All In

by Billie Jean King

  The 1973 U.S. Open began in the middle of a brutal heat wave. The day before my fourth-round match with Julie Heldman I woke up with a headache, fever, and chills that were so bad I couldn’t get out of bed. A doctor came and gave me a shot of penicillin. The day of the match, I was still weak but I dragged myself to the court. It was 96 degrees and so humid I felt I was sucking hot air through a wet towel. I managed to take the first set, but the heat began to get to me by the time I had stretched out to a 4–1 lead in the second. First I had the shakes. Then I got so wobbly I thought I was going to pass out. Every time I looked up the sky started whirling.

  Julie won the next nine games. I knew I was done. But because nobody likes to win or lose by default, I was trying to finish the third set on my feet. I was taking my time during the one-minute changeovers to keep from puking or collapsing—which aggravated Julie. Like her mother, Gladys, Julie was smart, passionate, and sometimes difficult. She was leading 2–1 in the third when she saw my legs buckle and asked, “Billie Jean, are you all right?”

  “I think I’m going to faint,” I said.

  I lost the next two games as well, and on the ensuing changeover I sat down on the bench and put my head between my knees, hoping to pull myself together. “Is a minute up?” Julie asked the umpire. Then she turned to me and said, “The minute is up! You’ve got to play or stop the match!”

  I felt so lousy that I looked at her and snapped, “If you want it that badly, Julie, you can have it!” Then I walked off the court to go lie down in the locker room.

  I was out of the U.S. Open.

  Julie, who had beaten me only twice before, told the press, “I wanted it any way I could get it. I would have kicked her, I wanted it so bad.”

  As soon as I gathered myself enough to leave the locker room, I was ambushed by reporters on the terrace. “Does this mean you’re backing out of the Riggs match?” one asked.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  The doctor who treated me told reporters that I had been suffering from influenza for two days and I probably had a reaction to the heat and penicillin. But that didn’t stop the freight train of rumors: Billie Jean King was in trouble. Women can’t take pressure. “Billie Jean Wilts!” read a typical headline. More than one columnist wondered if I was faking the illness to avoid playing Bobby. The speculation didn’t stop even after Rosie and I advanced to the U.S. Open doubles final (we lost) and Owen Davidson and I won the mixed-doubles title.

  The rumors that I was succumbing to the tension were so persistent that advance ticket sales at the Astrodome plummeted. Five London theaters canceled their live, closed-circuit showings of the match. I was supposed to share the cover of Newsweek with Bobby but I was dropped at the last minute. The magazine instead ran a goofy cartoon of Riggs under the headline “The Happy Hustler.” Bobby was raking in endorsements with his boasts. I had that one new deal with Sunbeam.

  There were four weeks gone in the buildup for the Battle of the Sexes, a little over four weeks to go.

  * * *

  —

  After Forest Hills I flew to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where I was the touring pro for the Hilton Head Racquet Club. Dick Butera, a thirty-nine-year-old real estate developer from Philadelphia, had hired me to promote his club and help him design the tennis facilities. He was a charming guy and we became great friends. He set me up with a condo next to his on the edge of the club, near a beautiful stand of pine trees. It was the perfect getaway to get my body and mind right for the match against Bobby. I’ve often said pressure is a privilege, but this was one of those times I occasionally felt overprivileged.

  I saw very few people that week as I prepared. “I just want to be peaceful and focused,” I told Dick. I narrowed my world to a small circle that included him and Pete Collins, the resident teaching pro, who hit with me whenever I wanted to practice. Larry flew in and out of Hilton Head a few times with papers for me to sign. I didn’t have my own publicist then, so Larry’s assistant, Annalee Thurston, set up camp at my condo too. Her main job that week was to turn down all requests for interviews and public appearances.

