I’m still working on it. Even now, I sometimes get a churning in my gut when I talk about being a lesbian. The word itself can make me uncomfortable because for most of my life the words lesbian or dyke were hurled as a slur. I prefer using the word gay because it’s a happy, joyful word, the nicest kind of double entendre.
Elton, who is three years younger than me, was wrestling with the same dilemma. He is gay, and married to David Furnish now, and they have two children. But as a younger man, Elton was attracted to both men and women. He discussed his sexuality publicly for the first time in a Rolling Stone article that was published in 1976, the year after my Playboy interview. “There’s nothing wrong with going to bed with somebody of your own sex,” Elton said. “I think everybody’s bisexual to a certain degree. I don’t think it’s just me. It’s not a bad thing to be.”
The remark was poorly received. Elton was one of the biggest rock stars on the planet at the time, but according to Rolling Stone, hate mail started pouring in. He battled drug and alcohol addictions for years and, like me, had food issues. His career suffered as a result of merely peeking out of the closet. It was yet another warning that the world wasn’t ready to accept us for who we were. And to my own detriment, neither was I.
* * *
—
I developed my lifelong habit of announcing goals like wanting to be No. 1 or, in 1975, chasing my sixth Wimbledon singles title, because it usually made me perform better. I put in the work and by the end of June 1975 I had never felt more fit. I was told after I arrived at Wimbledon that I could achieve a couple of significant records. If I won my sixth singles title, I’d tie the career total of the great Suzanne Lenglen, as well as match Elizabeth Ryan’s overall mark of nineteen Wimbledon titles (all of them in doubles).
Margaret was back after giving birth to a daughter, and her game was starting to peak again. In the semifinals she lost to Evonne. Chrissie had taken the first set from me easily in our semifinal match, and during the changeover I had a sharp talk with myself. I was trying to savor every moment, thinking this could be my last time on Centre Court, and it was hurting me. When I came out for the second set I was literally snarling. I snapped at the umpire, snapped at the line judges, and stomped around the baseline seething energy. I recaptured my form. I took the second set by the same wide margin that Chrissie won the first.
In the third, I was down 0–3, 15–40, and fighting for my life again in a service game that kept slipping back and forth to deuce before I finally held. I would win the next five games to take the match, but just as I began my roll, Jimmy Connors caused a commotion in the stands by arriving with the actress Susan George on his arm (she was still living with the singer Jack Jones at the time).
Though Chrissie and Jimmy had broken off their engagement, they were still seeing each other on occasion and she didn’t know there was another woman. Chrissie insisted afterward that she didn’t see them—she was too classy to detract from my win, and she didn’t want to feed the papers’ appetite for scandal—but years later, she admitted, “Oh, I saw them all right. Flashbulbs were going off. People were standing up. You couldn’t miss it.” Her concentration was broken and she never quite got it back. The fans were so astonished by my comeback they kept roaring and clapping for me long after we left. I had to retrace my steps and run back out into the stadium to take a curtain call. Everyone was still jammed around Centre Court.
Two days later, still riding that high, I swamped Evonne in thirty-eight minutes for the title, surrendering just one game. It was the closest I’ve ever come to a perfect match.
Arthur Ashe, who like me was thirty-one, faced Connors the next day in another battle of the generations, and I watched Arthur crush Jimmy in four sets. Some reporters suggested that it was karma coming back to bite Jimmy in the butt. In addition to the stir with Chrissie, Jimmy had sued the ATP after being banned from Roland-Garros, and the case was still pending when Arthur, the ATP’s first president, beat him.
It was stirring to see Arthur become the first Black man to win the Wimbledon singles title, and we had fun dancing together at the Wimbledon Ball. “What a great way to end my career here,” I told the press, insisting again that I was done as a tournament singles player. I honestly thought that was it. When the U.S. Open rolled around in late August, I wasn’t in the singles draw. But the tournament would be best remembered for something else, because it shaped the next generation of our tour.
