ugrin snapped a photo that became iconic: It shows Gladys holding up our contract and eight of us players holding up our $1 bills and smiling. We became known as the Original 9.

  We had no idea what the future held. But what’s that saying, Faith is stepping off a cliff and hoping you grow wings? That was us. And grow wings we did.

  * * *

  —

  Thrilled as I was that we didn’t back down, my mind was already racing ahead to the landscape we’d encounter once the euphoria of the Houston tournament waned. Remember, October was just days away and there were only two USLTA tournaments scheduled for women during the next six months. We desperately wanted to start our tour in three months and yet we had no infrastructure, no sponsorships or promoters. The pressure was on.

  I lost my first-round Virginia Slims match to Judy Dalton, but Rosie, fresh off her terrific runner-up finish to Margaret at the U.S. Open, was moving toward Saturday’s final. She was as concerned as I was about our future as a group. Gladys felt the same, so she was back to working her connections as only Gladys could.

  Rosie and I had asked Gladys several times if she would consider running an expanded tour for us beyond Houston, and she always told us that she was too busy with her other work. During the U.S. Open a couple of weeks earlier, Larry and Dennis Van der Meer, our partner in TennisAmerica, had attended Gladys’s annual World Tennis party at her Manhattan apartment, which was the social event of the fortnight, and openly told people about their willingness to promote some tournaments. Rosie mentioned the possibility to some reporters the next day during a tournament rain delay. Now I called Larry and asked him if he could fly from California to Houston to present a plan before we disbanded, and then I told a Houston Chronicle reporter that Larry was on his way.

  Larry arrived in time to join us at Gladys’s house on Saturday night for the spaghetti dinner party we had to celebrate the tournament’s success. When we finished eating, we asked if Larry could present the proposal that he and Dennis had devised about what to do next, and we moved to one of the large bedrooms. Gladys didn’t join us.

  Larry admitted that he didn’t have any sponsors lined up yet but he’d chase them. He was willing to start by promoting three or four events on the West Coast because we needed places to play going forward. When we voted unanimously to hire him, Gladys’s daughter Julie became upset. I’m not sure if Julie knew that Gladys had kept telling Rosie and me that she didn’t want to run a tour if we launched one. Julie thought we were pushing her mother aside.

  Larry found Gladys in the kitchen and told her, “Gladys, I’m only here because we thought you didn’t want to run a new women’s tour! We’d much rather help you than undertake the project ourselves.”

  Then Gladys said what we’d hoped for all along: “I do want to run it!”

  There was no precedent on how we should construct a women’s-only tournament circuit. That same night, we discussed what would be a reasonable amount of prize money per event. The players agreed to be honest with each other about what we were making under the table. I said I got $1,100 a week, and I thought that was a huge payday. Val Ziegenfuss said, “Are you kidding me? I’m lucky to get a plane ticket!” Many of the others didn’t get anything beyond nominal expense money.

  I said I didn’t give a damn if the trade-off for going our own way was that I’d never play another Wimbledon. Nancy and Rosie said they didn’t care, either. But some of the other women were still saying, We have a lot to lose. Finally I said, “Lose? Lose? What do we have to lose? What do we have now? We have fewer and fewer places to play. When we do play with the men, it’s an eight-to-one ratio of prize money even though we’re playing in front of a packed house. So you think they’re giving us something? Me personally, I think they’re giving us absolutely nothing. I think we have nothing to lose!”

  “We could fall flat on our faces if we start a tour,” I continued. “There’s a great chance we are never going to make the big bucks ourselves or enjoy the adulation that future generations might. But are you willing to do this just because it’s the right thing to do?” We took our vote, and it was unanimous. Gladys would run a breakaway tour in which we all committed to play.

  * * *

  —

  The Houston tournament was a success despite being thrown together in under two weeks, and Rosie was proud that she won that first title, beating Judy in straight sets. We had also made sure that our winner earned $2,000, $500 more than the women’s singles champion at Kramer’s Pacific Southwest event could make. Two weeks after that, four of us held a press conference at the Philip Morris headquarters in New York to announce the Virginia Slims/World Tennis professional women’s circuit for 1971, and Gladys uttered a memorable line to the assembled press: “You’ve heard of Women’s Lib? This is Women’s Lob.”

