People are often surprised to hear that the men who approach me often have tears in their eyes too. They say, “Billie Jean, I was very young when I saw that match and now I have a daughter. It changed me.” One of those men was Barack Obama. When I met him for the first time in the Oval Office after he became president, he told me, “You don’t realize it, but I saw that match at twelve. Now I have two daughters and it has made a difference in how I raise them.” Hearing that was just the best. Many other men admit to me that they had never absorbed or even considered the sexist treatment of girls and women until they had a daughter, and they found themselves asking, Is this the hard life she’ll have to face as well? Often, they’re motivated to push for equality for the first time.
Little boys were coming up to me after the match and saying, “I want to be a great tennis player like you.” They didn’t think of me as a woman as much as an athlete.
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As I mentioned before, when Senator Birch Bayh and others successfully pushed Title IX through Congress the year before our Battle of the Sexes match, few people recognized how much the law could affect sports. But in late May 1973, Sports Illustrated ran a terrific cover story titled “Sports Is Unfair to Women.” The writers, Nancy Williamson and Bil Gilbert, compiled page after page of infuriating examples of how boys’ and girls’ sports programs were kept separate and unequal:
By 1973, an estimated fifty thousand men attended college on sports scholarships. Fewer than fifty women had them nationwide.
In 1969, a Syracuse, New York, school board budgeted $90,000 for boys’ sports and $200 for girls’. At the University of Washington, where enrollment was 41 percent women, less than 1 percent of the sports budget went to women’s sports.
Many of the girls surveyed had trouble naming even a few women athletes.
When I read that article I felt both outraged and vindicated. Then Sports Illustrated published two more scathing pieces on sex discrimination in sports. The additional stories made the case that there indeed was a great hunger among girls to participate in sports even though the men who ran the institutions insisted that girls weren’t interested. The articles also made clear that few people seemed keen to watch women’s sports because there were hardly any women’s sports to watch.
It was a point we had been making in women’s tennis for at least a decade, and we were debunking it more forcefully each passing year. In 1976, just five years after I became the first sportswoman to win $100,000 on our Slims tour, Chrissie became the first female athlete to top $1 million in career prize money. The velocity at which things were moving for us in tennis was stunning. Especially since men had a one-hundred-year head start in the sports marketplace.
The Sports Illustrated writers asked what could be done to give women and girls everywhere more athletic opportunities, and found that the remedy already existed—it was Title IX, a lawyer in the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare told the magazine. If a school was spending far more money on male sports than on female sports—and it was nearly impossible to find a co-ed school then that wasn’t—the federal government could withhold funds to those institutions until the discrimination was remedied.
You could feel the fear and loathing spike in the male-dominated athletic offices and locker rooms across the country. Title IX was seen as an existential threat. Many schools, particularly those in the NCAA’s Division I (or biggest) conferences, were raking in cash from their men’s football and basketball programs with virtually no money going to women’s teams. The spending balance would now have to change. Once again, nobody was demanding overnight equality or a 50/50 funding split; rather, Title IX mandated a “proportionally” fair allocation for girls and women based on a series of criteria laid out for institutions.
Title IX’s opponents complained that the law constituted political correctness and could lead to the end of college football and basketball’s March Madness. Women’s advocates countered that one group’s “grand old traditions” often happen at the expense of another group’s continued repression. Our proof was in the math. At the time, major college football programs routinely warehoused players and handed out 120 or more full-ride scholarships per year per team, meaning that one major college football team exceeded the total number of athletic scholarships available to women in the entire country—fifty by Sports Illustrated’s count in 1973. The imbalance was indefensible.
Three weeks after I defeated Bobby, on November 9, 1973, I appeared before a U.S. Senate subcommittee to talk about the Women’s Educational Equity Act, a proposed adjunct to Title IX. The WEEA legislation would create federal grants to help institutions fund Title IX requirements.
I’d come a long way from my grade school public-speaking panic attacks. Here I was in our nation’s capital talking with seven senators on an all-male committee about what they should do with regard to federal legislation. It was an opportunity for me to contend that we should reshape our institutions to make sure they’re places where all of us are supported, so all of us can excel. I spoke from the heart. I told the committee how often I could’ve been dissuaded from becoming who I was. I shared my childhood stories about the boys getting expense money while I was given nothing. I suggested that the Senate should take the word women out of the title of the bill. “I think it should be changed to the Education Equity Act,” I said, noting that the grants would be given to both men and women, so women weren’t seeking special rights, just fair treatment.
I talked about how a lack of facilities and funding impeded girls and women athletes, and how social mores and psychological conditioning worked against us too. “We’re considered freaks, we’re considered masculine…that boys are not going to like us,” I said. “It is tough enough to guts it out on a tennis court other than to have to worry about all the other aspects of society accepting you as a human being. We are just now being accepted—I had to wait this long. [And] what about the boy who is not athletically inclined? Why should he be put down, too?” I said people should be able to do their own thing, whatever their abilities or interests are.