* * *
—
Martina Navratilova was born in Prague in 1956 at the height of the Cold War and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. She came from a tennis family. Her grandmother had been the country’s No. 2–ranked player before World War II, and Martina’s mom, Jana, was a tennis player as well as a gymnast and ski instructor. Martina’s father, who was also a skier, left Jana when Martina was three. Martina was raised by Jana’s second husband, Mirek Navratil, and took his last name. Mirek also played tennis and encouraged Martina to compete. She was a national champion by age fifteen.
Chrissie and I had looked out for Martina ever since she joined the U.S. circuit in early 1973. Chrissie knew what it was like to be young and under the microscope. Martina and Chrissie played doubles together for a while and I became an informal coach and mentor to Martina. By that summer of 1975, she had grown incredibly powerful and stood five feet eight. But she was at least twenty pounds overweight, which I could relate to. She was also a deeply emotional player, which could hurt her as much as help her. She was already chewing out umpires and line judges. Besides tweaking her backhand, I wanted to encourage her to learn self-discipline, something I had also lacked at her age as I battled both my temper and my weight.
When Martina first started playing in the States, tournament announcers would inevitably mangle her name: “And from Czechoslovakia…Marina Navatova!”
“Mar-TI-na Nav-RA-TIL-ova!” she’d yell back in frustration.
“Don’t worry,” I told her as we were playing doubles together at a tournament in Chicago. “Just keep winning. They’ll learn to pronounce your name.”
Everyone could see that Martina had the potential to be a star in women’s tennis. She was an incredible all-around athlete, an acrobatic serve-and-volleyer with great hands and speed. She went on a winning streak in 1974 that included a straight-set victory over Margaret in the Australian Open quarterfinals. Some weeks later, as the two of us were sharing a ride in Detroit, I told Martina, “You know, you could be the best player ever.”
She blinked and said, “You really think so?”
“Yes,” I told her. “You’re smart. You’re an amazing athlete physically. But you have to really, really work for it. Just think about it.”
Martina’s lifestyle and independent spirit irritated the top Czech tennis federation officials who controlled her visas and travel. (Czech athletes had to return their passports when they reentered the country.) Martina fell in love with the trappings of Western capitalism—Gucci bags, Mercedes sports cars, McDonald’s Big Macs. Her Czech handlers didn’t like that, or how she was spending time with Chrissie and me. They grew irritated at Martina’s other little rebellions, like not staying at the same hotels as her fellow Eastern Bloc players or delaying her return home once to play an extra U.S. tournament. The Czech officials told Martina she was becoming too Americanized and assigned the Czech coach Vera Sukova to be her chaperone. They almost didn’t let Martina play in the 1975 U.S. Open, until her countryman, Jan Kodes, intervened for her.
By the time she arrived in New York that year, Martina had talked to Chrissie and me about wanting to defect to the West. We both avoided influencing her decision. There was too much at stake. She was just eighteen. The Berlin Wall was still intact. Who knew if or when she’d be able to see her family again if she left? What if she were injured and couldn’t make a living in tennis?
Martina knew the dangers, but she was determined.
Her parents had been allowed to travel with her to Wimbledon in 1975, but once there, Mirek and Jana backed out of defecting as a family. After that, Martina again contacted her manager and lawyer Fred Barman, who was based in Los Angeles. (Fred had helped us cofound World TeamTennis.) He set up a series of clandestine meetings for Martina with FBI and U.S. immigration officials in New York City during the Open. This time, she planned to seek asylum on her own. She feared that Czech officials would not let her leave the country again because they had ordered her to return home immediately after Forest Hills.
Only a few of us knew what Martina was considering, and we were afraid she would be snatched, drugged, and thrown on a plane back to Czechoslovakia. Stories like that floated around. The night that she lost to Chrissie in the U.S. Open semifinals, Martina and Fred went to the customs office in New York after hours and did some asylum paperwork. The next morning, Martina was awoken at 7:30 by the phone. The first call was from a CBS news crew, asking her for an interview in the hotel lobby right away. “Now?” Martina said. She didn’t know why they called her. As soon as she hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Vera Sukova crying, “How could you do it? Why did you defect?”
