Three days later, I was playing the Virginia Slims Masters in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was foolish, I know. I went because Gladys was pressuring me to go, saying, “If you don’t show, Billie Jean, there is no tournament.” When I called the tournament director, Don Kaiser, intending to withdraw anyway on Wednesday morning, just forty-eight hours after leaving the hospital, he also pleaded with me to reconsider, and I caved. I got on a 10 p.m. red-eye flight that night and arrived in St. Pete at 6:30 a.m., rested a bit that afternoon and played my opening match that night.
I could tell some of the other players were surprised to see me walk in. I don’t blame them. What was I thinking? It was yet another one of those times I shouldn’t have played, but I was driven to make the tour succeed. I even somehow made it to the semifinals two days later, where I was matched for the first time against Chrissie, then sixteen. Kaiser added six hundred more seats for our sold-out match.
Chrissie still looked like a little girl with her sweet, serious face and ponytail, but I wasn’t about to underestimate her just because of those eyelet-and-lace dresses or hair ribbons she favored. She was still an amateur, but she already had upset Margaret. Her father entered her in St. Petersburg because it wasn’t far from their Fort Lauderdale home, and he wanted her to gain more experience. Even at that age, Chrissie had sensational shot placement, a strong lob and a crisp two-handed backhand. She was amazingly perceptive, unyielding, and frighteningly consistent. The British press nicknamed her “Little Miss Metronome.”
The Florida weather was blazing hot and humid the day of our match, which was unlucky for me. The sun felt sharp on my skin, and I quickly began to dehydrate. When Chrissie noticed I was a little slow, she remorselessly ran me back and forth along the baseline, as she should have. I remember how I could feel the total concentration behind her shot selection, a correctness and intelligence in her game. We hadn’t had a player like that at her age since Maureen Connolly broke records in the 1950s.
I kept up with Chrissie in the hour-long first set, rallying from a 1–4 deficit to eke it out in a tiebreaker. In the second set, Chrissie again held me in rallies that frequently lasted twenty shots or more and she won it, 6–3, to level the match. By then I was feeling so sick from the heat and from cramps that I had to forfeit. All I can remember is leaning over the sink in the locker room, heaving and splashing cold water on my face. Chrissie came over and asked, “Are you all right?” She seemed genuinely concerned, and I was touched by how considerate she was.
As trying as those circumstances were for me, the next time Chrissie and I played would be even more challenging, for different reasons.
Chapter 14
A few months later at the 1971 U.S. Open, I was walking across the grounds at Forest Hills when I decided to pop in on Chrissie’s second-round match against Mary-Ann Eisel, an accomplished veteran. I wanted to watch Chrissie a bit because she had been on a months-long winning streak after beating Margaret. When I arrived, she had narrowly lost the first set and was trailing Mary-Ann in the second, 6–5.
Bud Collins was calling the match on CBS-TV with Jack Kramer. Years later, Bud loved to retell how Mary-Ann was preparing to serve at 40–love, triple match point, and he and Jack were trying to be “very gentle” because “Chrissie was so young, you know? We were saying, ‘Why, she hit some good shots today…She’ll be back, just you wait and see!’ Then, almost as an aside, we said, ‘Oh, look. She saved a match point. Why, good for her!’ But then, Chrissie saved another one—and another one, and another one! Six match points in all!”
The crowd went nuts when Chrissie rallied to take the second set from Mary-Ann in a tiebreaker. The fans roared again as she ran Mary-Ann off the court 6–1 in the third. The atmosphere was electric. When I arrived back at the women’s locker room, I excitedly told anyone who would listen, “You guys, that kid is our next superstar! She is it! She’s the one!” A star was born in my eyes that match.
I knew Chrissie had come into the Open having won forty-six straight matches. Now I could see why. And she kept the magic going. She had two more comebacks to beat Lesley Hunt and Frankie Dürr after losing the first set to each. Frankie wiped away tears afterward. “Chrissie had pros—hardened pros—crying!” Bud said.