I also let the senators know I didn’t like the NCAA. “As far as I’m concerned, we should get rid of this monopoly because they [athletes] are going to school because of their excellence in sports. Who’s kidding whom? College athletes today are professional athletes.” It took the NCAA another forty-some years to begrudgingly allow athletes to be paid something beyond their room, board, and classes for the use of their name, image, and likeness. But it was obvious even in 1973 that major college football and basketball had their own version of shamateurism. So I said so.
A couple of months later, Congress passed the Women’s Educational Equity Act. I was heartened to see how many men in Congress were willing to work with women to safeguard our rights. The vote was an example of how many men will do what’s right if you can engage them as allies rather than reflexively dismiss them as enemies. Title IX remains intact, but we have to remain watchful. There are still legal challenges to the law and a stubborn lack of compliance to this day.
To keep the equality-for-all conversation going, I started the Women’s Sports Foundation, as promised, eight months after the Battle of the Sexes match, using the $5,000 award that Gillette gave me on its Cavalcade of Champions TV show. The WSF was originally created to fight for gender equality in sports from the grassroots to collegiate and professional levels. At the outset, it was the only national organization dedicated to assisting and funding the development of sports for women and girls. The foundation soon evolved into providing research, education, legal referrals, grants, coaching, and leadership development. The WSF works with the National Women’s Law Center. In 1987, the WSF executive director, Deborah Slaner Larkin, succeeded in soliciting enough support from all fifty states to convince Congress and President Ronald Reagan to establish National Girls and Women
in Sports Day, an annual day of observance that is celebrated with events across the country to recognize the importance of female athletic participation and achievements. Women’s sports leaders and athletes also meet with congressional leaders on Capitol Hill to discuss issues and legislation.
By the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX in 2022, the WSF will have raised and invested more than $100 million to expand opportunities for girls and women in all sports. Part of our work has been documenting the extraordinary effect of Title IX. In 1972, only 3 percent of American girls played high school sports; the number was 43 percent in 2020. Fan interest in women’s sports has grown enormously too. NCAA women’s basketball teams drew 11.5 million fans during the 2018–19 season, and the women’s college softball championships averaged 1.57 million viewers a game on ESPN that academic year.
The dominance and popularity of the U.S. national women’s soccer team, starting with its dramatic 1999 World Cup victory before a sellout crowd of 90,185 at the Rose Bowl, a record for a women’s sporting event, sparked the growth of women’s soccer around the world. At the American team’s fourth World Cup title victory in Lyon, France, in 2019, the crowd broke into spontaneous, thundering chants of “Equal pay! Equal pay!” in the waning minutes of the final. The U.S. team was so admired that their Swedish opponents had taken the extraordinary step of taping a video that was played on the scoreboard before the championship game thanking the American team they were about to play for all they had done for the sport. It was well known that the U.S. women had filed a lawsuit against their federation charging unequal treatment compared to the U.S. men’s team.
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Another of my dreams since I was a young woman was to make tennis a team sport. To me, team sports are where it’s at in terms of jobs, maximum audience size, participation slots, and money. I also knew many kids quit playing tennis because they missed the camaraderie that team sports provide. After I signed to play Bobby in the summer of 1973, Larry and I were approached by a group of businessmen led by Dennis Murphy, a sports entrepreneur who had cofounded maverick leagues such as the American Basketball Association and the World Hockey Association. Murphy and his group initially wanted to start another women’s tennis tour because they believed that the Virginia Slims Circuit’s viability was still doubtful. Larry said, “Not interested.” When Murphy came back to us with the idea of a team tennis league, we jumped. The basic concept had been knocking around for decades, and Larry and I had been shaping and refining our version since college.
We told them our idea was to create a World TeamTennis league with women and men on the roster in equal numbers, playing matches that made an equal contribution to the final score. Everything equal, see? Owners could buy franchises and set up teams in different American cities, the same as the NBA or NFL.
We were convinced that our World TeamTennis format offered something for everybody. Players would have a guaranteed salary for several months, with time carved out to play the majors. The networks would find World TeamTennis more TV friendly because a match would reliably last two hours or so, about the same as an NBA game. World TeamTennis would be great for fans because they were almost guaranteed to see the stars they bought tickets hoping to see, unlike traditional single-elimination tennis tournaments. Our fans also would have home teams to cheer for and they could get to know their players instead of having a tournament visit only one week a year (if their city even had a pro tournament). We also envisioned integrating World TeamTennis teams into their communities, supporting local charities, establishing programs, and holding clinics to grow the game at the grassroots level.
By then, tennis was the fastest-growing sport in the country, according to Nielsen surveys. Ten million Americans said they played tennis in 1970, and by 1974, the year after the Battle of the Sexes, the figure was 34 million people. It was the most amazing time ever for our sport. So many people took up the game that players reported it was often hard to get a court. Suddenly there was a gold rush in tennis. And money follows money.