Vera told Martina there was a story about it in The Washington Post and that she was coming to talk Martina out of her decision, which touched off a panic. Martina called Fred, who told her, “Get out of there! Now!” She left the room with nothing and was standing in an alley near the hotel with something covering her head when Jeanie Brinkman, the Virginia Slims publicity director, scooped her up in a taxi. They stayed at Jeanie’s Greenwich Village apartment until they took another taxi to Forest Hills a few hours later for a hastily arranged news conference. Jeanie figured they’d be safer there because of the security.
I didn’t know something was happening that morning until I saw Martina walking around the Forest Hills clubhouse with Howard Cosell. I thought, Oh my God, she did it. Minutes later, Martina was standing in front of an enormous bank of photographers and reporters explaining how she thought the Czech Communist government was trying to control her life and stifle her career. Every time she showed a hint of emotion the camera shutters fired noisily in unison. She said she felt she had to leave and was grateful for the chance to live in America. “You don’t know what you’ve got here,” she told reporters.
“What’s that?” asked one.
“Freedom,” Martina said.
I was happy that Martina chose to defect, but it would be years before she was reunited with her parents and younger sister, and her beloved grandmother died before she could see her again. Martina moved in with Fred and his daughter, Shari, in Los Angeles and all of us on the tour became her extended family. Martina traveled with FBI protection for the first six months after she defected. Despite all the challenges, she still developed into the best all-around singles, doubles, and mixed-doubles player we’ve ever had. She and Chrissie would have a historic rivalry that is unsurpassed in individual sports for longevity, import, or drama. It lasted sixteen years and featured eighty matches between them. They ended with eighteen Grand Slam singles titles each.
People often ask me if I’m jealous that later generations have earned more or had it easier than we did, and I always say, “Not on your life.” My reward has been watching women athletes who are freer now to concentrate on optimum performance rather than worrying about making a living or creating places to play. Chrissie and Martina were the first generation of women tennis pros who lived out the dreams my generation had about what the modern female athlete could be. Today, Ilana and I help other women athletes in sports including soccer, ice hockey, and cricket to grow their games. Yet tennis remains the leader in women’s sports. Tennis has shown what’s possible, and remains a model that other sports emulate.
Chapter 23
I spent much of my next few years in tennis feeling like a woman plucking the petals off the daisy: I’m going to stop playing singles. I’m not. I am. I’m not. I would think I was done playing, then have a good practice with a tour player and the yearning would be back. No matter how much you know it’s time to pass the torch, some residue of joy or ego, sadness or ambition, not to mention love—probably all of that—gets tapped back into, and you change your mind. Or at least I did. For much of my life nothing provided as much fun or sanctuary as performing on a tennis court.
After I won at Wimbledon in 1975, I made the mistake of listening to outside influences and giving in to the notion of going out on top. I skipped the U.S. Open when Martina defected because my knees had had it. A lot of the reporters there didn’t believe me when I again said I was done with singles. One scoffed, “Frank Sinatra is always retiring and then coming back.”
“Yeah,” I told him, “but you don’t sing with your knees.”
I told myself if I quit then, I’d finally have the time to do things I’d always wanted to do. I bought a piano intending to get back into playing classical music. I wanted to take Spanish lessons. My love of dance had been rekindled when I met Dina Makarova, a photographer and writer who did some work for World TeamTennis as a Russian interpreter. Dina was the one who had taken me to see the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets when we were in Russia. Now she was writing a biography of Natalia Makarova (no relation), a prima ballerina who had defected to the West in the 1960s. Dina took me one day to see Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia dance Swan Lake, and again, I was captivated. I’ve always thought the feeling an athlete gets of shaping time and space isn’t all that different from what a dancer must feel. There’s a grace and a rhythm, a freedom and beauty involved that intrinsically appealed to me.
