All In

by Billie Jean King

  Chrissie lost to Evonne in the U.S. Open semifinals, and Jimmy won the men’s championship. I wasn’t surprised when they called off their wedding a few weeks later after a long, late-night phone call. Chrissie was still only nineteen. Both of them went on to spend the next decade at or near the No. 1 spot.

  I faced Evonne for the 1974 title at Forest Hills, and it was probably the best tennis we ever played against each other. The match was filled with scintillating exchanges and went to a third-set tiebreaker before I reeled off eight of the last nine points to win. It was my fourth U.S. Open title, and I had to rally again and again to do it. When I walked into the press room afterward, the reporters applauded me. Then Rosie and I won the doubles title in another epic match.

  It doesn’t get much better than that. Then I thought, Maybe it never will.

  When the year-end world rankings were released for 1974, Chrissie was No. 1 and I was No. 2, knocked off the top in the World Tennis magazine and Lance Tingay’s London Daily Telgraph lists for the first time in three years. By then, I felt like I was running out of goals as a tennis player and my priorities had shifted. I announced at a news conference in December 1974 that I intended to leave tournament singles competition in a few weeks. After that, I planned to play only doubles and mixed doubles at a few events because I was juggling three or four full-time careers. “I’m having the time of my life, but it’s not fair to the sponsors and the public if I can’t give them my best at all times,” I said.

  I signed a contract with ABC in late 1974 to be a sports commentator. I had a lot to learn about broadcasting, but there was no training provided before they put me on air, so I tried to pick up the technical aspects as I went and booked elocution lessons on my own. I still laugh at how I had to cram for some of my early assignments, like the World Wristwrestling Championships in Petaluma, California.

  Some of our World TeamTennis owners wanted to bail after our inaugural year, in part because their cost of player procurement had been driven higher than they expected. We decided to contract by six teams before we started again in 1975, and my Philadelphia team was among them. I agreed to be traded to the New York Sets, and some of our other players were folded into the Boston roster. I eventually took an apartment on West Sixty-Sixth Street, across from Lincoln Center, that had a tennis court in the building, and it became my East Coast home. I could see the American Ballet Theatre rehearsing in the high-rise across the street. I had fallen in love with ballet after I’d seen the Bolshoi and Kirov companies perform on one of the trips I made to Russia.

  The West Coast headquarters of King Enterprises had moved to a suite of offices in San Mateo, just south of San Francisco. Larry and I bought a condo near the office, though we didn’t spend much time there since we were both constantly traveling. We now had at least twenty-five employees working on our various businesses, and we were both so busy we wanted something low maintenance. The one exception was a half-Labrador, half–Old English Sheepdog puppy that Randy wanted to give Larry and me that winter. I talked Larry into taking her, and she often came on the road. It was easier to fly with pets then, and we named her Lucy after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and the Lucy character in the Peanuts comic strip.

  One time Larry flew to San Francisco without me, drove to San Mateo, fell asleep at the apartment for a few hours, and then woke up and called out for Lucy. No response. He tried again. Still nothing. That wasn’t like her.

  Then Larry bolted upright in bed and thought Oh my God!, realizing that he’d been so distracted by everything he had to do that he had left Lucy in her airline travel crate at baggage claim. It was another example of how crazy everything was. Larry raced back to the airport, and when he opened the crate door to check on Lucy, she bounded out of the cage wagging her tail.

  She lived to be fifteen and a half. The stories she could tell.

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  —

  In January 1975, Seventeen magazine released a poll of teenage girls in which I was voted “The World’s Most Admired Woman,” capturing 37 percent of the vote. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was second, followed by Mary Tyler Moore, the Olympic gymnast Olga Korbut, Barbra Streisand, and Chrissie Evert. I was thrilled that three woman athletes were in that elite group, which showed that young people were choosing us as role models.