I was two months shy of my twenty-eighth birthday, and I knew we needed a boost of fresh talent on the Virginia Slims tour. Chrissie was perfect for the job—and she was American! What she had accomplished by the time we played our semifinal match was a turning point for tennis. You could feel it as it was happening. But when Chrissie walked into the locker room after each win, all that was missing were the snowdrifts. Virtually none of the other players said a word to her. She was just a nice, shy kid, but they were irritated because she was getting so much attention. They were also upset that the prize money they could be winning wouldn’t even go to her since she was an amateur. I think Val Ziegenfuss had the class to congratulate her, but most of them were just awful, and they got colder as Chrissie advanced through the draw.
When I heard what was happening, I was not happy, so I called a players’ meeting at an out-of-the-way table not far from the West Side Tennis Club terrace. Once we were huddled around, I said, “Listen, you guys, Chris Evert is the greatest thing that could happen to us. Look at her—she is it! She’s our next superstar and you’re going to be passing the baton to her. She’s already helped women’s tennis, and she’s going to put more money in your pockets, not less. And forget all that—she’s just a nice kid. So, I don’t even care if you like her. We’ve got to make her feel welcome. It’s not about ‘like.’ It’s about doing the right thing.”
Someone said, “Well, she’s not that nice to us either.”
“You guys—c’mon! She’s sixteen!” I yelped.
The fact that Chrissie was playing on the rival USLTA tour posed a threat to the Slims circuit. But I reminded everyone that it was her dad, Jimmy Evert, who made those career decisions, not Chrissie. Then I said, “Do you think you’re going to get her on our tour if you’re not nice to her? We need her more than she needs us.”
By the time Chrissie and I were to play in the semifinals, she was a national sensation. Bud was hauling her on CBS after every match for live interviews. Billy Talbert, the U.S. Open tournament director, joked that he scheduled all of Chrissie’s matches on the stadium court after she beat Mary-Ann because “there’d be a riot if I didn’t.” The New York Times called her “Cinderella in Sneakers,” and Barry Lorge gushed in Tennis magazine, “For 10 wonderful days, New York was a sentimental place and the U.S. Open was a great romance.”
I feared if an amateur challenger—a teenager, no less—won the U.S. Open during the first year of the Slims circuit, we might not survive another season. We were the upstarts who were trying something new. The USLTA was the Establishment trying to flick us off before we got traction. I was the only multiple Grand Slam singles winner on the Slims tour. If a kid like Chrissie ran away with the crown against our best player and then went back to playing against Margaret, Virginia Wade, and Evonne Goolagong on their rival tour, our circuit could be endangered. Evonne was only nineteen years old herself then, and she had just won Roland-Garros and Wimbledon. So, as much as I already liked Chrissie personally, I knew it was up to me to stop her. Now.
After warming up for our semifinal, I felt so much pressure that I went into a shower in the women’s dressing room, blasted the water as high as it would go so no one would hear me, and began sobbing uncontrollably as I contemplated the stakes.
* * *
—
By the time we were ready to walk out for our match I had regained my equilibrium. Letting out all my emotions had been cathartic. Then I moved on. I visualized exactly how I wanted to play Chrissie. I went through the phrases I wanted to embed in my mind like a string of mantras: One ball at a time, Billie…Leave everything on the court…Nothing matters except this. Here. Now. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!
Then I was out the clubhouse door. Chrissie was already there, waiting.
As she and I walked together down the fenced path to the stadium, hundreds of fans were calling out to us. Chrissie stared straight ahead and never said a word, which I learned was her way of preparing for a match. I found out later that she thought what talking I did was gamesmanship, but, in fact, I was just trying to encourage her to soak everything in. I knew it would never be quite like this for her again. Just as we reached the court, I turned to her and said, “You’re riding the crest of a wave. Enjoy every moment of it.”
The stadium was overflowing with a crowd of 13,647 that included Vice President Spiro Agnew and his Secret Service detail. You could feel the crowd’s anticipation as we warmed up, and the atmosphere stayed charged. This was what we’d always wanted—real excitement for women’s tennis, a sold-out stadium, top billing on the marquee, a huge TV audience, money to be made.