  Usually Marilyn filled that role, but she had flown back to Los Angeles and wasn’t to join me in Hilton Head until six days after I got there. I needed a break from her. She had been making me uncomfortable for months. She had become possessive and extremely controlling within the first few months we were together. Friends and business associates began to tell me she was blocking their calls or messages, unbeknownst to me. During tournaments, she made sure she was a conspicuous presence near me, especially when the TV cameras were around. At first I thought she was a little overzealous but just trying to be helpful. I came to see that it was actually her way to draw attention to herself. She told the media she was the gatekeeper in charge of my schedule, my mail, even my diet. One time she interrupted an important interview to try to feed me an avocado. She did a lot of odd or inappropriate things like that.

  It had also become clear that Marilyn expected me to take care of her financially, not just on tour but for the rest of her life. That was not something I’d ever said, and I certainly didn’t have that in mind by the time our relationship started to fray before the end of our first year.

  By early summer in 1973, Marilyn and I were no longer sleeping together. Whenever she felt me pulling away, she got agitated and tried to make herself more indispensable. By the time September arrived, I had decided to put some distance between us. I knew she wouldn’t handle it well if I suddenly broke off the relationship completely, and honestly, I couldn’t invite any added drama; I had quite enough just preparing for Riggs. Nor did it help that I’m bad when it comes to emotional confrontations in personal relationships. Avoidance often sets in. I’m most happy when everyone else is feeling happy and emotionally connected. So I kept Marilyn on the payroll, took her phone calls while she was in Los Angeles, and didn’t fight it when she said she planned to fly to Hilton Head and accompany me to Houston.

  Shortly after I arrived in Hilton Head, Marilyn called me from Los Angeles to say that she’d heard a rumor that Bobby was telling people around town that he had made a side deal with Jerry Perenchio for a piece of the huge expected gate at the Astrodome. That would’ve been a violation of our agreement. I slammed down the phone and told Dick Butera, who was visiting for lunch, what Marilyn had told me. “That’s it!” I said. “I’m out! Call Jerry Perenchio and tell him the match is off!”

  Dick said, “Now wait a second, Billie. Before you cancel, let’s call Jerry and make sure it’s true.”

  “It’s not true,” Jerry insisted when Dick reached him. Jerry heard me in the background spouting off as I paced around the kitchen, so he told Dick, “Listen, I’m on my way.” Jerry hopped on a private jet from Los Angeles, even though it meant bringing along a group of boxing managers, as he was in the middle of delicate negotiations for a heavyweight title match. Dick drove Jerry and me to lunch. Jerry convinced me that the rumors that Marilyn had passed on were untrue. Believing her would’ve been a high-stakes debacle.

  * * *

  —

  I poured the rest of my energy that week into preparing to play Bobby. I spoke on the phone with my former coach, Frank Brennan, who urged me to forgo rallying from the baseline, something Margaret had done. He suggested hitting behind Bobby because slower or older players tend to cheat toward the open areas of the court more. It was good advice. Dennis Van der Meer had coached Margaret a bit for Riggs, and he told me that Margaret didn’t take Bobby seriously enough. That was not going to be my problem.

  My father had always taught me never to underestimate my opponents and be respectful, even if I disliked them. Being fifty-five years old had slowed Bobby down, but he was still spry and he had the know-how and array of shots to hurt me. He had proved it when he wiped out Margaret.

  To go five sets with Bobby, I worked to strengthen my legs and be at peak
fitness. I still didn’t have a personal trainer or a science-based routine, hard as that is to imagine today. I just made it up as I went along. I did two hundred sit-ups and four hundred leg extensions a day using homemade ankle weights. I began staying up later every night and waking up late in the morning so my energy would be at its peak for our night match.

  During that summer I had run into Margaret. “Would you mind if I ask you a few questions about Bobby’s game?” I said. I was nervous about bringing up such a sore subject, but she was kind enough to tell me, “His backhand was surprisingly weak.” So I planned to attack it.

  On the court, I didn’t want to overdo it so I limited myself to a few hours of practice each day. I asked Pete Collins to play like Bobby and vary his speeds, toss me lots of junk shots with heavy spin. Poor Pete must have hit me three hundred lobs a day while I worked on sharpening my overhead smashes. Then he and I would play a practice match.

