by Susan Ware
If informed that her career encapsulated the open-ended but sometimes-contradictory possibilities of liberal feminism as applied to sports, Billie Jean King would probably roll her eyes and say, “Please, no labels. Let’s just get on with it.”32 And yet the promise and limitations of liberal feminism as they played out in her life provide essential keys to understanding the broad revolution in women's sports that has occurred since the 1970s—its undeniable accomplishments and its still-unfinished agenda. Decades after her playing days ended, Billie Jean King’s legacy continues to shape the women's sports revolution she helped to spark.
Chapter One The Making of a Sports Icon
In her 1982 autobiography, Billie Jean King reflected on the changes that she had seen in the first forty years of her life, a time of enormous transitions for women, tennis, and America in general. “Any woman born around 1943 has had to endure so many changes—in her educational experience, in her working life, in sex, in her roles, her expectations. But with me, it always seemed like I was also on the cutting edge of that change.” She continued, “I was brought up in a very structured universe—in my family, in school, in tennis, in every part of my world. Then, all of a sudden, the rules all started to change, and it seemed there weren't any rules left. I tried to go with the flow, but always seemed to find myself out in front and on the line.” This sense of being ahead of her times, a trailblazer on a variety of personal and professional fronts, characterizes many aspects of Billie Jean King’s life. She remains positive about the future: “I have to be. I’m always 20 years ahead of the times.”1
Practically as soon as the American public began to take notice of a brash young Californian named Billie Jean Moffitt King, fans and detractors alike realized that there was more to her than just her tennis. “Billie Jean is not just a tennis player,” noted a fan in the Reader’s Digest in 1974. “She’s a cause.” Like other sports stars such as Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and Joe Louis, who grabbed national attention to become icons of their individual sports and ambassadors of sport in general, Billie Jean King won a following for her role in transforming amateur tennis into a successful professional sport with broad national appeal. Soon after, she emerged as one of the nation’s most prominent and outspoken champions for the female sex— ” Mother Courage with a backhand.” In 1990 Life magazine named her one of the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century.2
And yet, as with any idol or icon, it is important not to conflate Billie Jean King the symbol with Billie Jean King the person. “Even my own autobiography sitting up there on my shelf gives me the willies,” she told womenSports in 1977. “It’s like two different people. There’s me, and then there’s that tennis player. I feel like I’m not what I am.” Fearless and bold in public but more conventional in private, she struggled to reconcile her transgres-sive (for the time) sexual feelings with her desire to be universally liked and respected. America at the time was not ready for a gay tennis superstar, so her sexual orientation was kept firmly closeted. To her the rationalizations were compelling: she didn't want to hurt women's tennis, and she didn't want to embarrass her parents, who would have found such a choice incomprehensible. This deceit meant that for most of her career—even after she was outed in 1981—she was living a lie. As we will see in chapter 6, King’s search for acceptance, from her public and especially from herself, turned into a lifetime journey.3
BILLIE JEAN MOFFITT was a war baby. When she was born on November 22, 1943, her twenty-five-year-old father, Bill, was in the navy, stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, as a physical education leader for stateside troops; her mother, Betty, had stayed home in Long Beach, California, for the duration of his active duty. Like many children conceived during wartime, Billie Jean was named after her absent father instead of her mother’s original choice of Michelle Louise. King later couldn't resist imagining the headlines: “Michelle Louise Whips Bobby Riggs in Straight Sets.”4
Both her parents had grown up in broken homes during the Depression, and memories of those hard times were not easily dispelled. Her mother remembered a succession of stepfathers and times when all the family could afford to eat was potatoes. Her father’s mother deserted the family when Bill was thirteen, leaving him with adult-sized responsibilities for a younger brother after an older sister died of cancer. Born and raised in Montana, at some point in the 1930s Bill, like so many other depression-era migrants, made his way to California, where he enrolled at Long Beach City College and played on the basketball team. He met and married Betty in 1941 and soon after entered the service. When he was released from active duty, Bill Moffitt got a job as a firefighter in Long Beach, and he and Betty bought a compact (1,000 square feet) three-bedroom tract house in a nice but hardly fancy neighborhood. There they lived the American dream of home ownership and nuclear family life that was the epitome of the immediate postwar period. In 1948 their second child, Randall James (Randy), was born.5