When we began to play, my strategy was to disrupt Chrissie’s game with a constantly changing medley of shots to throw off her excellent timing. She hadn’t lost in seven months and I was determined not to let her get control of this match. I think she expected me to charge the net, but I stayed at the baseline more than she anticipated and rallied, using a variety of spins, chips, and dinks. Her passing shots were deadly, so I stayed back and fed her drop shots and soft stuff to keep her off-balance. It helped me a lot that we were playing on grass. The surfaces were so uneven in those days, even at Forest Hills, that you never knew when the ball was going to skid or die once it bounced, especially when I hit my slice. They had groundskeepers who replaced the divots in the grass between matches.
I remember letting out a few blasts of emotion as we went—spiking my extra service ball after I won one game; baring my teeth and yelling “Yeah!” after another point, then pacing in a circle, pumping myself up. In later years, Chrissie told me that she trained herself never to look at me during a match because my intensity could overwhelm her. (Julie Heldman said the same thing.) But I didn’t know any of that then. Chrissie was remarkably cool even when I outlasted her in some groundstroke rallies, her strength.
The first crack in her game didn’t appear until the seventh game of the first set. She double-faulted on the first point and I ended up breaking her serve. That was the turning point. I took the first set, 6–3. Chrissie fought valiantly, and by the time I won the second, 6–2, the crowd was cheering for both of us, the veteran and the new kid. When we shook hands over the net I could see that she hated losing as much as I did. So I whispered, “Don’t let it bother you—you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”
The win set up the only Grand Slam singles final that Rosie and I ever played, but we had to wait three days because of unrelenting rains. Rosie had only beaten me once in nine previous tries, and I could hardly look at her when I won again in two tight sets. During the days-long delay to play our match, I was still feeling bad for Chrissie, so I sent her a telegram that read: “When you left New York, the skies opened up and it poured rain. The heavens weren’t happy you were gone.” She told me she teared up when she read it. That match was a thunderclap start to a deep, lifelong friendship.
Chrissie went home that week to a heroine’s welcome at St. Thomas Aquinas, her Fort Lauderdale high school. The governor of Florida declared her homecoming “Chris Evert Day.” As I got ready to move on to our next tour stop, I could only shake my head in wonder, remembering how my high school couldn’t have cared less when I won Wimbledon for the first time. We really had come a long way. I felt encouraged about what we were building more than ever. I knew we had just seen another glimpse of how glimmering our future could be.
* * *
—
I cashed a $5,000 check for winning the 1971 U.S. Open, a payday that didn’t sound all that bad unless you knew that Stan Smith, the men’s title winner, won $15,000 and was given twice the $2,500 I received in expense money. (That has to change, I told myself.)
Money was on the mind of the media, too. I had played so well on the first year of the Virginia Slims circuit that the press started keeping count: If I won $20,000 more before the end of 1971, I would be the first woman athlete in history to earn $100,000 in a single year. I had predicted that it was possible before we launched in December, and again in March. The second time, Margaret told The New York Times, “She’ll have to win it from me.” She had no intention of being eclipsed, and I welcomed the added drama. I had announced my $100,000 goal thinking that it would increase interest in our new tour. Throughout the year, I made it a calculated strategy to talk openly about the money and embrace the milestone. Like it or not, in this culture money is a measuring stick. I was always thinking, How can we tell our story and get people to care about us, follow us? What will start them talking? As I told Larry, people understand money whether they’re a factory worker or a CEO. Women athletes were fighting desperately to be taken seriously. For me, it was about the message we were sending more than the money.
It would’ve been sweet justice if I got within a whisker of the milestone by winning Jack Kramer’s tournament, the Pepsi Pacific Southwest Open, the next stop after Forest Hills. As I said earlier, I would come to see Kramer’s sexism and contempt for women’s tennis as a gift that motivated us to rise up, but I didn’t feel that way yet. There were hard feelings all around. I was grateful we were rarely in the same room, he felt the same way, and things got much worse between us for years before they got better.
