All In

by Billie Jean King

  Even the rumor that I might be gay nearly cost me an important honor, though I didn’t know it at the time. Sports Illustrated, the magazine I had read and admired since I was a teenager along with World Tennis, was internally discussing choosing me as its first Sportswoman of the Year in 1972 after decades of honoring only men. In the end, I shared the award with UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden, whom I deeply admired because of his success and the person he was. Taking incremental steps is often how progress goes. The first generation pushes the door ajar, and the next generation kicks it open. Chrissie had the honor all to herself four years later.

  It took three decades after my selection to learn the rest of the story behind SI’s decision. My friend Frank Deford told me that when I was being considered he ran into André Laguerre, the magazine’s managing editor, in the hallway. André asked him, “What’s this I hear about Billie Jean King being a lesbian?”

  Frank said he smiled and said reassuringly, “Oh, André, they say that about all women athletes.” Had Laguerre’s suspicions been confirmed, I never would have had a share of the 1972 award.

  I think other sportswriters also protected me more than I realized. I had many other good friends in the press corps—Bud, Barry Lorge, Bob Martin at the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Neil Amdur at The New York Times, and Mike Lupica at the New York Daily News, to name a few. Women sportswriters were still rare. The Associated Press estimated in the early 1970s there were only about twenty-five women covering sports for America’s 1,700 newspapers. The legendary Mary Garber covered sports for the Twin City Sentinel and then the Winston-Salem Journal (both in North Carolina) beginning in 1944, and continued to work part-time until 2002. It was Melissa Ludtke’s 1978 lawsuit against Major League Baseball for equal access to locker rooms that cleared the way for all journalists, men and women, to do their jobs more effectively. That opened the floodgates for more women. Title IX contributed too. The first female sportswriting pioneers—Garber, Ludtke, Robin Herman, Lesley Visser, Jane Leavy, Stephanie Salter, Claire Smith, Tracy Dodds, Susan Fornoff, Christine Brennan, Michele Himmelberg, Jane Gross, and Helene Elliott—soon had a lot more company. Le Anne Schreiber eventually became the first female sports editor at the Times, and Robin Finn covered tennis.

  I think I got along with journalists because I admired what they did and I understood that they needed access to us in time to meet their deadlines. The writers called me out when I deserved it, but they were almost always fair. I’ve always made sure to thank the traditional media, especially in this digital age, because without them our stories would never have been told, and we’d never have made it. I also liked asking them questions, learning about them, their jobs, their travels. It was a two-way street.

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  I felt safer with Marilyn when we were inside the tour. In women’s tennis we protected each other whether we were gay, straight, the biggest star, or the lowest qualifier. We were like a traveling family, complete with all the overlapping storylines, dramas, loves, and neuroses, and we kept things in-house. Nobody talked about the handful of gay women on the circuit. It’s always been a myth that the women’s tour was and is overrun with lesbians and men’s sports is completely free of gays. I doubt there were more LGBTQ+ people on the tour percentage-wise than there are in the general population.

  Feeling safe beyond the tour was a different story. It’s hard to convey how oppressive it was. Hardly anyone in public life was out then that I can remember, except a handful of authors and activists such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Gore Vidal, Rita Mae Brown, Larry Kramer, and, later, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California. (Milk was assassinated at City Hall eleven months later, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, by a political rival who opposed Milk’s activism.) The AIDS scourge that outed the actor Rock Hudson, the first major American celebrity known to die of the virus, was still more than a decade away. Otherwise, lesbian and gay sexuality—let alone the BTQ+ part of the abbreviation—wasn’t part of the public discourse. It was arguably one of the few ways that homophobia kinda sorta worked for us. Unless there was a messy divorce or arrest involved, a person’s sexuality was hardly mentioned in the press, and publicists at the time protected us by saying our personal lives were nobody’s business.

  Of course, knowing that didn’t make our lives any less terrifying. There were no guarantees. Gays had scant legal protection. Contracts with sponsors and employers often included morals clauses that allowed them to drop you on the spot. One scandal and your livelihood could be destroyed overnight. On the occasions people were outed, the label was used as a cudgel to mock, fire, ostracize, demonize, or even to justify physically injuring gays.