Dennis Murphy and Larry set out to find thirteen investors willing to pay $50,000 each for the right to buy a league franchise. Before long, they had raised $500,000 and marveled that their only upfront expense was a $3 map of the U.S. that Larry would stick a pushpin into every time they sold another franchise. Three more teams were reserved for our founders, which is how Larry and I ended up owning a piece of the San Francisco Golden Gaters.
From the outset, World TeamTennis offered numerous innovations for our sport, such as music during matches and branded multicolor court surfaces. We used a simpler scoring system that eliminated advantage points so the next point after deuce wins a game. The no-ad scoring and the responsibility of playing for your team and your city added a lot of pressure that players didn’t experience playing tournament tennis; many of them said it helped their performance when they returned to the tour.
We also permitted substitutions that were limited to one player per set, per gender. We were the first to pay linespeople, and among the first to use an all-electronic line-calling system when that technology came along. Each World TeamTennis match consisted of five sets—one set of women’s and men’s singles, women’s and men’s doubles, and mixed doubles—and a doubles set always opened and closed the match until Andre Agassi played for us in 2002. Andre persuasively argued that our format too often prevented teams from using their very best player in the final set, when the match was often decided. It made sense, so we made a new rule to allow the home team coach to determine the order of play—the better to get more strategy involved. We also encourage fans at World TeamTennis matches to hoot and holler, and they get to keep balls that are hit out of play.
“But what if people grumble about music and cheering at a tennis match?” a reporter asked me at the start.
“The players can’t have all the good of the past and all the good of the future,” I said. “Cheering and noise is where it’s at. Some of them want the country club life and nobody hassling them and $200,000 a year. They’ve got to become more professional like other team sports.”
When we launched, our friend Dick Butera bought the World TeamTennis franchise in Philadelphia on one condition: I had to agree to play for him and coach the team. I was willing to do just about anything to get World TeamTennis going. Plus, my role would be historic. This would be the first time a woman was coaching men in pro sports, and the first time women and men played on the same professional sports league teams. I even helped pick our Philadelphia team’s name, the Freedoms, after we held a contest with The Philadelphia Inquirer that attracted more than fifteen thousand entries. Freedom is one of my favorite words, because of the infinity of possibilities it suggests.
Larry initially took the title of vice president of operations, and Rosie made history, too, as a player/coach for Detroit. We were thrilled when John Newcombe agreed to play for Houston for $75,000 a season, particularly since Jack Kramer was trying to block the ATP men from signing with us and Arthur Ashe, still president of the ATP, ran down World TeamTennis even though he had privately tried to negotiate a multiyear contract with us; I told the press that only after they mentioned Arthur’s criticisms. Kramer disliked our format. He complained that there was “too much emphasis on dames.” But in our first season our sixteen teams drew 5 million fans.
Some of our original owners remain familiar names today. Dr. Jerry Buss owned the Los Angeles Lakers and our Los Angeles Strings. Robert Kraft cut his teeth as an owner with the Boston Lobsters before he bought the New England Patriots and launched their NFL dynasty. Many of our other owners knew almost nothing about sports. They were car dealership owners or furniture moguls caught up in the excitement of the moment, and it showed when we held our first player draft on August 3, 1973, in New York. Some of our teams ignored the availability list we gave them and wasted draft choices on Chrissie, Rod Laver, and Ilie Nastase, though all three said t
hey wouldn’t participate that first year. Maria Bueno and Pancho Segura were drafted though they hadn’t played in years. Chicago took Bobby Riggs in the ninth round, just for laughs. Young stars such as Chrissie, Martina, and Bjorn Borg all played in our league eventually. Pittsburgh was thrilled to land Evonne Goolagong.
World TeamTennis ran into interference almost immediately from the European promoters who weren’t happy that our May-to-August schedule pulled players off their tours. In retaliation, Philippe Chatrier, the head of the French Tennis Association and a friend of Kramer’s, banned all World TeamTennis players from Roland-Garros in 1974. That was particularly devastating for Jimmy Connors, who won the other three majors that year in addition to honoring his contract to play for our Baltimore Banners. Jimmy and his agent, Bill Riordan, sued on Jimmy’s behalf, but a French court refused to grant him an emergency injunction to play in the tournament.
The best male player on our World TeamTennis squad was Fred Stolle, my Aussie mate from our barnstorming days. Dick Butera moved heaven and earth to trade for Julie Anthony, the brainy and beautiful PhD student at Stanford who was still a part-time player. I had introduced them at Wimbledon the year before, and Dick developed a major crush on her. That I knew. What Dick did not tell me was that he had shipped out Laura Rossouw from our roster to get Julie. For a perfectionist like me, who was taking my coaching job very seriously and doing everything from giving players tips to arriving at the arena hours early to make sure they had every little thing they needed, Dick’s decision was grating.
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