  For us, a tour with women in charge was a dream come true. Our stated goals, from the start, were three-fold: We wanted to make sure that any girl in the world, if she’s good enough, would have a place to compete; that women and girl athletes would finally be appreciated for their accomplishments, not just their looks; and that we’d be able to make a living.

  In the short term, we still had a few more skirmishes. We had threatened to boycott the Pacific Coast Open in Berkeley—the tournament right after our Houston event—because the total women’s prize money there didn’t meet our new $10,000 minimu
m. This time the promoter, Barry MacKay, agreed to get another $7,600 for the women’s purse, making it $11,000 compared with $26,000 for the men. We were showing what women players could do when we stuck together and others were willing to champion us. The additional money came from the San Francisco native Alvin Duskin, a left-leaning social activist and clothing designer whose popular sweater dresses were favored by fashion icons like Twiggy.

  The USLTA did make another attempt to divide and conquer our group. A little over three months after the Houston tournament, the USLTA said it would forgo suspending everyone who played there—except for Rosie and me. The USLTA’s excuse for singling us out was that we had already been reinstated once after turning pro on the MacCall tour, and twice was not possible. Once again, they were making up rules on the fly to pressure us. We had only forty-eight hours to respond before play began at our first 1971 Virginia Slims Circuit stop in San Francisco. Once again, our players’ response was unanimous: The USLTA would reinstate all of us, or none of us would play their events. We were again speaking as one voice, and it made all the difference in the world. We were all reinstated.

  Philip Morris had a lot of promotional money to spend because all cigarette advertising on television had been banned, and so they chose to invest a significant amount in us. We zigzagged around the country that first year putting on an ambitious slate of nineteen tournaments that offered a total of $310,000 in prize money. By 1973, our prize money had grown to $750,000, and sixteen-year-old Martina Navratilova had joined eighteen-year-old Chrissie Evert on the tour. The two of them alone combined to win a staggering $30 million by the time they retired. From our $1 rebellion, women’s tennis grew into a profession where the U.S. Open singles winner earned $3.85 million in 2019.

  It’s hard to exaggerate how game-changing Joe Cullman’s help was. Philip Morris didn’t bankroll the entire 1971 tour—tournament organizers were responsible for their own events—but the company contributed a great deal beyond boosting the tour’s prize money. In addition to throwing Philip Morris’s corporate weight behind us, Joe expended some personal capital when he backed us. Beginning in 1969, Joe had served a two-year stint as chairman of the U.S. Open and helped the tournament land its first national TV broadcasting deal with CBS. Now he was putting his influence to work for our breakaway protest. That validation mattered greatly to the other people and companies we were approaching for support.

  Joe obviously wanted to sell more cigarettes, but he cared deeply about social justice as well. Like Gladys, Joe had experienced discrimination for being Jewish, and he once said he became involved in tennis in the 1960s because when he looked at the players and fans in the stands, “I was not happy with the lack of diversity—racial, religious, gender, and economic…Tennis wasn’t moving fast enough.”

  It was the first time women athletes had ever had that much power and money invested in us—let alone more money and power than those we were fighting at the USLTA. And Gladys was outstanding. She felt personally responsible for the players and fiercely advocated for our interests, paid some tour expenses with her own money, created a slush fund to help struggling players stay on tour, and often worked for us for free, sending us telegrams and holding monthly meetings to update us on tour business.

  At the start of Virginia Slims’ involvement, I had relayed my reservations to Gladys about partnering with a cigarette company, let alone a brand that was irking feminists with its slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” I knew that numerous male sports stars such as Joe DiMaggio had been featured in ads for tobacco products. Throughout the 1960s, Philip Morris had four tennis players on staff as brand ambassadors: Arthur Ashe, Manuel Santana, Rafael Osuna, and Roy Emerson. Gladys herself smoked at least two packs a day. Nonetheless, I told her, “We’re athletes. This bothers me.”

  She looked at me and said, “You want a tour or not?”

  Excellent point.

  I still say our partnership with Philip Morris was the greatest in the history of sports. They never asked us to smoke, and never asked us to endorse their product. They told us we could say whatever we wanted—and we did. Without their support, I’m not sure how we would’ve made it. The company provided us with an expert staff that helped us create and stage events, and do our marketing, public relations, signage, TV coverage—you name it. They committed to growing women’s tennis and making us known and relatable. They emphasized turning us into celebrities, not just tennis players; today it’s called personal branding. They made our tour possible and then ensured its growth into the global big business it is today. No other women’s pro sports undertaking has been more successful or longer lasting.