  Hardly anybody then was saying, You’re gay, so what?, and handing you a rainbow. LGBTQ+ people were beaten up, raped, arrested, and even killed. Families were torn apart, children were disowned, lives were thrown asunder. It still happens, but I’m not sure people truly grasp how bad it was then, or the internal war such ritual shaming can create. One of the most exhausting things in life is pretending to be someone you’re not.

  I was in a delicate position because I was our fledgling tour’s leading player and spokesperson, a woman known for calling out hypocrisy. “Mother Freedom” was Bud’s tongue-in-cheek nickname for me. My reputation was built on being a truth-teller and pioneer. Now I was living a lie and hating myself for it. The fact that I felt I was lying out of necessity didn’t lessen my shame or dissonance about it. I didn’t even feel that I could go to therapy to sort it out. The psychiatry manuals still said gays were “deviants.” There was this taint.

  The conventional thinking then was that straight is okay but gays and lesbians are consigned to unhappy, dysfunctional lives on earth and damned to hell after that. My parents were homophobic. My religious upbringing told me that homosexuality was wrong. And yet, if I was being honest, I didn’t feel like a sinner. So what did that make me? All I knew was that I was still married to a man but in a relationship with a woman and if it was revealed, it would be a catastrophe.

  Unlike now, there was very little talk in popular culture then about sexual orientation being something nuanced that resides on a continuum and can change over the course of someone’s life. That would’ve helped. I was attracted to men and like men’s bodies, but I feel like I connect with women more on an emotional level, not just a physical one. I guess the clearest way I can say it is I didn’t end up a lesbian because of the sex alone—it was a whole constellation of feelings that had to do with connectedness, tenderness, how you experience everything besides sex with another human being. Sometimes the sex is the least of it. I know that’s hard for a lot of people to understand, but it’s only once anyone genuinely tries to grasp those distinctions that they begin to see how I could love Larry dearly and even feel attracted to him, and yet ultimately prefer to be in a life relationship with a woman.

  In the 1970s, it was nearly impossible to trust that the public would understand. I feared the fallout if I was not who I seemed to be. The psychological switchbacks were so tough at times I wondered if there would ever be a place in this world for someone like me. I can relate to something Dave Kopay, who retired from the NFL before he came out as gay in 1975, said: “I feel too gay for the straight world, and too straight for the gay world.” Dave had hoped to go into coaching after his eight-year NFL career. No one would hire him. He ended up running the family linoleum business instead.

  After I began seeing Marilyn, I talked to some people I respect about coming out. They warned me not to do it. “It won’t just hurt the tour—we won’t have a tour,” I was told. As a result, my fear of exposure became greater, not less, as time went on. My estimation of the bad consequences soared. Dread or anxiety sometimes dogged me. Sometimes my anger at having to hide my authentic self would come out in inappropriate ways. Food remained something I turned to for comfort. I couldn’t re
ally talk about who I truly was because I thought if I did, I’d cause problems for myself and a lot of people who loved or relied on or believed in me. It had already happened before.

  So I did what was second nature to me: I tried to power through it, not give in to the emotional turmoil. When I began seeing Marilyn, everything went well between us. But things sometimes take awhile to become evident when you’re in a long-distance relationship. My perceptions began to change once Marilyn and I were together all the time on the road that first year and I got to know her better. Doubts crept in. Did I trust her enough to keep seeing her? Did I want to be gay, straight, divorced, married? I didn’t know myself. It could depend on what week you asked me. Everything felt so up in the air.

  Grace Lichtenstein sensed it during the months she spent on the 1973 tennis tour to report her book, A Long Way, Baby. She wrote that nobody, not even Larry and I, knew why we didn’t get divorced. I told her, “We probably should’ve lived together before we were married but we were hung up on Puritanism. We’d be better off divorced and living together. I’m tired of the idea that you have to stay together because of a contract.” Larry told her our arrangement was a matter of “love, convenience, understanding. We’ve loved each other for a long time even though we’re not really husband and wife. We had our separate careers, and when people don’t see each other much, the relationship has to change.”

