All In

by Billie Jean King

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  My public profile had been rising sharply for a few years now, and I started to get involved in more issues beyond sports and the reproductive rights debate. In September 1972, I agreed to play an exhibition match for the National Women’s Political Caucus to raise money for women running for office. In October, I was honored by the Manhattan Women’s Political Caucus. That event was also a fundraiser, and it drew Gloria Steinem and other feminist movement leaders such as Muriel Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, the civil rights lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Bella Abzug, the U.S. congresswoman whose nickname was “Battling Bella.” She showed up in her trademark floppy hat and auctioned it off.

  Supporting political candidates was activism I could embrace. The voting age in America had just been lowered from twenty-one to eighteen, and there was a push to capture the ballots of the new voters and hopefully have Congress look more diverse, like the rest of the country. Bella’s campaign slogan was “This woman’s place is in the House—the House of Representatives.” The 435-member House had only fifteen female members at the time, less than 4 percent. Shirley Chisholm had become the first African American woman elected in 1968.

  One of the bills the women’s activists were championing was the Equal Rights Amendment, which banned any discrimination on the basis of sex. Twenty-two states had ratified the ERA by the end of 1972, but a two-thirds majority of thirty-eight states wasn’t achieved until January 2020. Even then, after the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted to make the amendment law, it touched off arguments in the Republican-controlled Senate about whether the deadline for ratification had expired. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to schedule the ERA for a Senate vote.

  I should’ve lobbied harder for the ERA at the outset. Until the word woman is included in the Constitution so it reads “all men and women are created equal” our rights can’t be fully guaranteed. Early on, I felt I didn’t have enough information and I wish I had asked for help, or that the feminist leaders had pulled me aside and explained why I should fight harder for the amendment. But all they asked me to do was help them raise money or march. I was rarely invited to speak from the podium. Some feminists thought sports overly reflected the dog-eat-dog ethos of the patriarchy. I thought some feminists sometimes intellectualized things too much.

  I asked Gloria why she didn’t use more athletes to promote equality. She said, “Billie, this is about politics.” I told her, “Gloria, we are politics. You’re not using us right! We can sell this movement! We’re on TV, we sweat, we’re real! We’re out here doing and proving all these things that so many feminists are only talking about!” I maintained that the women on the Slims circuit were the embodiment of independence and empowerment. We challenged the male-dominated system to demand a living, and we were out there every day making it on our own.

  Throughout that year I was also tracking the work toward a new law called Title IX, which was one of the 1972 amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965. I think Title IX is the third most important piece of U.S. legislation in the twentieth century after the Nineteenth Amendment, which assured women’s right to vote, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  The push started when Bernice Sandler, a part-time lecturer at the University of Maryland, applied for a tenure-track position in 1969 and was told she came on “too strong for a woman.” She began to research the laws on gender discrimination and found a footnote to a law on federal contracts that prohibited discrimination based on sex. She filed a complaint against her university. Then, after running an ad in the Saturday Review literary magazine looking for other examples of discrimination in higher education, Sandler gathered enough material to file 250 complaints against colleges receiving federal contracts. She sent copies of the complaints to members of Congress, asking them to urge the secretary of labor to enforce the law. One of the recipients was Edith Starrett Green, a Democratic congresswoman from Portland, Oregon.

  Edith, a former educator and longtime champion of equal opportunity and women’s rights, had wanted to address sex discrimination in education after she sat in on a congressional hearing where school superintendents were praising a program for under-resourced boys and she asked what the superintendents were doing for girls who walked the same streets. Edith was told only boys needed the program because “they’re going to have to be the breadwinners.” She was astonished to learn the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn’t provide any protection on the basis of sex, and eventually hired Bernice to be part of her staff. Together, they drafted the proposed legislation that became Title IX.

  A version of Edith’s original bill passed through Congress with bipartisan leadership from another U.S. congresswoman, Hawaii Democrat Patsy Mink, and Republican senators Birch Bayh of Indiana and Ted Stevens of Alaska. Patsy was the first Asian American woman elected to Congress. Stevens helped Alaska earn U.S. statehood in 1959 before turning into a guardian angel for Title IX during his forty-year career in Congress. Birch’s first wife, Marvella, had been shut out of the University of Virginia because she was a woman. Birch never forgot that, or something his father, an athletic administrator and coach, told him and his sister when they asked their dad what he planned to say when he testified to Congress in 1940 about educational opportunities: “I’m going to tell them that little girls need strong bodies to carry their minds around just like little boys.”

  Bayh wrote the thirty-seven words that compose Title IX, and it is only one sentence long: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal assistance.”

  His remarks on the Senate floor when he introduced the measure captured what women were up against.

  We are all familiar with the stereotype of women as pretty things who go to college to find a husband, go on to graduate school because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children, and never work again. The desire of many schools not to waste a “man’s place” on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts absolutely contradict these myths about the “weaker sex” and it is time to change our operating assumptions…[and] provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs—an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay for equal work.

