Sometimes I liked what I saw in me, and other times I didn’t. Either way, one of the most important things I learned is that there are times when you think you cannot take another step, when you’re sure you can’t continue another minute, and then you find there’s some reserve in your body, in your soul, that you didn’t know you had. You go into a different gear—there are an indefinable number of them—that allows you to rise to the occasion. There’s a place you go sometimes that you didn’t realize you could go, and you win yourself a new beginning.
That was me, after Renfrew.
Ilana and I became more open in our lives. We stopped hiding from friends and acquaintances that we were a couple, then we expanded the circle from there. My parents finally accepted Ilana and me as partners, and we made a point to visit them together. (One of their favorite things was to have us take them shopping at Costco, and then grab hot dogs and Cokes for lunch and chat.) Now when I phoned home, Mom ended our calls by saying, “Give Ilana our love.” It was just four little words. But they meant the world to me.
If interviewers asked about my sexuality now, I answered honestly. I didn’t identify Ilana as my partner at first because she was the chief executive officer and commissioner of World TeamTennis by 2001 and we were both wary of the corporate blowback that might ensue if we were vocal about being an out couple. It wasn’t until the spring of 2006 when HBO aired Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer, a documentary by the producer Margaret Grossi, the interviewer and story adviser Mary Carillo, and the associate producer Helen Russell, that Ilana discussed our relationship for the first time on camera. That was when we came all the way out of the closet.
We stepped further into the open that summer after the USTA president, Franklin Johnson, told me the board had voted unanimously to rename the entire Flushing Meadows complex, home of the U.S. Open, the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. The first thing I thought was, The USTA is not only going to name the place after a woman–but after someone who led a revolt against them for open tennis and equal opportunities? Amazing.
The ceremony was held at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the tennis center’s main stadium, and it brought me to tears. My father had passed away only two and a half months earlier, at the age of eighty-eight. Not having him there was so poignant, especially when I saw that the USTA had flown out the color guard from the Long Beach fire department in honor of my dad, including a captain who knew him personally. It was hard to believe that somebody who always seemed so much larger than life could be gone. But my mother and Ilana were beside me that day, as were Randy’s daughters, Alysha and Miranda, and I thanked them during my remarks. It was the first time I had acknowledged Ilana’s real place in my life on a public stage, not to mention on a live television broadcast that was being beamed to 184 countries.
After twenty-seven years, I finally felt comfortable enough to bring our love out into the open, on our terms. As we stood on the floor of the stadium together, Diana Ross sang rousing renditions of “Respect” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Chrissie, Venus Williams, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe made some heartfelt remarks about our shared connection over the years. By the time Mayor Michael Bloomberg led me to the podium for my speech, I admit I was a bit overwhelmed. My voice was a little soft as I started, and someone in the crowd shouted, “Louder!”
“Well, that’s the first time anybody’s said that to me,” I said with a laugh.
I emphasized in my speech that this honor wasn’t about me. It symbolized what can happen in life when you believe. The national tennis center is on forty-six and a half acres of public-park land. I was a public-park kid who came along when tennis wasn’t as hospitable to someone like me. Now that I had my name on the place, I wanted to invite everybody to come out and play: people of all genders and colors, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities. No one has to be on the outside looking in, not in tennis or anywhere else.
“Mi casa es su casa,” I said that night. “My house is your house! This is our house.”
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Five years after Ilana and I stepped out completely, the NBA executive Rick Welts came forward in 2011 as the first openly gay male executive in North American sports. He’s since been voted into the NBA Hall of Fame for his front office work. The following year, our friend Sally Ride, the first female astronaut America sent into space, was dying of cancer and she gave her life partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, permission to reveal they were a couple for the first time—though not until Sally’s obituary. Two years after that, in 2014, Apple’s Tim Cook came out as the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Tim wrote about it in a first-person article for Bloomberg, and acknowledged that he was worried about the reaction outside Apple because “the world is still not friendly to gay or trans people in many countries but also within our country.”
Feeling safe enough to come out is a crucial consideration that I always emphasize. Not everyone lives and works in a place where diversity is tolerated. What I’ve found is that if you can achieve a comfort level or push through whatever else is inhibiting you, your worst fears may not come true. If you don’t give people a chance, they never have the opportunity to surprise you—often in the most wonderful ways.
Telling the truth has had a transformative effect on my life and relationships and happiness. When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each ran for president, I no longer worried about my sexuality being a liability. Ilana and I were seen as assets and were invited to work as surrogates for both candidates through three campaigns. If I was traveling for business, I would call the campaign staff in whatever place I was and say, “Put me to work. What can I do to help while I’m here?” In 2020, Ilana and I also worked for the Joe Biden–Kamala Harris presidential ticket and supported efforts to get out the vote. The night they won the election, we sent a text to Hillary thanking her for her landmark run for the White House, which helped crack open the door that Kamala kicked down.
