In my view, science matters, and research shows that there is no single biological measure that irrefutably places every human into one of two categories—male or female. The functions of genes and hormones in determining sex characteristics have been found to be more complicated than scientists knew in the 1970s. That’s why a chromosome test or testosterone count or the sex a person is assigned at birth (most often by a visual examination) is not and should not be the sole determinant of gender.
It’s incredibly tricky to know how this should apply to sports participation. As I write this, there is scant scientific research regarding the performance of transgender or intersex athletes. Until there is, we don’t know if other athletes’ concerns that they’re at a competitive disadvantage are reasonable.
For now, the United States, like many countries, has no consistent state or national policies. Many cases wind up in court. In 2020, the Connecticut high school association’s position as it was being sued for allowing transgender track athletes to compete was that multiple federal courts and government agencies have acknowledged that the term sex is “ambiguous,” and historical usage of the word “has not kept pace with contemporary science, advances in medical knowledge and societal norms.” In August 2020, Martina was among those who maintained that trans athletes’ inclusion could pose an existential threat to women’s sports. She was one of 309 athletes who signed a letter to the NCAA expressing support for an Idaho law that bans transgender female student athletes from competing in women’s and girls’ sports.
Still other sports federations from the high school to international level have passed rules mandating that trans athletes must finish gender confirmation surgery, or transgender and intersex athletes must take hormone suppression therapy before they can compete. The World Medical Association and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights pushed back against such forced medical interventions in the summer of 2020, taking the position that they are a violation of an athlete’s human rights. On that point, I firmly agree.
Nobody should make a decision about altering an athlete’s body or decide their gender identity except that person. My hope and goal is that we can arrive at policies for intersex, trans, and cisgender athletes that protect everyone’s right to play while also ensuring fair and safe competition. Championing everyone’s human rights and factoring in the ethics and science involved is the correct thing to do.
Chapter 24
The contrast between my clarity about Renée’s situation and my long-running conflict about my own sexuality was an irony not lost on me. Here I was, terribly afraid of being exposed but pushing ahead to take a public stand for Renée even though it could attract more attention to my closeted existence. “Gay by association” was a common assumption then, and I used to get impatient late in my career when other players endured speculation about whether they were gay merely because they partnered with me. I thought, Does this mean I can never have a female friend? Well, does it?
I continued hiding my sexuality throughout the 1970s. I paid a steep price for that in my health and my relationships. At one point my stomach problems became so bothersome my doctor told me I might be developing ulcers, and he put me on a bland diet. Just about all I could eat was soft tortillas with a little butter. I was constantly on one diet or another because my weight fluctuated with my emotions. When I was still playing I might follow a strict 2,200-calorie-a-day regime. Then, when I had a tough loss, I might tell myself, Forget it. I want a Big Mac. My emotions often led to angry outbursts. Sometimes my moods could be overwhelming, especially if I was overtired—which was most of the time.
Rosie says I had gained a reputation among the other players for blowing matches because of my temper. Tennis officials often took the brunt of my anger. In Japan I got angry once over a really bad line call in a doubles match that Julie Anthony and I were playing. Julie was horrified when I literally threatened to “kill” the linesman if he didn’t leave right after the match. I disrespectfully blew off an official dinner later that night, and when Julie came to check on me, she found me limping around because I had kicked something. She sat with me all night until I calmed down.
I lost another final in Austin, Texas, to Chrissie after another bad line call—this one on match point. Larry was there and ran ahead to the women’s locker room and yelled, “Everyone out! Get out! She’s going to go ballistic.” He knew me, all right. The room was deserted when I got inside. I sent my rackets helicoptering into a set of lockers and they went clattering to the floor.
Peachy Kellmeyer, the first fulltime employee of the WTA and our first Virginia Slims tour director, reined me in sometimes. Peachy, whose given first names are Fern Lee, is a small but formidable West Virginian who speaks with a country drawl. Her good manners disguise that she has a spine of steel. Peachy had been a junior tennis champion in the 1950s and played in the U.S. Nationals at the age of fifteen. Later, she became the first woman to play for the men’s Division I tennis squad at the University of Miami as well as the women’s team. As a coach and physical education director at Florida’s Marymount College, she also made history by successfully fighting to remove a rule barring scholarships for athletes at women’s colleges. She’s been a great advocate for equal opportunity and a defender of Title IX her entire career.
Peachy was also the only tournament director who never ticked me off when she came onto the court because I knew she was fair to everyone. She was also strong enough to stand up to me and even make me like her for it. That happened when we were playing a Slims tournament in Mission Viejo, California, at a tennis center surrounded by grass-covered hills. I was playing horribly against Robin Tenney in the first round and growing angrier with myself with each mistake. So I took it out on the balls. Every time I’d lose a point I’d knock a ball over the fence and into the hills. I was hitting moonshots. Pretty soon, all the ball kids were in the tall grass trying to find the balls and I was down to one ball—at which point I saw Peachy calmly walking out.
