To that end, in 2017, Ilana and I formed Billie Jean King Enterprises with a team of longtime trusted colleagues and strong leaders, Merle Blackman, Marjorie Gantman, Therese O’Higgins, Barbara Perry, Diane (Donnelly) Stone, and Nancy Falconer. The business is dedicated to creating strategic marketing partnerships, consulting on diversity and inclusion, and managing all aspects of my brand and legacy for the future. The company works in concert with the BJKLI to create meaningful and impactful change, efforts we plan to continue to grow.
Ilana and I also continue to encourage investment in women’s sports. We’re driven to help other women’s sports progress to the level of women’s pro tennis. When we had a chance in 2020 to join the ownership group of Angel City FC, the first National Women’s Soccer League team that will be owned and run almost entirely by women, we took it.
The founders and original investors of the expansion team, which will be based in Los Angeles and begin play in 2022, include more than a dozen former members of the U.S. women’s national soccer team; an array of women from the tech, finance, and entertainment industries; and some notable women of color, including Serena Williams, Candace Parker, and Eva Longoria. Alexis Ohanian, Serena’s husband, was the lead founding investor. In previous years, I had consulted at times with Julie Foudy and other leaders of the U.S. women’s national team as they fought the U.S. Soccer Federation for more equitable treatment, and again when the players were working to start their own professional league so they could make a living between World Cups and playing in the Olympics.
Ilana and I have also supported projects such as the XS Tennis and Education Foundation in Chicago, a program founded by the former player Kamau Murray for kids from under-resourced neighborhoods to learn tennis as a way to get ahead in life. One hundred percent of the attendees have landed college scholarships. It was through working with Kamau that we came to know two of Chicago’s leading philanthropists, Mark and Kimbra Walter. Mark is CEO of the investment firm Guggenheim Partners and an owner and the chairman of the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose ownership group includes Magic Johnson. Mark and Ilana got to know each other better at the U.S. Open. At one of the subsequent fund-raisers for XS, our conversation with Mark turned toward the sports teams the Guggenheim group owns, and Mark asked if Ilana and I would be interested in becoming part owners of the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.
I said, “Why not the Dodgers as well?”
Mark looked at me and said, “Why not the Dodgers?”
That’s how Ilana and I came into the Dodgers ownership group in 2018. Mark is committed to diversity, and Ilana and I certainly qualify. The Pride Night that we hosted at Dodger Stadium in 2019 drew 54,307 fans, making it the team’s best-attended regular season home game in seven years. Some nights when Ilana and I sit in the box seats taking in a game, I wish my parents could be there beside me. Dad and Mom would have had a good laugh the night the Dodgers held a Billie Jean King bobblehead-doll giveaway in 2019 and I threw out the first pitch like I was a kid back on 36th Street. I thought about Dad a lot, too, when Ilana and I were in Arlington, Texas, in November 2020, watching the Dodgers clinch their first World Series title in thirty-two years. The last few games were so tense we were hanging on every pitch. I thought a lot about Randy, who I always hoped would win a World Series ring. The Dodgers were the first major pro team he and I supported after Dad passed his deep love of baseball along to us.
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Much like my worries about whether my business opportunities would ever rebound after I was outed, my fear of being ostracized from working with young people did not come true. I’ve always seen coaching and business mentoring as forms of leadership, and both pursuits became even bigger passions of mine once I stopped playing and had more time. I have never forgotten how life-changing my teachers, coaches, and the support of the Long Beach community were for me. It’s rewarding to help people experience some of the same joys you’ve known.
Few people knew I had just come from in-patient treatment at Renfrew when I was captain of the 1995 U.S. Fed Cup team seven weeks later against Italy, one of nine times I served as the team’s coach and manager. The first stint was a prelude to my work as the U.S. coach at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, and again at the 2000 Sydney Games. I love the Olympics because they’ve always given women athletes and people of color a place to aspire to, even when other avenues were closed. Tennis had been absent from the Games from 1928 to 1988, and I never thought I’d get to experience being an Olympian. Walking out for my first opening ceremony in Atlanta, and then watching Muhammad Ali, dressed all in white, stride out as the surprise choice to light the Olympic flame in the stadium cauldron, is seared in my mind.
The Atlanta Olympics were also important because they became known as the Gender Equity Games. The world got to see the first generation of women and girls who had grown up benefiting from Title IX. Women now had more training, coaching, financial support, and opportunities to play sports, and the results were astonishing: The U.S. women swept the team gold medals in basketball, softball, gymnastics, and soccer, and we took the tennis gold medals in women’s singles (Lindsay Davenport) and doubles (Mary Joe Fernandez and Gigi Fernandez).
Across the board, our women athletes emphatically showed what we always said could happen when we have emotional investment, money, belief, and enthusiasm behind us. It created a wave. The WNBA began play the following year, and the U.S. soccer team’s victory in Atlanta set the stage for the sensational 1999 Women’s World Cup in the United States. The American World Cup organizers had been warned they’d never fill the football stadiums they chose—sound familiar?—but the 1999 tournament was a huge success that shattered attendance records.