  And so it did. But sometimes my head and my heart literally felt like they were being squeezed in a vise. I can’t make this right, I can’t make that right. I’m in a bind. I always felt like I had to keep all the plates spinning in midair because any sort of crash—even one misstep—could be disastrous. The pressure I felt was extraordinary. I don’t know how I kept it all going.

  Chapter 16

  When my months-long break came to a close and I returned to the Virginia Slims circuit in January 1973, Marilyn and I shared a suite or a room with two beds when we were on the road, which wasn’t unusual for women on the tennis tour. There was still a lot of infighting going on between the USLTA and the Slims. Our schedule was up in the air, and I wanted to end the uncertainty. By spring, some good news came.

  USLTA officials had been pushing back hard against the Slims tour, which had signed more than sixty players, by reviving the threat to ban us from the majors and by strong-arming sponsors and tournament directors to drop us. It got so bad that Gladys Heldman incorporated our group as an autonomous body she called the Women’s International Tennis Federation, and then sued the USLTA in federal court. I joined the lawsuit. The USLTA and the Virginia Slims circuit knew that staying apart was self-sabotage for both tours, and Joe Cullman was able to broker a truce at an April 27 meeting in New York. Julie Heldman, Frankie, Betty Stöve of the Netherlands, and I took part in the negotiations, and by the end, I was greatly relieved. We dissolved the short-lived WITF, and a plan was put in place for a single women’s circuit that would be called the Virginia Slims Tour and operate with the sanctioning of the USLTA and ITF, with our first full schedule starting in 1974. Chrissie had just turned pro on her eighteenth birthday, and she was such a sensation that spectators lined up around the block to see her play the first time she appeared at our Slims San Francisco stop.

  Unfortunately, one condition of the settlement was that the USLTA insisted Gladys had to go. They felt she was a polarizing figure. Gladys was deeply disappointed. So was I. For us, she had been magnificent.

  At about the same time Gladys was leaving, something that had started as a minor irritant for me was shaping up as another assault on the legitimacy of women’s tennis. Bobby Riggs, the former tennis champion and incorrigible hustler I’d been hearing about since I was a kid in Long Beach began pestering me to play him in a high-stakes challenge match. As I mentioned earlier, Riggs had the pedigree of having swept all three Wimbledon titles in 1939 and winning the U.S. Nationals singles championship twice, all as an amateur. He was now playing on the senior circuit, where there was no prize money either, but it kept Bobby in the mix. He made a living hustling rich club players and celebrities after his second wife divorced him. I had genuine respect and empathy for Bobby. I know he felt he had never gotten his due as a great champion, and he was probably right.

  I had never met Riggs until 1971, when he hopped over a low fence around the club court at Forest Hills where I was practicing. He had been phoning for weeks, trying to get a match with me. I wouldn’t take his calls. So he tried the direct approach.

  “C’mon, Billie Jean! Why don’t you play me?” he said. “You know you can beat an old man.”

  “Not interested,” I told him. I knew there was nothing in it for me or women’s tennis.

  Every few months after that, another offer from Bobby would float up and I’d turn him down. At first it was kind of humorous. Then it became an annoyance—especially when he escalated things two years into his overtures by going to the media with his challenge to me.

  “I don’t believe that women deserve the same prize money as the men, as Billie Jean has been saying,” Bobby said at a news conference. He shared a telegram he sent me: “You insist that the top women players provide a brand of tennis comparable to the men. I challenge you to prove it on a tennis court.” He announced that he’d put up $5,000 of his own money for a winner-take-all match with me, and if I wouldn’t play him, he’d offer the same deal to any of the top women players. I still wouldn’t take the bait.

  In late February, I was playing in a tournament in Indianapolis and beat Margaret in the semifinals, snapping her twelve-tournament winning streak. When I stepped into the arena elevator afterward, there was Margaret. As the doors closed, she smiled at me and said, “You know, I’ve decided to play Bobby Riggs. They’ve offered $10,000.”

