All In

by Billie Jean King

  Renaming the competition the Billie Jean King Cup and having me serve as a global ambassador for the rebranded event was the concept that the ITF’s leadership eventually agreed on. The fact that tennis already had the Hopman Cup, Davis Cup, and Laver Cup named after men, but no international competition named after a woman, was something the ITF wanted to address. I had played in the very first competition and supported the Fed Cup over the years, winning a record eleven titles as a player and captain. And of course, as I’ve said, I love the team format.

  Thanks to the efforts of everyone involved, more significant sponsorships have already materialized, and the first Billie Jean King Cup planned to offer $12 million in prize money to the twelve national teams that make the final round in 2021—the same pro-rata amount that the eighteen men’s teams in that year’s Davis Cup final will earn. We closed the gender pay gap for the first time, and our total prize money ranks as the world’s largest purse for an annual women’s team competition.

  Chapter 31

  In the late fall of 2008, I was staying with my mom in Prescott when the phone rang early one morning. Ilana was visiting family in South Africa, and her voice was happy and excited. “Billie! Can you get on the next plane to Jo’burg?” she said. “Nelson Mandela has time to meet you!”

  Mandela had been a hero of mine since the late 1960s, when I first learned about his actions to fight apartheid that led to his imprisonment. He had just turned ninety, was in frail health, and rarely accepted visitors. By then, Ilana and I had been working for two or three years with Mandela’s staff, hoping to meet him. I packed my bags and left as soon as I could.

  During the day and a half it took me to fly from Phoenix to London to South Africa, I had a lot of time to think about Mandela. After he was released from prison in 1990 he published an autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, which I devoured. The book followed Mandela’s life from his rural childhood through his twenty-seven-year prison stay to his election as the first Black president of South Africa in 1994. I marveled at his resilience and resolve, his exquisite wisdom and grace. He wasn’t bitter or vengeful. Instead of punishing his former white enemies when he came to power, Mandela offered them a role as partners in the rebuilding of South Africa. He started Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, hoping that they would facilitate a national catharsis.

  “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion,” Mandela wrote. “People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”

  Mandela embodied everything I love most. Kindness. Generosity. Freedom. Equality. Forgiveness. The belief in transcendence and redemption. I just wanted to be in his presence for a moment, absorb some of his wisdom, and thank him because of the ways he had changed the world.

  Ilana picked me up at the airport and whisked me the next morning to an 11 o’clock meeting at the Nelson Mandela Foundation office in the Houghton neighborhood. The streets looked familiar. As we pulled up to the gate I realized this was the same area where I had stayed with a host family in 1966, the first year I played in the South African Championships and inadvertently earned their Black housekeeper a dressing down. Now, seeing people of all colors inside Mandela’s compound was a reminder of the breathtaking progress that had been made. These people were executives and stakeholders in the new South Africa that Mandela had always stood for.

  Mandela was sitting in a comfortable leather chair behind his desk in an office lined with books and framed photographs. He was wearing one of his trademark batik shirts designed in rich golds and browns. When he stood to greet us I was surprised by how tall he was. It added to his presence. I could see that Ilana was battling her emotions as much as I was. “I can’t breathe,” she whispered.

  We settled in for a short conversation. Mandela’s memory was crystal clear about the conditions under which he lived at Robben Island prison. He talked about how difficult it was being there, but he said he could find humanity in everyone, even the guards. Mandela and a couple of his fellow political prisoners slowly broke down the barriers by talking with their white jailers. Some guards ended up making their daily life a little less onerous.

  When it was time to go, we didn’t dare ask for a photo, but Mandela’s private secretary, Zelda la Grange, offered to snap one on Ilana’s phone. I’m forever grateful she did. As we walked out of the building into the noonday sun, I was still under Mandela’s spell. That hadn’t changed by the time Ilana and I journeyed back to South Africa a couple of years later and made a point to stop in Cape Town for a few days. On clear days you can see the outline of Robben Island across a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean north of the city. Ilana and I had to take a ferry to get to the bleak prison, which is now a national museum.

  Our guide was himself a freed Robben Island prisoner, and he showed us the crude eight-by-seven-foot cell where Mandela spent so much of his adult life. The cell had no heat, air conditioning, running water, or toilet, just a container in the corner. It had no proper bed, just an inch-thick straw mat placed under a thin felt pad with a couple of coarse wool blankets to fend off the cold. Mandela was facing a life sentence when he arrived there and was forced to do hard labor in a quarry. I cannot imagine the courage or stamina it took to endure that kind of suffering. Later, as we were walking around the prison grounds, I saw faded white lines painted on a green section of the concrete exercise yard and asked our guide, “Is that a tennis court?”

  The guide explained that Mandela had persuaded the warden to allow the prisoners to make a homemade court to get some exercise. Mandela wrote in his autobiography that a net was set up a few days after they put down their painted court “and suddenly we had our own Wimbledon in our front yard.” What the warden didn’t know was that the prisoners would sometimes pass messages to the outside world by inserting them inside tennis balls that they pretended to hit over the wall by mistake.