  “This was a tremendous departure from past surveys,” Ray Robinson, Seventeen’s managing editor, told Sports Illustrated. “There is something going on out there with young girls. There are new heroines, but not the high lamas of feminism. It seems to be important to the girls that Billie Jean did it all on her own, just her and that damn tennis racket.”

  Winning the Seventeen poll dovetailed nicely that same month with the first Women’s Superstars show, a made-for-TV event that we created to bring together the greatest female athletes of the day. It was a two-part competition that consisted of a qualifying round and then the finals. Both aired nationally on ABC. The network already had a male Superstars program when Larry took the idea of having a female version to Sidney Schlenker, the vice president and manager of the Houston Astrodome, whom Larry had gotten to know because of the Riggs match. Sid offered the Astrodome as the venue and partnered with us on the Superstars fifty-fifty. Then we signed up twenty-three women athletes from eighteen different sports to $1,000 guarantees. When ABC Sports and the sports talent agency IMG found out what we were doing, they tried to stop us. Once they realized we already had so many top women under contract, they offered to sign on with us as coproducers instead, so we were able to demand that the women be given the same prize money as the male superstars. That was a coup that hiked our total available prize money to $69,000, with $34,000 going to our winner.

  Many of the women athletes we brought in had never dreamed of being able to chase that kind of payday. Our invitees ran the gamut from four-foot-eleven gymnast Cathy Rigby to the pro tackle football quarterback Barbara O’Brien, the jockey Robyn Smith to the towering volleyball spiker Mary Jo Peppler. We had the golfers Jane Blalock and Sandra Palmer, the surfer Laura Blears Ching, Olympians such as the sprinter Wyomia Tyus, the diver Micki King, and the swimmer Debbie Meyer. We competed in events that were not our specialties, such as an obstacle course, a sixty-yard dash, swimming, and so on. The idea was to show us at our athletic best and perhaps even our most vulnerable. (That would be me in the rowing competition, where I just kept going in circles. I couldn’t stop laughing.)

  To me, one of the most meaningful things that happened at the Superstars occurred away from the playing field. We knew we were introducing the national audience to many of the athletes, but we were surprised at how many of the women superstars had never heard of each other before they arrived in Houston. (Even today, women’s sports receive only about 4 percent of all sports media coverage.) The ABC announcer Donna de Varona, who later served as the Women’s Sports Foundation’s first president, Jane Blalock, and I organized some social gatherings for the athletes. Our conversations revealed how many of us had experienced the same struggles to make it and how deeply we craved a regular forum to exchange ideas, find fellowship, and access financial support that could help us stay in our games. I felt there was a lot the year-old WSF could do to make all of that happen, and the Superstars event helped us sharpen the foundation’s mission. Later that year, the WSF established our annual Salute to Women in Sports gala to keep bringing everyone together and raise funds. (In 2020, we held the forty-sixth version as a live-stream event because of the coronavirus pandemic.)

  The tennis tour’s winter season opened the same month the Women’s Superstars aired, and it quickly became clear to me that my announced plan to stop playing tournament singles might not stand. For a lot of pressing reasons, retirement would have to wait.

  Chapter 22

  I don’t think my roles as a businesswoman and a tennis player ever overlapped with as much urgency as I felt in 1975 once
a few of our ventures started going sideways. Three young enterprises were now up and running—the magazine, World TeamTennis, and the Women’s Sports Foundation—and all three would experience fits and starts. Like most things Larry and I did, we established them to be vehicles for transformative change, so making sure they kept chugging along meant more to me than amassing titles. We thought we could do it all.

  The wave I began riding after the Riggs match showed little sign of slowing. For every commitment I turned away, two took its place. We were accomplishing enough to convince me that we had made important inroads, and yet everything remained so fragile I’d think, I can’t stop pushing now.