  I couldn’t believe she fell for it. I’d just turned down Riggs again two days earlier. I smiled back at her and tried to sound supportive, but all I could come up with was, “Okay, Margaret, if that’s what you want to do. But I’m begging you, please—you have to win. You know that, right? This isn’t just about tennis. You have no idea how important this is for women’s tennis.”

  She looked at me like I had six heads. For Margaret, it was just another exhibition match with a nice paycheck to tuck in her wallet. It burned me that for years she had been telling everyone money was ruining tennis and now she was risking the reputation of our tour for money—and not that much of it, at that. Before we separated, I pleaded with her one last time, “Margaret, please win.”

  Rosie let Bobby Riggs have it in an interview with Sports Illustrated. She questioned why any pro woman player should have to answer to “an old, obnoxious has-been like Riggs who can’t hear, can’t see, walks like a duck and is an idiot besides.” I had to laugh. Rosie always spoke her mind.

  Margaret later admitted that pride was one of the reasons she agreed to play Bobby. “It rubbed me the wrong way when he not only lampooned my sport but proclaimed Billie Jean the best player in the world when I had beaten her many more times than she had beaten me,” Margaret wrote in her 1975 memoir.

  As I mentioned earlier, after I went to Australia to become a full-time player and train, our record was dead even over the next twenty-four matches. I was ranked No. 1 at the end of 1972, but by the time Margaret agreed to play Riggs, she had drawn close to overtaking me. But this wasn’t about the rankings or head-to-heads anyway. Bobby was challenging me first because I also represented women’s liberation, not Margaret. She was the first to admit that she “was nobody’s idea of a women’s libber…I am playing this match for me. A woman is not supposed to beat a man, so I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Nor did Margaret think she would lose. At five-feet-nine, she was two inches taller than Bobby, and at thirty-one, she was twenty-four years younger. Years later, she admitted that she expected the match to be an “inconsequential novelty,” just “a bit of fun” as she geared up for Roland-Garros and Wimbledon. She didn�
��t prepare in any special way or even develop a game plan to play Bobby. She said the biggest impression Riggs made on her before their match was that “here is a man who has quite a big mouth.”

  The showdown took place at the San Diego Country Estates, a half-built resort community looking for a boost, on May 13, 1973—Mother’s Day. CBS decided to broadcast the match on live TV and added $10,000 to the winner’s payday. I couldn’t watch because I was thirty thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean at the time. That week, a group of Slims players had flown to Japan for the first-ever women’s pro tournament there. I wrapped up the finals in Tokyo the night before Margaret’s match for a very nice $8,400 prize—nearly as much as Margaret was making against Riggs, but with none of the gimmickry or headaches. Then I hopped a red-eye back to the States with Marilyn, Rosie, and the other American players.

  All we talked about during the long flight was how great it would be if Margaret wiped out Bobby and silenced him forever. We hoped to catch some of the match when we stopped in Honolulu. Once the jetway door swung open, we raced off the plane and fanned out across the arrivals lounge hunting for one of those coin-operated television sets that used to be attached to rows of seats in airports. I fed a quarter into one TV and groaned, “C’mon!” when all it would play was the previous week’s Gunsmoke, a popular Western. Rosie pulled out her portable radio and turned the dial until she found a local news station. We held our breaths when the broadcaster turned to sports and said, “And in California this afternoon, Bobby Riggs defeated Margaret Court, 6–2, 6–1.”

  She lost in a rout? We couldn’t believe it. I looked at Rosie and said, “Now I have to play him.” Then I called Larry and said, “Let’s set it up.”

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  Riggs’s defeat of Margaret became known as the Mother’s Day Massacre. When I watched the videotape for the first time and saw Margaret curtsying to Bobby before the match as he handed her a bouquet of roses, I thought she had lost it right then. Bobby disarmed her first, and then he dissected her. The oldest hustler trick in the book.