Game, Set, Match
Page 2
Time to celebrate—or eat crow. Sports Illustrated, which the week before had predicted Riggs would win, called King’s performance “a classic example of a skilled athlete performing at peak efficiency in the most important moment of her life.” So many people had been seduced by the media hype to think about this match only in gender terms that they forgot that it was also a match pitting the young versus the old, which was painfully on display as the match unfolded. To his credit, Riggs was gracious in defeat, admitting to his opponent at courtside, “You were too good.” Rumors that Riggs deliberately lost the match have been consistently—and convincingly—denied by all parties over the years.19
Billie Jean King’s decision to play Bobby Riggs was a conscious political act. She always realized that the match was much bigger than just tennis, and she was willing to put her hard-won credibility on the line to prove the point that women deserved just as much respect as men. Even though the outcome now seems preordained, at the time people really felt it could go either way. Would a loss by King have irrevocably damaged the history of women's sports or derailed second-wave feminism? Probably not, but it would have been an embarrassing, indeed humbling affirmation of many of the old stereotypes that women at the time were trying to upend. But victory—how satisfying. Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona relished the result: “The guy was older and was this and that, but the truth is, it was a worldwide movement that needed a finishing statement. And Billie Jean King gave it to us.” Future sportswriter Christine Brennan captured the sweet vindication as only a fifteen-year-old aspiring athlete could: “We won. The girls won.”20
LOOKING BACK FROM today’s perspective, when so much has changed for women in sports and society, it is hard to recapture how high the stakes were in 1973 and how closely aligned this tennis match was to the fundamental political and social controversies of the day. Americans at the time did not realize it, but the Battle of the Sexes was one of the first public manifestations of a revolution in women's sports that has been reshaping American society ever since. One of the main catalysts was the passage of Title IX in 1972. Another was the revival of the broad-based social movement called second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. And the third was the charismatic figure of Billie Jean King to bring the two together.
The controversy surrounding Title IX foreshadowed the politicization of women's sports in the 1970s. The law was originally passed in 1972 to address widespread discrimination against women in all aspects of higher education; only gradually did it dawn on supporters and then opponents that the law would have its most wide-ranging impact on athletics. The battles over equitable distribution of sports resources quickly brought to light some of the most egregious examples of sex discrimination, such as female athletes getting 1 percent (if that) of sports budgets, having to hold bake sales to pay for their own uniforms and travel expenses, or being forced to practice at 6:00 in the morning or 10:30 at night because those were the only times the gym was available. Once Title IX began to raise the nation’s consciousness about sports, parents and students alike began challenging discrimination in athletics wherever they found it, and the women's sports revolution took off. So profound has been this sea change that many female athletes today have no idea how recent, or how hard fought, the opportunities they take for granted are.21
Title IX was not conceived in a vacuum. The revival of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s provided a key backdrop for the tremendous energy gravitating toward women's sports.22 The momentum began to build with such initiatives as the President’s Commission on the Status of Women from 1961 to 1963, the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning sex discrimination in employment, and the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. The movement reached new constituencies when consciousness-raising groups sprang up on campuses and radical feminists staged a protest against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968. On August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote, NOW orchestrated marches and protests in cities across the country that suggested the mass potential of this new movement. That year Robin Morgan published the groundbreaking anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful.23
While popular memory credits the decade of the 1960s as an era of social protest and change, the greatest breakthroughs for the women's movement occurred in the 1970s, especially early in the decade. Suddenly so many things seemed possible, so many formerly settled ideas up for grabs. In fact, one can speak of the period from 1970 to 1975 as something of a “feminist moment,” when the proponents of women's liberation forced their way onto the national agenda and won significant victories before a backlash set in. In March 1972, after languishing for almost fifty years, the Equal Rights Amendment cleared both the Senate and the House and was sent to the states for what looked like speedy ratification. In June 1972 Congress passed the Education Amendments Act containing Title IX. That year Ms. magazine was launched, and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm ran for president. In January 1973 the Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. These breakthroughs were not uncontested, and there was a real edginess to relations between the sexes in the early 1970s. (The term gender did not come into widespread use until the 1980s and 1990s.) Debates over such issues as sex discrimination, pay equity, and equal opportunity raged not only in the halls of Congress and chambers of the Supreme Court, but in offices, restaurants, and living rooms across the country.