At about the same time, I was invited to meet another artist who fascinated me—Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts. Like tens of millions of other Americans, I had been a devoted fan of his comic strip for years. (At its height, Peanuts was syndicated in seventy-five countries and read by an estimated 355 million people.) Snoopy, the tennis-playing beagle, was my favorite character. Naturally, I related to Peppermint Patty, who was way ahead of her time when she was introduced in 1966. She could play sports better than any boy. I also had a huge soft spot for Charlie Brown, the shy, lovable kid who just wanted to belong and didn’t care if he played with boys or with girls, as long as he could get into the game. Charlie Brown was a feminist, like his creator and alter ego. “I guess Charlie Brown is mostly me,” Schulz once admitted.
I first started to recognize the inclusive message in Peanuts in 1973 after Bobby Riggs popped up in a Sunday panel devoted to how upset Lucy was that Riggs beat Margaret Court in the Mother’s Day Massacre. After I defeated Bobby in the Battle of the Sexes that September, I began turning up in the strip, too. In March 1974, I opened my morning newspaper to find Peppermint Patty’s little pal, Marcie, yelling at Patty to get off Snoopy’s doghouse perch. Patty looks down and says, “Marcie, has anyone ever told you that when you’re mad, you look just like Billie Jean King?” I couldn’t stop laughing because it was true.
World TeamTennis had arrived in the Bay Area that spring, and Schulz became one of our biggest fans. He would regularly drive down from his home in Marin County to watch the Golden Gaters play in the Oakland Coliseum—Ilana was a young player on that team and remembers him well—and he made a point to come see me play, too, when I was in town with the New York Sets. Schulz and I didn’t meet until Eva Auchincloss was putting together a board of trustees for the Women’s Sports Foundation and asked me to accompany her to Schulz’s Santa Rosa home for a meeting. The first thing I noticed was his warm smile and crinkly blue eyes behind his large glasses. “You can call me Sparky,” he said. As a baby he had been nicknamed after a cartoon horse named Spark Plug. Only people who didn’t know him called him Charles or Charlie, he explained.
Sparky was a caring, unassuming man. He accepted the trustee position on the spot and supported the foundation and women’s sports vigorously. He took me to his studio the first day we met and s
howed me where he illustrated his comic strip, which was a treat. Over the years I visited him often in Santa Rosa and we became dear friends. Ice hockey was among the many sports Sparky loved, and we’d talk for hours at the ice rink near his house, where he ordered the same lunch every day: a tuna fish sandwich, root beer, and a chocolate chip cookie. Sometimes I’d hit with him on the home tennis court he built, and I came to know his wife, Jeannie. He illustrated posters for the foundation, attended our board meetings, and hosted the Snoopy Cup and other tennis legends events that Rosie’s company organized. I wrote the foreword for volume 12 of The Complete Peanuts, his definitive collection.
For twelve days in the autumn of 1979, Sparky used Peanuts to push for gender equality and forcefully call out the NCAA because Title IX was being debated again. He relied on research from the Women’s Sports Foundation to show the huge imbalances between women’s and men’s collegiate sports but ended the storyline hopefully: “I think the day is coming when women will achieve equality in sports,” Peppermint Patty tells Marcie.
In subsequent years, Sparky would mention me in Peanuts again, often with one of his characters saying some variation of perhaps Billie Jean would give them a call. I always took it as a sign I needed to phone Sparky, and so I did.
Larry and I were getting along better than we had since the early days of our marriage now that I’d slid back into my transition plan of playing only doubles. I was more relaxed. He was running World TeamTennis and I loved how he focused daily on that job instead of chasing a dozen other projects. We were spending a lot of time in the New York apartment and almost had a routine. In the mornings we walked our dog in Central Park. Sometimes we stopped for warm bagels. Later in the day we might take in the latest movie. I loved the rhythm I’d fallen into away from tennis—until I got to Wimbledon in June 1976.
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