Women’s ice hockey got a boost from the Olympics as well, after its inclusion in the Nagano Winter Games in 1998. Ilana and I have also worked closely with members of the U.S. and Canadian national women’s teams when they formed their first-ever players’ association in 2019. We organized and helped fund the Chicago stop of their Dream Gap tour in the fall of 2019 to showcase their ability. Ilana has continued to help them with the details of starting their own professional league, and we’ve both participated in their exploratory talks with the National Hockey League.
One of the consistent messages I’ve stressed to the women in both hockey and soccer is the imperative to create jobs and opportunities for people beyond the dozen or two dozen slots on each national team. It’s crucial to lift girls and women at all levels of the sport.
Coaching, like business mentoring, is a rewarding way to impact lives. Sometimes just a single conversation can flip a switch for someone. When I coached Lindsay Davenport in the 1995 Fed Cup, I seemed to surprise her one day by asking her, “Have you ever thought of becoming No. 1?” Shyly, she said, “No.” Lindsay is close to six feet three, and early in her career she got a lot of negative feedback that she was too heavy and slow to be a champion. I told her, “The critics never talk about your positives. So I’m going to tell you: You’re the best striker of the ball, men or women. You hate to lose. You care deeply, you’re really smart, you have a good serve and some of the best hands in the game. That’s why you can be No. 1 in the world.” Once Lindsay worked hard to get in top condition, she went on to win three Grand Slam singles titles and spent ninety-eight weeks as the top-ranked player in the world. If I contributed even a tiny bit, I’m thrilled.
Of course, things in coaching don’t always go as planned. I still laugh about the time I invited Jennifer Capriati to play for our Fed Cup team, in part on Lindsay’s recommendation. When we got to the competition, Jennifer was spraying balls all over the court, which was shocking because it was so unlike her. “What’s going on?” I said to Lindsay, who paused a beat, looked back at me uncertainly, and stammered, “Well…um, Jennifer didn’t want to tell you this, but…um, she forgot her contact lenses.” Through gritted teeth I said, “Lindsay? We. Could. Have.
Sent. For. Them. Haven’t you guys ever heard of FedEx?”
One of my earliest but best coaching experiences was working with Martina for six years, starting in 1989 with the fifteen months she spent chasing her record ninth Wimbledon singles title. Martina had started to doubt herself when the German teenager Stefanie Graf swept the majors in 1988 and supplanted her at No. 1. The following April, eighteen-year-old Gabriela Sabatini beat Martina in the semis at the Bausch & Lomb Championships on Amelia Island, Florida, and more doubt crept in.
I began to work part-time with Martina and her full-time coach, Craig Kardon, who had first suggested I assist them. I had agreed to watch some videotape of Martina’s matches when I ran into them at Hilton Head, and right away I told them about an error she was making: once at the net, Martina was committing too soon to cover one part of the court or another, and her opponents were waiting to see where she went, and then passing her in the open court. “Stand your ground,” I told her. “You’re quick enough. When they strike the ball, then you go to the ball.” She and Craig started calling me “the Jolt” because they felt whenever I showed up at practice I drove everyone to work harder. Sometimes they’d play Elton’s song “The Bitch Is Back” over the sound system to tease me.
The transformation in Martina’s game didn’t happen overnight. She lost to Graf at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open finals in 1989. That fall, she experienced another trough of self-doubt: “I don’t know if I’m good enough anymore,” she said, bursting into tears one day at a practice in Chicago. We navigated that too. Martina was thirty-two when we began working together, the same age I was when I won my last major singles title. Having played tournament tennis to the age of forty, I knew that for a player that age the biggest obstacle to winning may well be psychological, not physical. So I asked Martina to drill back down to the time when her love for tennis was sweet and uncomplicated and just beginning.
“Use all your senses,” I urged her. “What’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
“Oh, I loved going to our town club, I loved being with my grandmother, I just couldn’t get enough,” Martina said. She mentioned the smell of the red clay, the plunk-plunk-plunk of the balls she hit against the backboard at her little club in Revnice.
“Do you think you could bring back some of that excitement and passion now?”
“I can try,” she said. Then she repeated that she wasn’t sure she was good enough to dominate anymore. She asked me what I thought.
“I think your 90 percent is better than just about everybody else’s 100 percent,” I said, and I meant it. “The first thing I want you to do in the morning, and the last thing before you go to sleep at night, is write out, ‘I won Wimbledon in 1990.’ Can you do that?”
She said she would. I also suggested that she was suffering from burnout and should skip Roland-Garros that year and funnel all her energy into preparing for Wimbledon, which she did. She went to Antigua for her first extended vacation in sixteen years and came back laughing about finally having a suntan on her stomach. For weeks before Wimbledon, Craig kept drilling her on sharpening her strokes. We also made her rehearse match point over and over. She’s such an unbelievable learner and gifted athlete I felt we always had to keep challenging her or she’d get bored. Great champions love to be challenged.
Martina had always had a lot of joy when she played, and all we did was help her reconnect with it. She did win her record ninth Wimbledon singles title that year, then rejoiced by climbing from the court through the stands to her supporters in her player’s box because she couldn’t wait to give all of us a hug.