The total women’s purse for Kramer’s event had been raised from $11,000 to $18,000 after some pressure from our Slims players and an infusion of cash from Joe Cullman. Still, it grated on me that the men’s total was bumped up to $65,000, a gaping difference. Plus, being back at the Los Angeles Tennis Club was unpleasant for me. It always evoked memories of Perry T. Jones tossing me out of the photo when I was ten, the Czar ominously summoning me to his office with a hooked finger, the Czar characterizing anyone who wanted pro tennis as crass moneygrubbers. Over the years, outsiders like Pancho Gonzalez and I never totally fit in at the club. We talked about it.
Joe Bixler, the Wilson rep who had been so great to me as a kid, had taken over the Southern California Tennis Association when Jones died the year before, and he had moved into Perry’s office at the club. I appreciated Joe for his kindnesses toward me before, but I disliked how he now sided with Kramer and the sexist old-boy network. Joe also didn’t see anything wrong with the all-male, all-white makeup of the association’s thirty-six-member board.
The outside world was changing fast, but the club was stuck in a time warp in many ways. Tennis players had become professional, many tournaments had not. The umpires, referees, and line judges were still well-meaning volunteers who got little to no training, and some of them were glaringly incompetent. It was a pet peeve of mine that they were unpaid while we now were playing for our livelihood.
The bad calls piled up that week at the Pacific Southwest, and my anger had been on a slow boil for days by the time Rosie and I played the final before a sellout crowd of 3,200. With the first set tied at 6–all, there had already been six or seven bad calls by the same line judge when Rosie ended a long rally by overshooting the baseline. The inept linesperson called it in, giving Rosie a 3–0 tiebreaker lead.
I flipped my racket in the air, threw up my hands, and yelled something at the sky asking to be saved from any more of this. (If my dad had been there, he might’ve sawed off my racket handle right then.) Then I kept yammering. I stomped over to the chair umpire, John Coman, for the third time, but this time I said, “I want that linesperson out!” Rosie walked over and backed me up, agreeing that the calls were terrible.
John refused to do anything, so I asked to see Kramer, since he was the official tournament referee. John should’ve told me then that Jack had designated him to be both the umpire and referee for our match since Jack was doing the TV broadcast, which made John the final judg
e. But John explained none of that. He just sat there, looking down at me from his elevated perch, saying nothing.
I was so disgusted I began packing up my rackets and I looked at Rosie and said, “I am outta here.”
She said, “No, Old Lady, don’t go!”
“Rosie, you stay here. Stay so you can win this match.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No!”
Back and forth we went—“Yes! No! Stay! No!”—until I steamed off. Rosie was right behind me, her jaw clamped shut in anger too. I’m not proud of it—but it was hysterical when she blinked and told me that she forgot we weren’t playing doubles and she left because she was thinking we were a team.
The crowd booed us on our way off and we deserved it. The press massacred us too. We were fined by the USLTA. And that’s how Rosie and I became an infamous footnote in tennis history: We’re still the only two singles players to default after we both took the court. As you can imagine, Kramer was not charmed.
My brother, Randy, who was sidelined because of a knee injury, was in the stands that day, and so he hobbled over to the clubhouse to catch Jack’s angry press conference. He said he wanted to deck Jack when he overheard him ripping women’s tennis in general—and me in particular. Randy held off, thank goodness.
* * *
—
I passed the milestone of $100,000 by beating Rosie at the Virginia Slims Thunderbird Tennis Tournament in Phoenix, the last stop on our tour that year. Making that kind of money in our first year was another victory for women’s tennis, and Rosie and I ended up dousing each other with champagne to celebrate. The final stop on the 1971 Virginia Slims Circuit originally was scheduled to be played in mid-April in Las Vegas, but the response to us was so enthusiastic Gladys was able to add six more Slims-sponsored tournaments as the year went on, giving us a total of nineteen. We were exploding the lie that people weren’t willing to come out and pay to see women play.
All In Page 22