  Initially, I—a lot of us actually—didn’t want to break off from the male players. I still think all of us would’ve enjoyed more self-determination if the men and women had stuck together. (The idea was revived by Roger Federer when tennis was shut down during the pandemic in 2020, but it didn’t immediately go anywhere despite widespread support from other players on social media.) Because we’re a global sport, we could do so much good by setting an egalitarian example.

  The start of the original Slims tour was not the only time we were forced to empower ourselves as women because the men refused to work with us. In fact, the rejections pushed us to take control of our future. I was learning that you can’t build a movement without incurring opposition, and we often gained a bigger foothold each time it happened, gathering strength as we went. Some of us were feeling empowered for the first time in our lives.

  Chapter 13

  Our great experiment in women’s pro tennis kicked off in San Francisco, on January 6, 1971, with the BMC Pro Women’s Championship, a tournament with nineteen players and a $15,000 purse. The sponsor was British Motor Car Distributors, which was owned by a Norwegian American named Kjell Qvale. When Larry and I spoke to him about backing all-women tournaments in San Francisco and Long Beach, he saw it as a great marketing opportunity. He said he would give us the money, but only if Jerry Diamond, his gifted publicist, ran the events. At the outset, Jerry wasn’t thrilled by the prospect.

  Jerry had Bronx roots, a thick New York accent, and a tough-guy manner. He grew up in a walk-up apartment over a jewelry store and started out as an automotive writer, then switched to representing racetracks and major motorsports events. I don’t think he had seen a tennis match in his life before we met. When he called a newspaper buddy of his in Los Angeles for advice, his friend made a call to…Jack Kramer. How do you suppose that went? But Kjell wouldn’t let Jerry off the hook.

  The San Francisco Civic Auditorium held about nine thousand people and it cost $10,000 to rent for the championship. Our total paid attendance was less than five thousand. When Jerry went to Kjell to tell him the first event had lost $25,000, Kjell told him, “Jerry, you did a great job!” Jerry said, “Huh?” Kjell continued, “We’ve had the front page of the newspapers every day, the TV news—everything! I think I got about $250,000 worth of exposure for British Motor Cars. Let’s commit to doing it again.”

  For the first two years, Jerry remained so annoyed to be working on the event that he would wheel and walk away when he saw Larry coming, as if it was Larry’s fault. But in the third year the tournament made $50,000, and Jerry—who owned one-third of it, the same as Kjell and Larry and me—became one of our biggest believers and assets. In 1974, I hired Jerry as executive director of the Women’s Tennis Association and he negotiated terrific deals for us over the years with big-name sponsors who helped us go from an experiment to an industry.

  After our inaugural San Francisco stop, we put together the Billie Jean King Invitational in my hometown of Long Beach, and Larry and Dennis Van der Meer staged it. We drew more than nine thousand spectators over four days, with weekend crowds much larger than the recent men’s pro tennis tournaments that year, even though ours was a bootstrap operation. My mom and dad helped us with ticket sales, and Larry, Rosie, and I slept a
t their house. It was my first tournament in Long Beach in ten years, and we had a blast. The city had decided in 1968 to rename Recreation Park, one of the public courts where Clyde taught me, the Billie Jean Moffitt King Tennis Center. Larry and I donated our tournament’s proceeds to build permanent seating for the main court.

  Now that the Slims tour had Philip Morris’s backing, we negotiated a truce, of sorts, with the USLTA: We agreed to pay them a fee in exchange for sanctioning the Slims tournaments. But then—infuriatingly—the USLTA and its overseer, the International Lawn Tennis Federation, added more women’s events to their 1971 summer and fall tours.

  If they had just done that when I called the USLTA chief Alastair Martin from Houston in September 1970, we might have never broken away. The result now was messy and confusing to fans. The other circuit featured Margaret, England’s Virginia Wade, and sensations like nineteen-year-old Evonne Goolagong of Australia and young Chrissie Evert, who was already getting a lot of attention.

  We still held out hope that Margaret would join us on the 1971 Virginia Slims tour even though she had stayed away when we risked our livelihoods to create it. But she denounced us in the fall of 1970 in a press release. “If you worry about money you become hard. It’s a bad thing,” she wrote. “Besides, men play five sets, women play three, and by and large the biggest crowds turn up to watch the guys play. So I don’t think women should be paid the same as men. We aren’t equal.”