  I still get chills reading that. Making a government serve its people is what statesmanship is about. Bayh always put the country before party politics and I wish more elected officials were like that today.

  Title IX was signed into law by Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972. Those thirty-seven words sparked a sea change for women in the U.S. and eventually around the world. But anyone who tells you that they realized immediately that Title IX would lead to the resultant boom in women’s sports opportunities, participation, scholarships, jobs, and other advances isn’t remembering those early days correctly. The full impact became clearer only after the Office for Civil Rights was asked for interpretations of how, or even if, the law applied to sports. Compliance guidelines were set, challenged, and threatened again and again over the years. The law is still vulnerable to clawback attempts today.

  I was part of a panel discussion at the Fordham School of Law in 2019 about Senator Bayh’s work for Title IX, as was the Indiana Pacers executive Kelly Krauskopf, the first woman to be an assistant general manager in the NBA. Kelly told a story about inviting Bayh to the first WNBA game that the Indiana Fever played in Indianapolis after she had moved to his home state to start the franchise as the Fever’s general manager.

  Bayh accepted Kelly’s invitation to attend opening night, and she told him, “Look at this, look at this…” as they stood together on
the court, scanning the arena in wonder, absorbing the sight of the sellout crowd of sixteen thousand, the excitement, the players running through their pre-game warmups as rousing music played. When Kelly turned back to look at Bayh, he had tears in his eyes. “We didn’t know—I didn’t know what Title IX would mean for sports,” he told her. “When I meet women and girls like you is when I understand.”

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  I was worn out again by October of the second year of the Slims tour. I was pushing my body beyond reason and working dozens of hours off the court. In Boca Raton, I staggered to a straight-set loss to Chrissie in 90-degree heat, at one point throwing up into a hat that the chair umpire handed me. My doctor had me tested afterward for mononucleosis. I had always imagined that when I became No. 1 I’d have a fuller life, and in many ways I did. But 1972 was the year I really became a celebrity, and I was discovering that fame created complications. “[People] know my name,” I had told 60 Minutes. “They know I play tennis, and I feel I owe it to them to give them time.”

  By now I had been drawn into the highly politicized worlds of women’s rights, abortion rights, and electoral politics, not just sports. To the outside world, it seemed I was either a curiosity or a disrupter—sometimes both. People wanted a closer look at me. For years it was hard for me to eat in a restaurant. One day a fan pulled up a chair to my table and sat down as if he intended to join me for the meal, uninvited. Variations of that were common.

  The questions about my marriage to Larry hadn’t stopped, either. At one point I described our hectic lives to someone as two circles that intersect occasionally, and my friend countered that the two circles looked more like smoke rings evaporating before everyone’s eyes. I had achieved most of my competitive goals, but I didn’t have peace of mind.

  Larry has said he felt lonely during that period, but he was also happy because he was “doing my own thing…doing what I wanted, and I felt actualized.” Decades later, he told the journalist Selena Roberts that his view of my divorce requests, which I repeated over the years, was that “I was her husband, good, bad, or [in]different, you know…The bottom line was I didn’t see any reason to get divorced because Billie Jean had identity problems. I felt that when it all got sorted out, she would be much better off growing old and gray with me than any other person on the planet.”

  I originally thought we’d be lifers, too, and that idea paralyzed both of us. We were breaking each other’s hearts because we couldn’t face the reckoning.

  I finally concluded that I needed to take a personal inventory, so I did something I hadn’t done since college. I took three months off. I decided I would use it as a time of reflection, and from the start, it was absolute bliss. I divided my time between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. It felt like such a blessed freedom to simply get back to doing everyday things. I’d wake up in the morning and ask myself, Should I see a movie or read a book today, try some new restaurant or drop in on a friend? Sometimes I’d visit Fort Scott, which is part of the Presidio national park in San Francisco. I spent a lot of time in Marin County, driving over the Golden Gate Bridge to the windswept headlands there, then traveling the switchback-filled roads and hairpin turns that carved a path down the cliffs until, finally, I hit the glistening Pacific Ocean.

  One of my favorite destinations was Stinson Beach. I returned there repeatedly and found a spot on the long crescent of sand where I could lean against a tree stump and let my mind wander. Sometimes I’d bring a book to read, or something to write on. Mostly, I’d just meditate. I’d listen to the sound of the waves crashing, breathe deeply, feel my heartbeat slowing down.

  At times, I thought a lot about how far my sport had come and what we could still do. I also thought about how the journey had changed me. The point was driven home when a tour friend, Vicki Berner, handed me a copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and said, “Billie, you’ve got to read this! You’re Dagny Taggart!”