Billie Jean King’s epic match with Bobby Riggs occurred right in the middle of these “superheated” times.24 King came to feminism through sports, not vice versa, and tennis always remained her top priority. As journalist Grace Lichtenstein aptly observed, “Billie Jean liked seeing her face on the cover of Ms., but she loved seeing it on the cover of Sports Illustrated even more.” King’s outspoken advocacy of better treatment for women in professional tennis propelled her into the feminist limelight, where she became one of the prominent faces, along with women such as Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Bella Abzug, that the public associated with the powerful, if often controversial, new movement. Then, as now, there was disagreement about its priorities, and sport was never all that high on its agenda. And yet popular athletes like King brought welcome publicity and accessibility to the feminist cause. As journalist Selena Roberts noted, Billie Jean King gave “a polarized women's movement exactly what it needed: a mainstream face.”25
Billie Jean King was very aware of her power to shape public opinion, which was one reason that she embraced her tennis celebrity with such enthusiasm. “It’s easier to change attitudes through sports,” she always asserted. “Sports are a visual example of what the world could be.” Here the role of popular culture was crucial. The widely disseminated images of path breakers such as Billie Jean King encouraged ordinary women (and probably a few men) to think that maybe they could do new things too—not necessarily win Wimbledon, compete in the Indianapolis 500, or be elected to Congress, but do something more than what their society had told them they could do. As womenSports magazine said of race car driver Janet Guthrie in 1976, “Now, instead of saying, ‘Oh, I can't do that,’ women are beginning to say, ‘Yes, I can.’ ”And the more women who successfully met these new challenges, the harder it became to hold onto old stereotypes and shibboleths about women as the second or weaker sex.26
It is too strong to say that without feminism Billie Jean King would have been just another athlete, but she certainly would have been of much less interest historically. Because of her relationship to second-wave feminism, she came to embody the aspirations and dreams of the modern women's movement in her role as a popular heroine from the world of sports. Too often the histories of sports and feminism have operated on separate, not always parallel tracks, to the detriment of both. Billie Jean King was the rare athlete who made the connection and affirmatively tried to bring the two closer together.
In the 1970s, the predominant thrust of feminist sports activism was a focus o
n equal rights, especially increasing participation opportunities and winning equal access for girls and women to the existing sports structure. As Billie Jean King later recalled, “In the ’70s we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes. We had to make it okay for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports—we had to create the opportunity.” This call for equal opportunity was behind Billie Jean King’s challenge to the tennis establishment, and equal rights was the motivating idea behind the Battle of the Sexes. The focus on winning access was also at the core of Title IX’s emphasis on creating participation opportunities and making sure that girls and women received equal resources to boys and men in educational settings. To use a sports metaphor, it was about getting girls into the game.27
The height of Billie Jean King’s advocacy intersected with the launching of the women's sports revolution in the 1970s that made women's access to sport a right rather than a privilege in just over a generation. Inspired in large part by Title IX, girls and women found many new chances to participate in recreational sports and competitive athletics, which in turn helped to erode the stigma attached to being a female athlete. High school participation rates jumped from one out of twenty-seven in 1971 to one out of three by the end of the decade. With tennis blazing the trail as a model, women also found the glimmerings of new professional opportunities to compete in sports outside of educational settings. Most important, Title IX, despite constant attacks, served as a legislative and political force in favor of better treatment for women.
None of this would have happened so quickly without the symbiotic relationship between the women's sports revolution and modern feminism, with Billie Jean King serving as the bridge between the two. Most women athletes were not closely aligned with the women's movement, nor was equality in sports a high priority for second-wave feminism compared to other “body” issues such as abortion, rape, self-defense, and sexuality; but that does not mean that sports and feminism were not influencing each other in subtle and often profound ways. Once questions of feminism and equal rights entered the national dialogue in the 1970s, these powerful new ways of thinking about women's social roles and physical capabilities challenged the monolith that was men’s sports, pried open the small, insular world of women's sports, and caused fundamental change in both. In turn, women athletes provided a strong, visual example of “women's liberation in action.”28 No one personified these twin thrusts better than Billie Jean King.
TO TELL THIS STORY calls for a combination of biography and history. Chapters that focus primarily on Billie Jean King are interspersed with thematic chapters on the early days of Title IX, the history of women's sports, and the relationship between sports and second-wave feminism. Providing the thread that ties the narrative together, Billie Jean King appears in every chapter, but sometimes only in a supporting role. Although this is not a conventional biography, it provides a full analysis of her life and its significance for twentieth-century U.S. history, especially where matters of sport and feminism are concerned. In fact, I would argue that only by setting King’s life in this larger context does her true historical significance come through, something that would be lost in a more traditional sports biography.