“Oh, hi Peach!” I said, thinking, Here we go…
“You cannot do that, Billie Jean,” she said.
“I don’t have a choice, Peach—I’m going crazy out here.”
“Well, I’m not going to give you new balls. You’ll have to serve with just one.”
“You have got to be kidding me!” I barked.
She wasn’t. “Fine,” I said. I didn’t miss a first serve the rest of the set. I even won the match. But it was another temper tantrum that qualified for my personal hall of shame. There were so many times when I was so mentally worn down. I remember telling Frank Deford, “I’m just not in the mood to fight anymore.”
People had been pressuring me to run for political office by then, and I usually said I didn’t have the heart for that. It was another thing I said that was untrue. I would have loved to run for office, but the country wasn’t ready to elect someone who had a lesbian affair outside her marriage. I was still dealing with the Marilyn issue. She was not in any hurry to move out of the Malibu beach house, and things were not good between us. Trying to compartmentalize the secrecy and dysfunction made me anxious. So did not knowing when or how it might end.
* * *
—
The late 1970s marked a generational shift for tennis that included the birth of some epic new rivalries just as a lot of former champions, including me, were moving on. Jimmy Connors was growling about his determination to chase Bjorn Borg “to the ends of the earth.” Martina was on her way to overtaking Chrissie. Tracy Austin splashed down as a fifteen-year-old phenom, and her pigtails, braces, and pinafore dresses were a stark contrast to her advanced game. With her two-fisted backhand and fierce determination, she seemed like a younger, harder-hitting version of Chrissie, and playing such a mirror image of herself threatened Chrissie at first, by her own admission.
It was also an era when the top players were treated like rock stars. They
were the first generation of professionals whose careers unfolded entirely in the television age. John McEnroe was on his way to join a rock band. Vitas Gerulaitis, John’s fellow Queens native and a brilliant player, had an affection for Studio 54, the trendiest disco in Manhattan. Chrissie accepted Andy Warhol’s offer to paint her portrait and dated the actor Burt Reynolds for a while.
By then, I was sometimes falling out of tournaments earlier than I had since I was a teenager. I finally found a way to accept that I couldn’t be No. 1 forever and I allowed myself to experience the sheer joy of being out there, competing. One of the things that helped me a lot was reading Bill Bradley’s 1976 book, Life on the Run, his first-person account of a few weeks in his life late in his career with a New York Knicks championship team.
Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer, is usually credited with the oft-repeated line that a professional athlete “dies two deaths”—once when the person retires, and again when life ends. My takeaway from Bradley’s book was that your career is indeed a separate lifetime, but only you should decide when to stop playing or what still brings you joy. You shouldn’t listen to the outside world that’s telling you you’ve faded, or that you’re damaging your legacy.
Bradley’s advice was a yardstick I started applying to myself and, later, to other athletes such as Chrissie and Martina when they asked my advice about retirement. “I don’t care what people say or what your ranking is—do you still love it enough?” I asked each of them. My answer at that point was still yes, even as Margaret, Maria Bueno, and Arthur had all stepped away by 1979. My body was telling me my time was close. My mind kept saying, Not yet, not yet.
I needed orthotics and injections in my foot to allow me to play Wimbledon in 1978. I lost to Chrissie in the quarterfinals. I didn’t enter in singles at the U.S. Open but won the doubles title with Martina. When I finally had plantar fasciitis surgery in December, my orthopedic surgeon, Dr. John Marshall, removed a golf ball–size chunk of scar tissue and a bone spur from my foot and told me he shouldn’t have let me play that summer.
While I was still in a cast in early 1979, Martina asked me, “Are we playing doubles together at Wimbledon?”
“There’s no way,” I scoffed. “I won’t be ready.”
“I’m not playing without you,” Martina said. Then she kept it up all spring, calling me at least a dozen times with the same offer. She wouldn’t give up on me, and I remain forever grateful. Prodding me to believe and giving me a goal to work toward were the greatest gifts she could’ve offered me that year. She wanted me to have the Wimbledon record of twenty titles overall, breaking my tie with Elizabeth Ryan, a fellow Southern Californian whom I had known since she watched me play junior tournaments at the Los Angeles Tennis Club.
I was able to work my way back in time to play Wimbledon with Martina. The day before our doubles final, news raced across the grounds that Elizabeth had suffered a heart attack as she was watching Martina win her second singles final. Elizabeth, who was eighty-seven, died on the way to a London hospital. I broke her record the next day, Martina carrying me most of the way. The minute the championship match was over, I glanced up at the stands where Elizabeth’s customary seat sat empty. My victory felt so bittersweet.