  By the end of my preparations for Bobby I had a strategy. I was down to 135 pounds, my ideal weight. My abs were ripped and my arms were toned. Between practices or in the evening, I spent a lot of time alone in my condo. Sometimes I’d just lie in my bed listening to the distant ocean, the birds chirping in the trees. I’d slow my breathing and meditate. I always had a tennis ball in my hand or pocket as a sort of talisman, and from time to time I would hold the ball or look at it as a reminder of all the blessings the game had already given me.

  When I wanted to pump myself up, I’d listen to music like Elton John’s “Take Me to the Pilot” or the title song from Jesus Christ Superstar, the popular rock musical. I used the Maureen McGovern song “The Morning After” to imagine how I’d feel once the match ended and I was the winner. I visualized myself playing Bobby and doing everything right. I beat him in my head a thousand times.

  By Saturday afternoon, the day before I left for Houston, I was as ready as I would ever be. When I walked over to Dick’s condo that day to say hello, I found him lying on the floor in front of the television watching Penn State play Stanford in college football. I happened to get there just in time to see the Stanford band march onto the field at halftime. They were playing Helen Reddy’s anthem “I Am Woman,” and then, to my surprise, the band snaked around to form my initials, BJK. Dick and I looked at each other and we both had tears in our eyes. Neither of us said a word.

  The faraway show of support left me with a range of emotions—happiness, gratitude, astonishment at how much the match was capturing the public imagination. The next day when Dick, Pete, Marilyn, and I packed up my gear and boarded our flight to Houston, it felt like we were deploying on some kind of special ops mission. And in a way, we were. Losing was not an option.

  Chapter 18

  By the time I resurfaced in public in Houston, Bobby had been in town for a week and the city was already a madhouse of media, overheated hype, and money.

  I persuaded my parents to fly in for a few days because they hadn’t seen me play in person for five years and I wanted them near me for this match. I knew it would be historic. I put them up at the Houston Oaks Hotel, the same place where the rest of our party—Dick, Marilyn, Pete Collins, Larry, and I—were staying. We might’ve been one big, mixed-up family but we were all pulling together. Randy couldn’t attend because the San Francisco Giants schedule wouldn’t allow it, but he watched the match on his waterbed at home, yelling at the television.

  The Oaks Hotel was a safe distance from the circus atmosphere of the Astroworld Hotel where Bobby had set up his carnival act. While I was playing tournaments or training, he had been gallivanting around Beverly Hills and elsewhere, making the rounds of the nightclubs and talk shows, usually in the company of a rotating cast of beautiful young women. At a Hollywood function, Frank Sinatra kissed Bobby on the cheek. Now that Bobby and I were both in Houston, I figured the less Bobby saw of me, the more it would drive him nuts because he would have no opportunity to try to psych me out. Two could play that game. He hadn’t seen me in a month.

  Crazy as it sounds, I had another commitment to juggle that week, of all weeks. I had promised to play the Virginia Slims tournament in Houston long before I agreed to play Bobby. I had wanted to withdraw, but Gladys kept saying, “We’ll get killed on ticket sales if you do. And you signed a contract. You have to play.” At least they scheduled my first two Slims matches on Monday, and I won both easily. Then I took off to the hotel to make final preparations to play Bobby on Thursday night. Seventy-two hours to go.

  A few friends told me Bobby was keeping the press and himself entertained by playing celebrity challengers in the practice bubble they had set up for us in the Astrodome parking lot. That was his idea of practicing. Otherwise, Bobby’s only preparation seemed to be laying off the booze for a few weeks before the match and taking, he claimed, 415 vitamin pills a day. He made a great show in Houston of squiring around Sandra Giles, a young actress he was dating, and taking endless calls from bettors looking for a piece of the action. Bobby was so sure he could win that he didn’t bother to rest much or change his schedule. To the last, his hotel room door was always open and his suite filled up nightly with cigarette-smoking reporters, random hangers-on, and a stream of women.

  It’s hard to overstate how much Margaret’s loss to Bobby colored things. When they played, eighteen of the twenty-four reporters who covered the match predicted that Margaret would win. After that? The Las Vegas bookmaker Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder installed Bobby as a 5-to-2 favorite to beat me.