When Donald Trump was president, many of the things we fought for in the 1960s and ’70s were relitigated and remain under attack. We suddenly had a president who bragged about sexual assault and penalized anyone he sees as Other. As his four-year stay went on, his behavior became even more divisive and objectionable, culminating with the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol building. I’ll never forget seeing a sign at the 2017 Women’s March that read “I can’t believe we still have to protest this stuff.” I get the frustration. I sometimes feel it myself.
But if you’re in the business of change, you have to be prepared to play the long game. Even now, in my late seventies as I write, I’ve never felt comfortable enough to stop pushing. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) are the animating principles behind all the work that Ilana and I do in business, in politics, in the LGBTQ+ rights arena, and in the other social justice causes we support.
The recurring question we ask ourselves whenever we consider any undertaking is When this is done, will we have helped make the world a better place? If the answer is no, then we move on to other possibilities. I often joke with Ilana that we want to make lots and lots of money before I’m out of here so we can give it all away. The way we define success is doing well and doing good.
I’ve always said that it helps women in business to know sports because men have created both cultures, and having that knowledge helps you navigate your path and pick up vital cues and subtleties. Sports teach you how to assert yourself and create sustained bonds even in competitive environments; you learn how to weather setbacks and conflict, handle pressure, and push through to get the outcome you want, whether it’s with teammates or by yourself. Those are vital skills in business. To me, it’s not surprising that research by EY (Ernst & Young’s global organization) and espnW has shown that 94 percent of women at the C-suite level say they played sports, and more than half competed at the university level. UBS, a company we work with, has data that show
s that women-led companies are outperforming corporations led by men. Women often have to be more resourceful to survive and advance.
Ed Woolard, the former CEO of DuPont and one of our most important business mentors and dear friends, has helped me refine some pointers that we could pass along to audiences of all ages about what makes people successful, happy human beings. We came up with three components for inner and outer success:
Be a problem solver and an innovator, and realize that once you identify a problem, it’s important to be part of the solution.
Never stop learning, and never stop learning how to learn.
Relationships are everything.
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While much is understandably made of the early part of my life and career, what too often goes overlooked is that Ilana and I have been together for forty years and the story of our time together has never been fully told or understood. Granted, part of that was our doing. But when I look at our personal life together and what we’ve accomplished as businesswomen and social activists, it’s significant.
Stylistically and temperamentally, we’re very different, but those differences complement each other. I bring emotion, energy, and vision; Ilana is an ideas person, too, but she’s more results oriented, and excels at selling concepts and finding ways to finish the job, close the deal. She tempers my runaway enthusiasm, and she says I raise her ability to be more open-minded, more forgiving. We’re partners in every sense of the word. Our values align seamlessly. I don’t think Ilana gets enough recognition for her pivotal role and leadership in everything we do, let alone what she’s accomplished independently.
By the time I turned seventy in 2013, we began thinking seriously about my legacy. What could I leave behind that would be enduring and meaningful for future generations? One answer came in 2014, when Ilana and I worked with Paul Keary, Kim Davis, Michael Coakley, and Therese O’Higgins at the strategic advisory firm Teneo to start the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, our nonprofit undertaking to promote equality and inclusion and advocate for pay equality.
Studies have shown that creativity and productivity increase in businesses where workplace diversity and inclusion are supported, and that improves the bottom line for employers and employees alike. People are better on the job when they can be themselves. But how do you get employers onboard who may be lagging?
We decided to start working with large corporations that set trends in workplace practices at the C-suite level, knowing that CEOs can do things overnight if they want to, and corporations can help move governments and change legislation.
One example is Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, a cloud-based software company. Ilana and I met Marc in April 2015 at the White House when we were attending the Equal Pay Day event, which is meant to raise awareness about the gender pay gap. In 2019, an American woman had to work for sixteen months to earn what a white American man made in twelve months, if both of them worked full-time. Overall, women in the U.S. make only about 82 percent of what men do, and the gap is far worse for African American and Latinx women, who earn 62 percent and 55 percent, respectively. President Obama made the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 the first bill he signed after taking office; this important piece of legislation widened the time frame and conditions under which an employee can sue their employer for discrimination. But we still need to do more. Many people don’t realize that women and minorities fall behind from the timing of their very first promotion, and then it’s hard to catch up, according to the 2019 Women in the Workplace study, one of the most comprehensive examinations to date of the experiences of working women and men.