There was someone else missing that day—Larry. Earlier that year, as the magazine and World TeamTennis were experiencing setbacks, Larry lost a lot of money on another venture, a smokeless ashtray. He had spent about $10,000 of our money on its development. Then, against the advice of our business manager, Jim Jorgensen, Larry invested more to manufacture and market thirty thousand ashtrays in time for Christmas 1977. They barely sold. The loss of more than $100,000 frightened me. I was thirty-six years old, worried about my future earning power and determined to have some untouchable money that would carry me through retirement. Not long after that, Jim set up individual bank accounts for Larry and me. The financial disengagement was the beginning of a long process of separation that would take us years to complete. The day I broke that Wimbledon record of a lifetime, Larry had chosen to run a one-hundred-mile ultramarathon back in the States.
* * *
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Sometime in the summer of 1979, Ruth Kloss wrote me a letter from South Africa asking me to check in as a friend on her daughter, Ilana. Ruth confided that whenever she heard from Ilana, she seemed lost.
Ruth and her entire family had been part of my life since I first met Ilana, by chance, more than a decade earlier. I was walking across the grounds at Ellis Park in Johannesburg at the South African Championships in 1966 and saw Ilana and her father practicing. I recognized Ilana because she and her friend, Renée Aucamp, had been ball girls for some of my singles and doubles matches with Rosie and they had done an excellent job. Now I could also see that Ilana, a shy but determined ten-year-old, had talent as a player, and so, as I did for many youngsters, I wanted to give her some encouragement.
“Do you mind if I hit with her a bit?” I asked her dad, Shlaim.
After ten or fifteen minutes, I told him, “You should make sure your daughter pursues tennis if she wants to. Here’s the name and address of Frank Brennan. He’s my coach back in the States.” Then I said to Ilana, “I’m going to put the Wilson rep in touch with you, too, so you get free rackets. And when I leave, you can reach out to me if you want. Write to me.”
Offering to help was just my way of paying forward the kindnesses that top players such as Doris Hart, Darlene Hard, and Alice Marble had shown me as a junior. It’s something I still do. It was only years later that Ilana told me, “I decided I was going to be a professional tennis player that day.”
I saw Ilana and her family at the South African Championships the following year as well, and I kept up my correspondence over the years with her and Ruth, who was in charge of the tournament’s program sales. I’d send Ilana little notes about life on the tour, ask her questions about her game, maybe give her a few motivational tips. I had no idea that her parents were saving each handwritten letter in a large scrapbook they kept about Ilana’s tennis career. Ilana still has it. It’s fun to look at today. In one two-page letter I addressed to Ilana and Renée in June of 1971, I wrote,
The Queen’s tournament starts Monday, a week from today, with Wimbledon to follow. My heart starts pounding every time I think about it…Ilana, it seems as though your game is coming along in good form from what you write and from what I hear through the grapevine. As soon as possible you must start travelling and really start working on becoming a champion, if that is what you still desire. I could sit and talk or write to you all day trying to warn you about the various pitfalls along the way, but each person must experience their own adventure in life, the ups and downs, and the confusion of it all.
If you and Renée are meant to be any good, you will make it no matter what the odds. You will train, travel, fight, and struggle your way to the top. It is a good life and to be the best at something is worth a try, if you have that restless feeling deep down inside that keeps pushing and pulling to make you just a little bit better than the next person. Each new day will be a new challenge, a new adventure, never to be duplicated again. Think big.
Once Ilana traveled the pro tour, we occasionally ran into each other at tournaments or at World TeamTennis matches. She attended the Gloucester Hotel meeting where we founded the WTA and served as the African continent’s representative on the WTA board. We didn’t socialize together because I’m twelve years older and I was in another orbit of friends. But when Ruth wrote to me, I said I’d be happy to see what was going on in Ilana’s life.
In late September 1979, Ilana and I were both playing in the Davison Classic in Atlanta so I asked Ilana to hit together, then grab some dinner. We hadn’t had a heart-to-heart talk since she was a kid. Back then, I had usually done most of the talking. Now I listened to her for a change. She was a levelheaded twenty-three-year-old who had been on the road for tennis mor
e or less since the age of sixteen. In some ways, she seemed older and wiser than her years; in other matters, she was innocent to the point of being naive.
“I’m in a rut,” she told me that night. She wasn’t sure where her tennis career was headed, or what the future held for South Africa, for that matter.
South Africa was still a very isolated country by then, with little news penetrating from the outside world. The radio was state run, and television (which didn’t reach the country until 1976) was still censored by the government. The first day I met Ilana at Ellis Park, I asked her what she dreamed about most. “To play Wimbledon,” she told me, even though she had never seen it live. She was limited to photos or listening to BBC radio broadcasts of the tournament.
By the time we had our dinner in Atlanta, Ilana had achieved her goal to get to London and more. In 1972, when she was sixteen, she won the Wimbledon juniors singles title. (I saw her early that day on the grounds at the All England Club, and motioned to her to come over to hit two-on-ones with Kristen Kemmer and me. That’s how we both warmed up for our finals, and we both won.) The following year, Ilana became the youngest woman ever ranked No. 1 in South Africa. In 1974, she signed on to play World TeamTennis. She also won the juniors singles championship at the U.S. Open, and she partnered with her South African friend Linky Boshoff to play Rosie and me in women’s doubles.
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