  At first it was kind of amusing to watch the boundless energy that Bobby threw into hawking our showdown. Some of it was just a put-on, and I told myself it was all part of the promotion. He was saying the grating things he always said—“I’ll tell you why I’ll win. She’s a woman and they don’t have the emotional stability! She’ll choke, just like Margaret did…The man is supreme!” Other things Bobby did were harder to dismiss. The day before our final press conference, he showed up at his practice wearing a T-shirt with two circles cut out to expose his nipples, and then cracked to reporters that he thought the shirt would look better on me. That crossed the line.

  I knew some people actually did believe some of the sexist things he was spouting and I wanted to be forceful and crystal clear: It was not okay. The day before the match, when one of the reporters at our final joint press conference asked how I felt about Bobby, I told the truth: “That creep runs down women…I like him for many things, but I hate him putting down women, not giving us credit as competitors.”

  That seemed to strike a nerve in Bobby. We were sitting elbow to elbow and he ignored a question put to him and turned to me instead. “Please don’t call me a creep,” he pleaded. “You don’t mean that, do you? Won’t you take that back?”

  As I studied his face I wasn’t sure if he was truly pained or if this was another of his cons. And frankly, I didn’t care. I could feel the dynamic in the room shift when I looked him in the eye, smiled dismissively, and said, “No way, baby. ‘Creep’ stands.”

  The next twenty-four hours were a blur. I do remember the Smithsonian Institution asking for the dress I would wear during the match. Everywhere I went—the practice bubble, the hotel lobby, a last-minute run to a grocery store in Houston—women kept approaching me and saying, “I hope you win…I hope you shut up that S.O.B….I want you to kick his pompous ass.”

  People were divided over who was going to win, and they were arguing it out at their kitchen tables, around the vending machines at work, inside beauty salons and corner bars. Countless wagers were made. Husbands promised their wives to take over the ironing for a week if I won; bosses vowed to make the coffee for their secretaries. Viewing parties were planned, and people had fun with it. (My partner, Ilana, was then a young touring pro, and she watched the match at the home of friends on Long Island.)

  The media kept canvassing experts for predictions. Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, Bobby’s former coach, told the press that
Bobby was such a shot-making genius, “He knows the air inside a tennis ball.” When I ran into Bud Collins, he said, “I went with Riggs.” That hurt, but it stung me even more when I overheard some Slims players in the bathroom at our Houston tournament telling one another that they wanted me to win, but they thought Riggs would beat me. They didn’t know I was there until I walked out of one of the stalls, looked at them without saying a word and left after washing my hands.

  While I was busy strategizing with Dennis Van der Meer and watching at the last minute a bit of film from Bobby’s win against Margaret, Bobby kept playing celebrity challengers in the practice bubble for $100 or more a set. Over the years, Bobby had burnished his hustler label by cooking up gimmicks like placing thirty-two chairs on the court, playing in galoshes, attaching himself to a dog on a leash as he played. He still won. In Houston, he was selling buttons that read “Pigs for Riggs.”

  We were so totally different. A big part of my preparation for a match—or a speech, or any event, really—has always been running through everything that could happen ahead of time. Every detail is important to me, from having a backup pair of sneakers to familiarizing myself with the venue. For the Battle of the Sexes, I especially left nothing to chance. I arranged for a guard to let me into the Astrodome the day before the match to show me around. The stadium looked like an enormous flying saucer on the outside. It was nicknamed the Eighth Wonder of the World when it opened in 1965 because it was the first domed stadium of its size anywhere. Inside, it was a cavernous, echoing space.

  I knew I’d have to get used to the lighting, the depth perception, and finding the ball fast in the steel girders of the 208-foot-high webbed ceiling. Then again, so would Bobby. The Sportface carpet court we were using would be laid out at one end of the stadium, in the middle of the Houston Astros’ baseball diamond between first and third base. I reminded myself that I wouldn’t have the luxury of getting acclimated beforehand because the court wasn’t being assembled until the day of our match. But it would be the same for Bobby.