  I initially planned to play two events in January to say goodbye to tournament singles. I suffered a painful 6–1, 6–1 loss to Chrissie in the first one in San Francisco. I remained upset going into the next tournament—my announced singles swan song—and when I was to play Chrissie again in the final, I told myself if this was indeed it, I was determined to go out fighting. I worked myself into such a pitch I routed her in straight sets, losing only five games. “That’s the best I’ve ever seen her play,” Chrissie said. After that, I seriously started questioning if I should step away.

  By February 1975, the WTA was considering boycotting the Wimbledon championships over unequal prize money, just as we had discussed the year before. This time, Chrissie embraced the idea. She was now No. 1 in the world, she had just ascended to WTA president, and, at twenty, she was on her own for the first time in her life—no fiancé, no mom traveling with her, no father calling all the shots regarding her career. When reporters asked her where she stood on boycotting Wimbledon, Chrissie said, “I’d like to play at Wimbledon, but not if it throws women’s tennis back a few years. What’s the point of the WTA if we don’t stick together?” Perfect.

  Jerry Diamond and I flew to England that month for talks with Wimbledon officials about averting a boycott. Jerry had replaced the WTA’s Martin Carmichael as executive director in 1974, and he stayed on the job eleven years. He was one of the best hires the WTA ever made. When Jerry took over we were $35,000 in debt and offered less than $1 million in annual prize money; when he left in 1985, the total pot was $14.2 million. He was a brilliant negotiator, and Ann Jones and I were among those who got to witness that during our Wimbledon discussion with Sir Brian Burnett, chairman of the All England Club.

  “Jerry, I’m just going to say a few opening words and then it’s all yours,” I told him as we traveled to the meeting. “It’s the All England Club. It’s all men. They don’t want to hear from me.”

  We knew Wimbledon would lose its lucrative contract with NBC if there was another boycott a year after the men stayed away. To show Sir Brian how much leverage and unity we had, Jerry produced a contract that was signed by more than eighty women players, obligating us to compete the following summer in another tournament to be held the same time as Wimbledon. We told Sir Brian the contract for us to skip Wimbledon and play elsewhere would be binding only if the women didn’t receive at least 70 percent of the prize money the men were paid at Wimbledon in 1976. The second condition: Our percentage would have to be negotiated upward each succeeding year, until equal prize money was achieved.

  Sir Brian accepted the proposal; he had little choice. When we announced that the WTA was calling off its boycott because of the increased prize money we had been promised, I told the media another bit of news: “I’ll be playing singles at Wimbledon this year, too.”

  My change of plans started in earnest when TennisAmerica, our tennis instruction business, developed liabilities of $400,000 after Larry and Dennis Van der Meer hired a Stanford University economics lecturer to run it the previous year. The business filed for bankruptcy in early 1975. (It was eventually bought and revived by Nike.) When Frank Deford came to interview me for a profile in early 1975 I confessed to him that I would probably have to abandon my plan of selective play. I admitted for the first time that I played Chrissie not only to avenge the beating she gave me in our previous final in San Francisco, but because I needed to enter every possible tournament to win enough prize money to keep womenSports from folding. “I probably played so well because I had to, for the money,” I told Frank.

  To Larry and me, TennisAmerica was a business, but womenSports and World TeamTennis were our babies. And World TeamTennis was struggling too. It fit my utopian vision of a nonsexist sports world where everything was equal, and I’ve never given up on the concept. But World TeamTennis lost $12 million in 1975, our first year; that was less than projected but still scary. When we cut the league back from sixteen to ten teams by the start of our second season, only three of the original owners were still in place. We could argue that the league was a good investment because most of the owners who bailed had sold at a profit. But there was no certainty that we’d meet our projection to be out of the red by year four.

  Our magazine womenSports was considered a success even though it lost a million dollars in its first year, hardly unusual for a start-up. Unlike our involvement in World TeamTennis, though, the money Larry and I were risking on the magazine was mostly our own. Larry eventually found womenSports an angel investor, Charter Publications, the owner of Redbook and other magazines, and that temporarily saved the day. Larry and I reclaimed ownership three years later when Charter closed the magazine and we relaunched it through the Women’s Sports Foundation with the slightly altered title, Women’s Sports. It lived on another twenty years until Condé Nast bought it in 1998 and folded it into Self two years after that.