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I was excited to take on another responsibility in September 2020 when the International Tennis Federation announced that the Fed Cup would be renamed the Billie Jean King Cup. My hope going forward is that the year-long tournament, which started as a sixteen-team, one-week event in my day and had grown to 116 participating nations by 2020, will be even more appreciated as the World Cup of our sport.
Representing my country has always been an important calling for me, and I’ve tried to convey to today’s players my genuine enthusiasm and reasons for participating in the event. As the U.S. team’s captain, I had the joy of initiating Venus and Serena Williams to Fed Cup and Olympic play and coaching them both over the years. Venus was seven and Serena was six when I first met them and their parents, Richard and Oracene, at a free World TeamTennis and Domino’s Pizza–sponsored clinic in April 1988 in Long Beach. I watched them hit a few balls that day, just as I did with all the other kids. The Williams sisters stood out.
I saw the girls again when Rosie and I partnered with them in an exhibition doubles match in Hilton Head in 1992 and 1993, and I attended Venus’s pro debut at the 1994 Bank of the West Classic in Oakland. Even then, as a fourteen-year-old, she reminded me of Althea because of her long legs and reach and quiet carriage on court. In time, Venus would hold the women’s record for the fastest serve ever (129 miles per hour) for a while, in addition to seizing the No. 1 ranking and seven major singles titles. As for Serena, by the spring of 2021, she remained one major title away from matching Margaret Court’s career record of twenty-four Grand Slam singles titles.
Both sisters have matured into accomplished businesswomen with diverse interests in entertainment, clothing, design, team ownership, and activism. They excel at connecting with other influencers and getting their messages out, especially on social media. Their popularity drove the U.S. Open’s decision in 2001 to move the women’s singles final to prime-time—we had come a long way from being shunted to the backlot courts—and it was a huge occasion when the Williams sisters played each other in the first one. Two Black players had never opposed each other in a Grand Slam singles final anywhere until then, and Venus won that showdown.
Venus was also instrumental in pushing Wimbledon and Roland-Garros to finally offer equal pay—first by speaking to the Grand Slam board in 2005, and then by writing an editorial for The Times of London the following year, winning support from British prime minister Tony Blair. In one of the most moving parts of her remarks to the board, Venus said, “When your eyes are closed, you can’t really tell who’s next to you, who’s a man and who’s a woman. Think about your daughters, your wives, your sisters. How would you like them to be treated? All of our hearts beat the same.”
Wimbledon became the next-to-last major to level men’s and women’s prize money, which they announced in February 2007, a month before Roland-Garros did the same. (Because Roland-Garros is played a month earlier, Wimbledon was the last major to actually pay out equal prize money, and it was fitting when Venus won that year. I was sitting in the Royal Box cheering her on.) So many of us were proud that she and Larry Scott, then chairman and CEO of the WTA, finished the equal pay fight at the majors that my generation started.
I’m also gratified that we can say a tennis player has been the highest-paid female athlete in the world every year since Forbes started tracking the data in 1990. In 2019, women tennis players comprised the entire Top Ten, with Naomi Osaka of Japan passing Serena for the first time at the top. From those $1 contracts the Original 9 signed with Gladys, look what we’ve achieved.
The Williams sisters epitomize the cultural force a modern female athlete can be, and they’ve inspired a next generation of players who look like them and want to play like them. Women’s tennis is a power game and a global sport more than ever. Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff’s fathers both followed Richard Williams’s blueprint for developing his daughters into top players, right down to taking their girls to some of the same places and coaches in Florida where the Williamses trained. In that way, the baton gets passed, again and again. By the summer of 2020, Naomi and Coco also showed a strong interest in taking stands for social justice. They independently spoke up during the protests in the U.S. about the police killing of an unarmed man, George Floyd, and other Blacks such as Breonna
Taylor. On her way to winning the U.S. Open, Naomi, the daughter of a Japanese mother and Haitian father, wore a different face mask every day that she played, each bearing the name of a Black victim of racial injustice or police brutality. Asked what statement she was trying to make, she told reporters the message others took away “is more the question…. I feel like I’m a vessel at this point, in order to spread awareness.”
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The Fed Cup was already the world’s largest annual international team competition in women’s sports before it was renamed after me, but there are still many countries where women encounter huge obstacles to compete at all, let alone advance to the international level. Ilana and I recently gave Lilitha Ndungane, a talented young Black player in Johannesburg, a scholarship to study at St. Mary’s, where South Africa’s Federation Cup captain worked as head coach.
In 2018, Ilana read that the International Tennis Federation had struck a twenty-five-year, $3 billion deal to sell the Davis Cup’s commercial rights to a Spanish investment group named Kosmos. The Davis Cup’s 119-year-old competition format has been revamped so the final stages will now be concentrated into a week-long event featuring eighteen nations in one place, competing for $18 million in annual prize money. The Kosmos chief executive Javier Alonso said that without the controversial changes, “I don’t think Davis Cup would have survived.” As the ITF well knew, the Fed Cup was facing similar challenges. During the 2018 U.S. Open, Ilana met with the ITF president, David Haggerty, who assured her that he and the ITF wanted to attract more money for the women’s competition and adopt a format change as well.
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