Like much of California, Long Beach experienced dramatic growth during the 1940s as part of wartime mobilization, playing an especially critical role as a major seaport just twenty miles south of the terminus of Los Angeles. In the postwar period, government spending for what came to be known as the military-industrial complex continued to fuel exponential economic development and population growth in Long Beach and surrounding areas. Media writer John Leonard (who also grew up there) once described the city’s suburban sprawl architecture as a place “where churches looked like airports, the high schools looked like filling stations, [and] Midwestern geriatrics trolled housing tracts in go-carts.”6 Long Beach and nearby Orange County were also noted for their preponderance of fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches, and the strong conservative political views of their residents, especially on the subject of anticommunism. It was no accident that Orange County in the 1960s was the seedbed for the modern Republican conservative revolution known as the New Right. With only slight hyperbole, a sociologist once referred to “the orange curtain” that “metaphorically surrounds Orange County, California and keeps it seemingly free of liberal thinking.”7
Bill Moffitt fit the profile of a strongly conservative, hyperpatriotic, an-ticommunist citizen, often intolerant of those who didn't share his views, including, at times, his only daughter. “I guess my parents were prejudiced, not so much against individuals as against groups,” she later recalled. “I remember one discussion with my father about homosexuals when I was about ten. It wasn't much of a discussion, actually: he made it clear he had very little tolerance for them… It was all a strange contradiction, because they brought Randy and me up to always treat each person as an individual, as a human being, but when it came down to the broader issues, I guess they were really pretty narrow.” Her future husband put it in a less flattering framework, calling the Moffitts “straight out of Archie Bunker.”8
Complementing their conservative political views, the Moffitts had a very traditional marriage: “Dad was the boss, the breadwinner, the one who made all the final decisions. Even though mom wasn’t afraid to speak up, she wasn't nearly as opinionated as dad.” It was obvious to everyone that Billie Jean got much of her competitive drive—and temper—from him. The most important family rule was dinner every night at 5:30 sharp, “or dad would go into a tirade.” Her mother, always the peacekeeper in the family, painted the mealtime ritual in warmer tones: “Family dinner has always been an important event in our home. It was discussion time, warm, pleasant, and an opportunity to exchange ideas. It made us a very close family.” Feeling so well grounded in this secure family environment as a child was an important precondition for Billie Jean King’s success, athletic and otherwise. And yet just as noticeable was her early desire not to grow up to be a typical South California housewife like her mother, struggling to get by on a firefighter’s salary. Class as much as gender fueled the future tennis star’s ambition. “I like being different,” she once said. “I also like being successful. I somehow always knew that I would succeed.”9
/> In later years Billie Jean King felt a real bond of kinship with fellow tennis player Chris Evert, who though a decade younger, also came from a very traditional family background in Florida. (Note also the shared advantage of growing up in climates where you can play tennis outdoors all year.) Their suburban houses even looked alike, but the similarities went deeper than postwar decor: “In both houses you could feel the discipline in the air.” Even though the Everts were Catholic and the Moffitts Protestant, “there was a lot of black-and-white thinking in both. Her father was a real disciplinarian. We both learned to be perfectionists.”10
As an active girl fond of pick-up football, speedball, baseball, or whatever else was being played on the street (“Small but quick, I was the scourge of 36th street”), Billie Jean earned the unavoidable label of tomboy, a term she disliked, as did her parents.11 As a child, however, Billie Jean showed little interest in any traditional female accomplishments, despite her mother’s attempts to introduce her to sewing and embroidery. Even if she didn't know then that Babe Didrikson Zaharias was probably the best all-around athlete, male or female, of the twentieth century, Billie Jean certainly would have agreed with her when she was asked if there was any sport she didn't play. Babe’s pithy reply: “Dolls.”12