  I had only been making big money for a few years by 1975, and our business misadventures were noticed. There was speculation about how financially overextended I was, and reports of how I was playing “to keep the wolf from the door.” As Frank wrote in SI, “The unkindest remark going around the tennis community is that Billie Jean may not only be the Jackie Robinson of women’s sports, but the Joe Louis as well.” It was an allusion to how Louis, the iconic heavyweight boxing champion, had to go work as a casino greeter in Las Vegas late in life because he had gone broke.

  In the same article, Frank wrote about another growing concern of mine: “Some of the interest in her most private life is more than genially searching; it borders on raw inquisition. Alone, perhaps, of any public figure, she has been asked point-blank if she is a Lesbian.”

  * * *

  —

  The source of the “inquisition” Frank was referring to was Playboy. Joe Hyams was a Hollywood writer and an avid club tennis player who was married to the actress Elke Sommer, and he had written an instruction book with me, Billie Jean King’s Secrets of Winning Tennis, that we published the year before. The Playboy Interview, as it was called, was a major event back then that reached millions of people. Cultural figures from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Beatles had agreed to do it because of its reach. But only a few women or athletes were asked when Joe approached me. I wanted the opportunity to use the interview to reach men who might not ordinarily hear a woman talking about women’s liberation, sports, and politics.

  My publicist Pat Kingsley and I discussed the interview before I agreed to do it. I said, “Pat, you know they’re going to ask me about my sexuality.” She told me she was confident I could handle it. In early 1975 I agreed to the interview, and when Joe asked about sex, I easily dismissed some of his questions, including whether I had ever seen a porn movie, but others made me uncomfortable. Joe mentioned the rumors about my sexual orientation and asked me—on the record—if I was a lesbian. That was a first.

  “My sex life is no one’s business,” I said, echoing the same pat answer that many publicists at the time, including mine, gave. I should have stopped there. But I added, “If I don’t answer your question, people will think I have something to hide…[so] I’ll give you the answer. No, I’m not a lesbian. That’s not even in the ballpark for me.”

  It was yet another example of the mental gym
nastics I was doing at the time regarding my sexuality. Today, after forty years of loving Ilana, I know I am a lesbian. But before that, I told myself that declaring what I was came down to labels, and I wasn’t willing to accept any of them with any finality. I was attracted to both women and men, so I didn’t think of myself as a lesbian. When I was on and off again with Larry, which was still happening, I’d say I was straight.

  I went on to tell Joe that I believed everybody should feel free to live however they wanted, as long as they didn’t hurt anybody. “I’m for liberation at all levels,” I said, “be it gay liberation or whatever.”

  That, at least, was true. But even that assertion was freighted with the unspoken reality of my life: I wanted my own liberation. My torment over my lack of clarity and having to hide the truth again led me to discuss with close friends the idea of going public about my sexuality. Everyone warned me not to do it. Ellen Merlo, who had ascended to brand manager for Virginia Slims, still believed that coming out would hurt the tour and destroy my post-retirement prospects in broadcasting as well as tennis. That was crushing to hear, even though I thought she was right. The Playboy interview drove me deeper into my closet. And it was starting to feel as if the walls were closing in.

  It has taken a lot of therapy for me to understand the role that my own homophobia played in my reasoning. Though it may be a shock to straight people, the societal bias against LGBTQ+ people is ingrained in many of us, too, particularly in people from older generations. Some of us are still reluctant to talk freely about our sexuality. It’s a legacy of so many things, including not knowing if you could trust anyone with the information. People in the closet often take consolation in the idea that at least they’re controlling who knows the truth, when the real truth is that the closet is controlling them.