  I felt a new and even deeper connection to Mandela after I knew those stories. He never let anything stop him.

  As I walked around Robben Island, I also recalled watching the day Mandela was released in 1990 from a different prison and the celebration scenes as he walked out. I still marvel at how he reimagined the country in ways people had doubted were possible. For me, nothing has compared to meeting the man himself and walking in some of the same places he tread.

  * * *

  —

  In July 2009, President Obama organized a White House roundtable discussion to celebrate the thirty-seventh anniversary of Title IX. I was invited to be on a panel of speakers, along with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education at the time. Duncan emphasized that Title IX is about leveling the playing field in every area of education, from sports activities to science and technology.

  After the program, Valerie Jarrett, chair of the president’s Council on Women and Girls, invited me to have lunch with her and two others in the White House mess in the basement of the West Wing. All through lunch, I was a little distracted by how they seemed to be looking at me and then at each other with faint smiles on their faces. After our meal, I asked to meet the kitchen staff, which I always try to do if possible, and I was asking the chef, cooks, and dishwashers what it was like to work in the White House when Valerie poked her head in to tell me the president wanted to see me.

  I thought she was talking about the president of one of the organizations who had been on the Title IX program with us. “Okay, I’ll be right there,” I said, turning back to the kitchen staff.

  “Billie?” Valerie persisted, “the president of the United States would like to meet you.”

  What! Me? Now?

  We literally had to run through the West Wing to reach the Oval Office before the window of opportunity closed. I was still a little breathless when Valerie walked me through the door and there was President Obama, standing in front of his desk. He was warm and relaxed as he shook m
y hand and greeted me with that silky voice of his. I was so shy I didn’t sit in one of the striped hardback chairs next to his where the photographer could take our picture together. I plunked down on a pale yellow couch across from him instead.

  After some small talk that included revisiting the Riggs match, Obama smiled and said, “You know, I watched you practice at Punahou.”

  I knew the place well. It’s a private high school in Honolulu where I had sometimes held tennis clinics when Larry and I had our place in Hawaii.

  “That was you?” I said. Obama nodded. He had attended Punahou from 1971 to 1979, and I clearly remember seeing a young Black boy standing with a white boy behind the fence, watching me hit. The Black boy stood out because almost all the other faces at Punahou were white or Asian. I think he came back more than once, but he never said anything to me.

  “Why didn’t you ask me to hit with you?” I said.

  “Oh, I would have never done that,” he answered. Later, I learned the rest of the story. He had joined the tennis program at Punahou, but a bigoted coach ruined the sport for him. The president wrote about it in his first memoir, Dreams from My Father, describing a white tennis pro “who told me during a tournament that I shouldn’t touch the schedule of matches pinned to the bulletin board because my color might rub off.”

  About a week later, I found out why our introduction had been arranged. I received a phone call from Valerie telling me that I had been selected for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. It had never been awarded to a woman athlete. (The great University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt was selected three years later.)

  The 2009 recipients were chosen by Obama because we were all “agents of change.” The day of the ceremony, August 12, 2009, is hard to forget for a lot of reasons. When I arrived at the visitors’ gate to the White House with Tip Nunn, my dear friend and longtime publicist, the guard wouldn’t let us through even when I told him why I was there and that we had only an hour before the ceremony began. The guard, who was maybe thirty years old, looked at me blankly and said, “Sorry, ma’am. Your name’s not on the list.”

  The temperature was in the high 80s, one of those dreadfully humid midsummer Washington days. As Tip tried to phone someone for help because I was in danger of missing my pre-ceremony commitments, Sidney Poitier arrived. The guard wouldn’t let him in, either. Then Stephen Hawking, the brilliant theoretical physicist, approached in his customized wheelchair, accompanied by his attendant. They were also made to wait. By the time Archbishop Desmond Tutu glided past us and breezed through the gate with his entourage, I was wilting in the heat.

  At last, a very apologetic intern appeared and guided us to the reception in the East Room, where I got to chat with the other honorees. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was standing next to Muhammad Yunus, who had won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work with microloans. Rev. Joseph Lowery, the civil rights icon who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, stood across the room not far from Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow, the last living Plains Indian war chief and the author of books on Native American history and culture. Stuart Milk, the nephew of the late gay activist Harvey Milk, was there to accept the honor on behalf of his slain uncle.

  President Obama opened the ceremony by introducing each of us. When he got to me, the president emphasized that I had been chosen for my work for equal opportunity and human rights, not just my Grand Slam tennis titles.

  “We honor what she calls ‘all the off-the-court stuff,’ ” the president said, citing what I had done to “make the future brighter for all LGBT Americans” and “to broaden the reach of the game, to change how women athletes and women everywhere view themselves, and to give everyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation—including my two daughters—a chance to compete both on the court and in life.”

  What a thrill to hear a U.S. president say “LGBT.”