Chronologically the story is grounded primarily in the period from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. There are several reasons for this time-frame. Most obviously, those years coincide with the height of Billie Jean King’s playing career and her widest influence as a popular heroine from the world of sports. The 1970s, especially the early part of the decade, also represent the highpoint of second-wave feminist activism. The decade was also crucial for the fate of Title IX. The narrative ventures into the early 1980s to finish off an important story—the battle between the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women over control of women's intercollegiate sports. And it introduces a new story—the outing of Billie Jean King in 1981 by a woman who was her former lover—in order to connect King’s life to the wider issues of homophobia and lesbianism in women's sports, as well as the history of gay rights. It does not, however, provide a detailed history of Title IX from the 1980s to the present because that topic has been well told in other recent books.29
The thematic core of the book is an exploration of the benefits and limits of liberal feminism. With its emphasis on individual achievement, equal opportunity, and striving for political and legal equality within the mainstream of the dominant culture, liberal feminism is best understood as one strand—the lowest common denominator, as it were—of the broader, multifaceted social movement referred to as second-wave feminism. Billie Jean King is a classic liberal feminist, challenging any archaic notions of female inferiority by insisting that men and women be treated as equals and pragmatically working within the system to bring about social change. Her philosophy put a premium on opening doors for women and allowing them to demonstrate that they could compete on an equal plain with men, leading by example and serving as an opening wedge toward more equal gender roles. She would have agreed wholeheartedly with Eleanor Roosevelt’s straightforward definition: “Fundamentally, the purpose of Feminism is that a woman should have an equal opportunity and Equal Rights with any other citizen of the country.”30
Billie Jean King’s individualistic stance toward women's advancement was part of a long philosophical tradition that stretched back to the classic liberalism that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe alongside the emergence of modern capitalism. This brand of liberalism, which emphasized tenets such as rationality, individualism, equality, citizenship, and especially liberty, was most closely associated with the philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Starting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, and John Stuart Mill called for the extension of liberal freedom and responsibility to women, who had previously been relegated entirely to dependence on men in the private realm. Women too should be seen as autonomous and rational individuals with commensurate rights and responsibilities to men’s, they argued. With its commitment to individualism and self-reliance, alongside a critique of accepted notions of women's inferiority, liberal feminism offered a vision of women as truly equal partners of men in the public realm.31
This liberal feminist approach was also the main thrust behind Title IX in the 1970s. Title IX’s focus on getting women more participation opportunities and access to the dominant athletic system—or to put it another way, a larger piece of the athletic pie—fit the model of working for change within the existing political and legal system. This liberal feminist stance produced enormous breakthroughs for women in sports in the 1970s but also had some less-than-salutary consequences, such as the decline in opportunities for women coaches and administrators and the absorption of women's sports into a corporate, market-driven model based primarily on competition and winning at all costs. In addition, by focusing so single-mindedly on issues of access, sports activists often failed to challenge the core principles of a system that had denied women athletes their rights and opportunities in the first place. As a result, the sports world was free to continue to treat women as second-class citizens, even as their participation opportunities increased dramatically; prejudices such as racism and homophobia remained deeply rooted and hard to ferret out. In hindsight, therefore, this commitment to working within the system hinted that the women's sports revolution might not be very revolutionary after all.
At the same time there are aspects of liberal feminism that do have the potential to force a truly revolutionary rethinking of how the sports world is structured and maintained. If we think of athletes as individuals first, exhibiting a wide range of overlapping talents and skills, and then only secondarily as male or female, why is it necessary to keep the two sexes so rigidly separated in most aspects of athletic participation and competition? This conundrum was raised by the National Organization for Women in
the 1970s in the context of how to implement Title IX, but the idea of men and women competing together was just too radical then to have any realistic chance of acceptance. After four decades of explosive growth in women's athletics and female athletic capabilities, it is time to revisit the provocative question of why sports remain caught in a separate-but-equal framework while the rest of the world has gone coed. The tenets of liberal feminism offer an intriguing way to jumpstart that conversation.
On the tennis court and off, Billie Jean King put a human face on the abstract ideals of liberal feminism. Throughout her career she worked strenuously to increase access and open opportunities for women athletes—getting them a piece of that pie, a place at that table. She also pushed to make women's tennis an attractive and exciting option on par with the men’s game, accepting that women needed their own professional tour to shine and succeed as athletes. At the same time she was willing to take Bobby Riggs’s dare in 1973 for a “Battle of the Sexes” that challenged the separatist paradigm of sports that kept men and women from competing against each other. Her founding of World Team Tennis, with its coed roster comprised equally—and purposely—of men and women, also constituted an assault on the rigidly gendered sports status quo. Work within the system, but also embrace the ability to step outside the box and think about sports in new ways; keep women's athletics separate from men’s when necessary, but also encourage all athletes, male and female, to participate and compete as individuals. To Billie Jean King, these were all logical and necessary choices to advance the broader cause of fostering equity and fairness for women in sports.