An avid recreational athlete himself, Bill Moffitt was ahead of his times in encouraging his daughter to play sports, but her athletic dreams were abruptly shaken when she approached adolescence. In a story told by countless women athletes across the generations, Billie Jean had her epiphany at a baseball game: “But what struck me like a thunderbolt as I watched the game on the diamond that day was that there were no women on the field. My life-long ambition to become a professional baseball player was shattered.” Years later a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times substituted football for baseball, divining King’s later activism from a similar (imagined) gender epiphany: “King has never forgiven nature for the dirty trick it played on her in preventing her from being a safety for the Green Bay Packers.”13
Not only would there be no professional baseball career such as the one her brother Randy later pursued as a relief pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, but Billie Jean got the strong message that if she insisted on continuing to play sports, she must choose one that was more ladylike, or at least more acceptable for women. Swimming and golf were options, but tennis was an even better choice for a girl who loved to run and hit a ball. When a fifth-grade classmate named Susan Williams introduced her to tennis, she immediately fell in love with the sport. As she later put it succinctly, “The thing I like about tennis is that you’re using your mind and body as one.”14
Soon after she first stepped onto a tennis court, Billie Jean Moffitt set her sights high. In an oft-recounted story (actually, most of her stories are oft-recounted), when Betty Moffitt picked her daughter up after her first group lesson on a Long Beach public court, eleven-year-old Billie Jean told her, “I’m going to be the Number One tennis player in the whole world.” “That’s fine, dear,” her mother replied, and just kept on driving.15 When later asked if she was surprised at this announcement, Betty Moffitt said matter-of-factly, “Bill and I took her at her word. She was and is the kind of girl who means what she says.” As her daughter later explained to a journalist, “I’d had a sense of urgency since I was born. When you can see things so clearly, it’s hard on you. You see this vision and everyone looks at you like you’ve got three heads when it’s a no-brainer.” For Billie Jean King, her vision was to be the best tennis player in the world.16
Tennis changed Betty Moffitt’s life almost as much as her daughter’s, as she chauffeured and chaperoned Billie Jean on the daily after-school trips to public courts around Long Beach for her lessons and then later to tournaments in the greater Los Angeles area. “I never thought of any of the thousands of hours I spent watching Billie Jean play tennis as a sacrifice,” she recalled. To friends who raised that point, “I told them that if they had a child who was as interested as Sis [Billie Jean’s childhood nickname] and who put so much effort into a project, they would be willing to go along with her, too.” In contrast to today’s over-controlling sports parents, her mother always made sure that Billie Jean had a well-balanced childhood, with piano lessons and school getting equal time with sports.17
One of the striking things about the Moffitt family is that their traditional postwar nuclear family, with one girl and one boy, ended up producing two professional athletes—Billie Jean in tennis and Randy in baseball. Reflecting their somewhat modest family circumstances, journalist Selena Roberts later said of the Moffitts, “Somehow Bill and Betty helped create a tennis superstar and a major league pitcher on a coupon-clipper’s budget.” Still, having two athletic children to equip and transport put a strain on a firefighter’s salary, and Betty Moffitt sometimes worked as an Avon Lady or sold Tupperware to bring in some extra cash. Billie Jean and Randy always remained grateful for their parents’ combination of support without strings or pressure: “I think the reason we are here today is that our parents did not live through us; they stood behind us,” their daughter said proudly. “There is a big difference.” 18