  Taggart is an unconventional protagonist: a workaholic woman who runs her family’s railroad company and is treated like an outsider. I could relate to that. But another theme of the novel—the idea that self-sacrifice for the good of society is immoral, and that unproductive people are parasites—was too cold and heartless to me. I liked how the book reinforced my belief that an individual can make a difference. But unlike Rand, I believe that all of us can make a difference, not just the strongest or most gifted or privileged among us.

  Still, the book came at the right time in my life, when I was spread too thin and stuck in my years-long impasse between loving Larry and being conflicted about who I was. The book helped me see that self-interest can be a healthy thing. I realized, with some regret, that from the time I was young I had thought happiness always depended on pleasing the people dearest to me—an impossible task, to be sure. I often negated what I needed or felt. I buried my emotions, yielded to my fears. Sometimes I’d overindulge in food to comfort myself after a loss or when I was just feeling bad, then put myself on strict diets. My weight was a constant concern.

  I asked myself, what would have happened if I hadn’t taken charge of my life in the past? Where would I be if I had not ignored what I was told about what couldn’t or shouldn’t be possible? Years later, when I’d gotten serious about therapy, I started figuring things out even more. But during my sabbatical in the fall of 1972, something else I was learning about myself was scaring me half to death. I was falling in love with a woman.

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  It began with a haircut. A friend on the Slims tour named Tory Fretz kept telling me about a terrific stylist at a salon in Beverly Hills who might be able to help me with my thick hair and was used to dealing with celebrity clients. “I want you to meet her,” Tory said. “She’s really nice and gives great cuts.” So one day in May 1972, Tory took me in for an appointment with Marilyn Barnett. She was a slender woman with fine features, feathery blond hair, and a soft, lilting voice. She worked fast—a few snips here and there and I was out of there in twenty minutes, looking better.

  Marilyn and I didn’t meet again until I was taking my break from competition in the fall of 1972 and spending lots of time on my own. I’m not much of a partygoer, but one night in Los Angeles I thought it might be fun to drop in at a friend’s gathering. Marilyn and I saw each other across the room right away, and she walked up to me and asked me if I was going to come in for another haircut.

  We started talking and I found her funny, and more than a little flirty. She was laidback and into yoga and halter-top dresses then, and she had a disarming smile. Best of all, she knew nothing about tennis. I had just won the Roland-Garros, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open titles and she didn’t have a clue or a care about what any of it meant. It felt wonderful.

  Talking to Marilyn was refreshing after years of nothing but tennis, tennis, tennis. She suggested that we have dinner one night. I said, “Sure.” That’s how it started—casual, relaxed. I visited her a few days later at the funky little wood house that she rented in Hollywood on Doheny Drive, just off Sunset Boulevard. She was dating a rock musician at the time.

  The house felt like a comfortable and cozy escape, far from tennis, far from the crowds, far from the strains in the rest of my life. I could relax around Marilyn and talk about my frustrations on the tour or about anything else. Marilyn was a good listener—what hair stylist isn’t?—and enjoyable to be around, so I would see her whenever I was in Los Angeles. It wasn’t the first time I had been drawn to a woman, but the intensity of this attraction seemed so natural and right. It didn’t take all that long for our relationship to become physical. Our first time making love was scary but also wonderful.

  Being with Marilyn at first was like floating in a bubble detached from outside responsibilities but connected to another person in an intimate, liberating way. It was the first time I had been with someone outside of my sports world and I wasn’t being judged as a player,
a businessperson, an outlier, or anything at all. I could be vulnerable. And at first, I let myself get lost in her.

  On a typical day together we’d sleep in late and she’d cook eggs or oatmeal for breakfast. Sometimes I would just read or we’d sit around and listen to music, which we both loved. Some afternoons we’d hop into her Karmann Ghia convertible and fly along the freeways, blasting music on the radio. There’s a scene in the 2017 Battle of the Sexes film when Marilyn and I dance to the song “Crimson and Clover”; it gave me chills when I first saw the movie because I had never told the screenwriter or directors it’s the song I most associated with Marilyn. One of the lyrics is “I don’t hardly know her, but I think I could love her.” I remember hearing it on the car stereo while we drove through the city, the wind whipping wisps of Marilyn’s blond hair around her face.

  By the end of that year I was living a double life, right out in the open. At the start with Marilyn, I only told a few close friends what was happening, but it became pretty obvious what was going on when she started traveling with me in the spring of 1973. Some tour insiders knew that I had questioned my sexual orientation for a while. Larry also knew, of course.

  Marilyn and I didn’t shy away from spending time together in public, dining in restaurants, going to movies, listening to music in coffeehouses. I’d take two or even three days off, which was a lot for me then. If we ran into anyone I knew, I’d just introduce her as my friend or, later, my personal assistant and road manager. I was paying her $600 a month to handle those two jobs and picking up all her expenses when she was on the circuit with me. Marilyn had dated women as well as men before, so hiding in plain sight wasn’t new to her. But I did ask her not to speak about our romantic involvement to anybody. It was too risky.