  When President Obama draped the blue-and-white ribbon around my neck I lifted the medal and kissed it. I’d requested that the name engraved on the back read “Billie Jean Moffitt King.” I was again thinking of my patriotic father, who didn’t live long enough to see this day. I was also thinking about my mom, who after years of angst had come to accept me for who I am. She was now beaming at me from the audience as she sat with Ilana and eight other family members, including my mother-in-law, Ruth, whose letter asking me to catch up with Ilana two decades earlier had changed all of our lives in ways we never could have foreseen.

  * * *

  —

  I had a few more encounters with Barack and Michelle Obama during their eight-year stay in the White House. They were so kind and easygoing and always made Ilana and me feel welcome.

  President Obama’s staff contacted me in 2014 as the Winter Olympics in Sochi approached. The Russians had poured many billions of dollars into building up the Black Sea resort town to host the Winter Games. But human rights groups had grown increasingly alarmed over Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian government and his crackdown against dissent and freedom of expression, particularly in the LGBTQ+ community. The summer before the Games, Putin signed a federal law banning “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” and the police started arresting gay rights activists. Mobs often beat up protesters.

  The Sochi Games presented both a crisis and an opportunity for the international sports community and for the Obama administration. Rather than boycott the Olympics and punish innocent athletes, the president, first lady, and Vice President Joe Biden decided to stay home to signal the United States’ disapproval of Russia’s human rights violations. To make an even stronger statement, Obama decided to send a five-person delegation to represent the U.S. in Sochi that consisted of three openly gay athletes—the Olympic skating champion Brian Boitano, the Olympic ice hockey player Caitlin Cahow, and me. I thought it was brave of Brian to publicly come out as gay two days after he was named to our Sochi delegation. When the president asked me to go to Sochi, I immediately said yes. Ilana and I have traveled in the Middle East and Asia where homosexuality is illegal, and we are always a little on edge doing so. You never know what might happen whether you’re an ordinary tourist or an honored guest.

  President Obama’s decision to send us provoked enough discussion that the writers at Saturday Night Live noticed. They highlighted our mission in a skit that featured Kate McKinnon appearing as me on “Weekend Update.” I almost fell off the couch laughing when I saw her burst into the camera frame next to host Seth Myers wearing a short brown wig, wire-rimmed glasses, and a Sochi T-shirt, preening and waving her arms like she had just won Wimbledon.

  “Billie Jean King! You seem excited to be going to Sochi!” Seth said.

  “I couldn’t be more excited, Seth!” she boomed. “I’m President Obama’s big gay middle finger, and this bird’s about to get flipped. BJK’s about to double down, and Putin’s going to find himself in the epicenter of a gay tornado! I’m gonna drive my Subaru Outback into Red Square doing donuts and blasting Melissa Etheridge.”

  “You seem very confident.”

  “That’s right, Seth. There is no demographic in this world that gives less of a flip than seventy-year-old lesbians!”

  “Be careful. There could be trouble.”

  “Trouble? I’m from trouble,” she boasted.

  It was hilarious.

  As much as I desired to travel to Sochi, my mother’s health had been failing by the time the president asked me to make the trip. As the start date of the Olympics grew closer, there was no way I was going to leave her side, so I canceled. Mom was ninety-one, and dementia had taken most of her memory, but I believe she knew I was there as she left this world. Mildred Rose (Betty) Jerman Moffitt died on February 7, 2014, the same day as the opening ceremony.

  What a sweet soul my mother was. Mom always yearned to travel more but she refus
ed to leave Dad at home. Once she was alone after sixty-five years of marriage, I asked her what she’d like to do, and one of my great pleasures in life was being able to fulfill her wishes. We saw some of her favorite entertainers live. Mom was thrilled when we met Tony Bennett at his eightieth birthday party and surprised again when Diana Krall confided to her backstage, “You’re the first one I’m telling this—I’m going to have twins!” Ilana and I brought Mom on cruises to places in the Mediterranean, to Greece, to Alaska. Those were such special times.

  Ilana’s mother, Ruth, would pass away just two months later, leaving another great void in our lives. No matter how old you are when a parent dies, it’s like losing an anchor that kept you safely moored. I had a heavy heart as I took care of my mom’s affairs. I visited with family and friends. By the time I was done with all my obligations, there was still enough time left in the sixteen-day Olympics for me to spend a few days there and attend the closing ceremony. I’m so glad I did.

  From what I had been reading to prepare for Sochi, the repression that characterized the old Soviet Bloc system had morphed into something lawless and even more sinister in Russia. I read reports of the murder of a gay man in Volgograd in 2013. I read about a spike in hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people. Thugs were using dating apps to lure unsuspecting gay men to locations where they would be beaten and much worse.

  I read news accounts about how artistic expression was being squelched in the weeks before Sochi and protesters were being shadowed and arrested. When other nations and athletes criticized the crackdowns, Putin declared that gays attending the Olympics should feel “at ease”—but he couldn’t resist adding, with a whiff of contempt, “so long as they leave the children in peace.” The mayor of Sochi declared that there “were no gay people in this city,” which was, of course, ridiculous.