Marc is a very unusual CEO who has become one of the BJKLI’s greatest allies. He’s a delightful, brilliant man who has always had a social conscience and designed a model of corporate giving that is replicated all over the world. But Marc was surprised after two of his executive vice presidents, Cindy Robbins and Leyla Seka, urged him to do an internal audit of their seventeen thousand employees, and the data showed what the two women expected: In many cases, he was paying women in his company less than men who had similar jobs. Over the next two years, Marc spent nearly $9 million to correct the compensation gaps that existed by gender and race and ethnicity across the company. When 60 Minutes interviewed him about it, Marc admitted that he had been in denial that the inequities existed at first, and so are many of his fellow CEOs.
“I’ve had CEOs call me and say, ‘This is not true, this is not real’ and I’ll say to them, ‘This is true. Look at the numbers,’ ” Marc told 60 Minutes. “CEOs, with one button on a computer, can pay every man and every woman equally. We have the data. We know what everyone makes. There’s no excuse.”
At the BJKLI, we’ve partnered with Starbucks, which announced in 2018 that it had reached its goal to provide 100 percent pay equity for employees of all genders and races performing similar work across the U.S. We’ve worked with Deloitte, the professional services network, to get the facts out about workplace diversity and promote practical solutions for how to foster it.
The BJKLI is still a young organization, but we’ve produced some insightful research on Millennials, who will make up 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025. They have made it clear that they don’t want to work in a place that isn’t inclusive, and they will leave such jobs for more diverse workplaces. I’ve seen members of older generations roll their eyes when they talk about this group of younger workers, claiming that they are self-absorbed and irresponsible. I don’t see them that way. Our research shows that Millennials and Gen Z are the two greatest generations for inclusion. I think they are going to help solve problems. They aren’t so hung up on people’s looks and customs. They don’t buy into the traditional boundaries of gender and race. They’re deeply interested in collaboration and connection. They’ve grown up using social media and technology, and they’re adept at building community. They think and work a lot on how they want to present themselves to the world, and quite often, they have an entrepreneurial streak—even if it’s only focused on building their online followings. They have big ideas, and they don’t shrink from the public square. They’re comfortable with the idea of being influencers, even disrupters. And the technology we have now makes it easier to do all of that than ever before.
Technology has revolutionized the speed and logistics of activism. A message can go viral even if you don’t have huge resources to fight your battles. Ideas can carry you. Sometimes a cell phone is all it takes. I use Twitter and Instagram as daily consciousness-raising tools. I told Kristi Gaylord, my social media person, “If you said I have a half-million followers, I’d say, ‘Don’t talk to me about it till I get a million!’ ” Then we broke up laughing. She knows I’m only half-joking.
Illuminating the challenges and paths to achieving equality is important because power and influence are still mostly held by white men. I’ve spent my whole life watching men stick up for each other and help each other. I’ve seen men—even men who otherwise have little in common except that they’re men—actively organize with each other to shut women out. Women don’t bond or organize that way.
Women also have to fight people’s tendencies to tell us when we do lead or succeed, “Thanks for what you do for women.” We never limit male leaders by telling them, “Thanks for what you do for men.” This double standard has to stop. Any time women are discounted as if we’re only representing half the population, it also consigns us to less of the marketplace, fewer opportunities, less money, less influence, and so on. We are never going to fulfill our potential until people realize that when women lead, we lead for everyone. When I fight for equality, I fight for everyone. If I see guys getting a raw deal, I fight to lift them too.
Every year, the BJKLI hosts a powerful symposium where we bring together thought leaders, CEOs, academics, community leaders, and artists to share in an open fo
rum about what’s working and where there is room for change. Our 2016 symposium was specifically focused on, and organized, for men because too often, especially in relation to women’s conferences, men are removed from the conversation or effort. I couldn’t have achieved what I have without the support of male allies. One of the things the BJKLI stresses is that equity is not a women’s issue, an LGBTQ+ issue, or a minority issue—it’s everyone’s responsibility. None of us is as strong as all of us are together.
I genuinely believe that some men don’t know how much they create obstacles for achieving diversity. When you’re the dominant group, others are often invisible to you. People in subdominant or marginalized groups—people of color, the disabled, women, the LGBTQ+ community—don’t have that luxury. We have to learn to navigate the dominant group’s world to survive, let alone thrive. Our welfare depends on it.
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Sports consistently reminds us how talent comes from all places, and how much we can achieve together, especially when we accept each other without prejudice and recognize that our differences make this a richer world. Tennis and sports remain a big part of what Ilana and I do, even though we sold our majority stake in World TeamTennis in 2017 and Ilana stepped down as commissioner.
I will never stop believing that our co-ed team format, if adopted wholesale, would lift the popularity of pro tennis and college tennis closer to the other team sports we compete against. After three decades, Ilana and I were simply ready to hand over the day-to-day operations of World TeamTennis, but we retained ownership of the Philadelphia Freedoms. Our interest in fostering diversity and inclusion at all levels of sports remains unchanged. We want to see management suites and coaching ranks reflect the diversity we’ve long seen on the playing field and in the rest of society.
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