Billie Jean Moffitt took to tennis, but tennis took a little time getting used to her. She never forgot her early run-ins with the tennis establishment, including one painful slight when she was not allowed to be in a group photograph at a tournament because she was wearing tennis shorts (which her mother had specially sewn for her) rather than the requisite tennis dress. From the start she had an outsider’s sense that made her want to shake up the game from its country-club tonyness and make it more of a people’s sport. Part of this came from her public court exposure and her lower-middle-class family background. Yet she cautioned against exaggerating her family’s financial straits: “We weren't nearly as poor as it was fashionable to make us out to be. It was just that anybody in tennis who wasn't in the country club was always stereotyped as indigent.” Still, her parents always felt much more comfortable in a baseball crowd cheering Randy than at a tennis match watching Billie Jean.19
Having only been introduced to the sport at age eleven, Billie Jean quickly began climbing the tennis ladder. Even if she deplored the haughtiness of tennis culture, she loved the game too much to just walk away from it. In the 1950s and early 1960s, tennis really wasn't all that changed from the genteel, country-club sport it had been in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, it would have been heretical to show up to play in anything but “tennis whites.” Balls were white too, racquets were wooden, and many clubs featured immaculately groomed grass courts. With the exception of a few ranked players such as Helen Jacobs and Alice Marble who played in shorts, women competed in demure tennis dresses or skirts that almost reached their knees. When designer Ted Tinling added lace to the panties that Gussy Moran wore under her dress for her Wimbledon debut in 1949, it created an international sensation.20
This tennis world was extremely insular and hierarchical, tightly controlled by the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) and local groups such as the Southern California Tennis Association, which Perry Jones (“a fussy old bachelor who hated girls,” in Billie’s words) ran like a dictatorship.21 Tournaments, local and national, were organized by age divisions and all were amateur. Opportunities to play in these tournaments, receive reimbursement for travel expenses, or access to other advantages such as coaching and sponsorship were under the thumb of tennis association leaders who had a vested interest in the status quo. If players were lucky, they received token per diem and travel expenses, and they often stretched their budgets by staying in the private homes of tennis supporters at tournaments; obviously such a set-up privileged tennis players whose families were affluent enough to subsidize their participation in the sport. Top tennis players received cash under the table—appearance money or prize money—for playing; professional tennis players, who mainly played exhibition matches, were barred from all the prestigious tournaments. Newspaper coverage was limited, and television coverage virtually n
onexistent.22
This world of tennis was also rigidly segregated well into the 1950s. The black counterpart to the USLTA was the American Tennis Association (ATA), which ran its own tennis program as well as championship tournaments for youth and adults. The ATA had nurtured the athletic careers of such outstanding black female athletes as Isadore Channels in the 1920s, Ora Washington in the 1930s, and a young Althea Gibson in the 1940s, but like baseball players in the segregated Negro Leagues, these women had no opportunities to demonstrate their skill or compete against white players. It took determined public advocacy by Alice Marble in 1950 for Althea Gibson to be invited to play in a grass-courts tournament on the East Coast. This invitation in turn paved the way for Gibson and a small number of other African American players to compete in tournaments such as the U.S. Open and Wimbledon.23
Billie Jean Moffitt, who felt like an outsider in this clubby world because of both class and gender (although not race), often bumped up against its rules and traditions and then nursed grievances, sometimes for the rest of her life, for the treatment she received. Case in point: the inadequate financial support she was given to attend the national girls’ fifteen-and-under championship in Ohio in 1958. Her parents could not afford to underwrite her travel costs to the tournament, and at fourteen she was deemed too young to travel without a chaperone. When her nemesis Perry Jones turned down her request for funding, a group of local boosters came up with some cash, but the sum was too small to stretch for airfare for her and her mother, so they had to sit up on the train all the way from California. Seeded fourth, she lost in the quarterfinals; it was the first time she had ever played on clay. After the championship, other team members went on to play in tournaments on the East Coast and then on the European circuit, but a tearful Billie Jean and her mother had to turn around and return to California for lack of funds. Such slights just increased her determination to succeed.24