Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  At this point in her career, Billie Jean King was all dressed up with nowhere to go. She was ranked number one in her sport, but she wanted more—more recognition, more opportunities, and more money, especially the chance to make a living at what she did best. To do that tennis had to leave its insular, country-club atmosphere and venture out into the mainstream of American sports. As she said in 1967 when she sat for an interview for the women's pages of a newspaper, “That’s the trouble with this sport. We’ve got to get it off the society page and onto the sports pages.”50

  What Billie Jean King was really up against was the vestiges of tennis as a purely amateur sport, a facade (and a lie) that would be challenged and then collapse in 1968, in part because of her advocacy. Arthur Ashe, then the second-ranked American male player, said it best in 1967: “We all deserve Oscars for impersonating amateurs.” For years tournament directors and tennis officials had made under-the-table payments to top players to guarantee their participation, which in turn drew the spectators who made the events profitable. While no tennis players were going to get rich under this system, they could more than cover their expenses and have some left over. King herself estimated that in 1967, her last full year as an amateur, she grossed just under $20,000 (“I haggled pretty good and got almost as much as the men”), which sounds like a tidy sum until you remember she had to cover most of her travel and lodging expenses. She was less successful with her long-term nemesis, the USLTA. As she recalled caustically, “The USLTA paid me $196 a week in expenses—half that if I stayed in private houses—so I could help draw crowds that put money into its pot, and where that money went, your guess is as good as mine.” No wonder Life in 1967 described the “myopic housewife of Berkeley, California,” as “the most colorful and outspoken critic of tennis today.”51

  This striving for professional status for tennis, accompanied by a desire to wrest its control from the elite, country-club set, was what initially drove Billie Jean King as a rebel in her sport; the attention to women's issues came later. “It was the hypocrisy of the thing that bugged me the most. I wanted the chance to make money, honest money, doing what I did best. It was that simple.” As she said on more than one occasion, “I can't even get a credit card. How can I tell them I’ve got a job.”52

  Two sportswriters later called the arrival of Open Tennis “the first giant step towards today’s all-embracing, big money professionalism.” For Billie Jean King the onset of Open Tennis meant signing a contract with the National Tennis League that went into effect on April 1, 1968. She was guaranteed $40,000 a year for two years, and she joined Ann Jones, Francoise Durr, and Rosie Casals as “the only women tennis professionals in the world who actually earned our money by playing.” The tour, which also included Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson, Pancho Gonzales, and Rod Laver, started in Europe and was nothing but a string of one-night stands; King remembered never being so tired in her life. The tour actually folded before her contract ended, and she went back on the regular tennis circuit. Professional tennis wasn't quite ready for prime time yet.53

  The 1968 Wimbledon was the first major tournament played under the new rules, and both the men’s and women's titles were won by professionals. Rod Laver received $4,800 for his victory, while Billie Jean King only got $1,800, about par for the gender gap in prize money at the time. For King, it was her third straight title, which ironically soured her relationship with the British press and public, who loved underdogs but did not warm to repeat winners, especially brash American ones.54

  And yet all was not well with her tennis career, as King later recalled: “The years from 1968 to 1970 should have been the best tennis years of my career, but because of a lot of things, they turned out to be the worst.” She was plagued by knee problems, which kept her in almost constant pain and necessitated surgery and extensive rehabilitation in 1968 and 1970. An added distraction was that when Larry finished his law degree at Berkeley in 1969 they moved to Hawaii, where he hoped to set up his practice. Not that she spent much time there, but she felt totally out of place in the social scene, plus the added travel time to tournaments on the mainland was a real burden. Rumors of a possible divorce circulated widely.55

  Lurking underneath this personal and professional uncertainty was the nagging realization that in the transition to Open Tennis, the women were—in Larry King’s apt description—getting “squeezed out.” Having won round one to take the sport professional, women now found out that they had to fight a second battle: to get gender equity for women professionals. This struggle consumed Billie Jean King for the next three years.56

  The story of the founding of the women's professional tour revolves around the actions of three individuals: the charismatic advocacy of Billie Jean King, the astute professional savvy and contacts of tennis promoter Gladys Heldman, and the financial and marketing support of Joseph P. Cullman, the chief executive officer of Philip Morris. After several years of watching the purses for men’s tournaments grow while women's shrank, plus a decline in the number of women's tournaments overall because tennis promoters claimed that nobody would pay to watch women play, the final straw was the Pacific Southwest Open run by Jack Kramer. The tournament, scheduled for September 1970, offered top prize for men of $12,500 and $1,500 for women—a ratio of eight to one. Even more galling, women players were guaranteed no money, not even expenses, unless they made the quarterfinals. Kramer was never known as a friend of women's tennis (King later threatened to withdraw from the Riggs match if he served as one of the color commentators for the ABC broadcast), and he refused to meet the women's demands for at least one-quarter of the purse. In fact, he probably would have been quite happy to cancel the women's draw and turn all the prize money back to the men.57

  Tired of being marginalized and treated like second-class citizens, the women players turned to Gladys Heldman, the founder and publisher of World Tennis magazine, who quickly put together a women-only tournament in Houston the same week; Joseph Cullman kicked in $2,500 (one third of the $7,500 purse) on behalf of Philip Morris for what was to be called the Houston Virginia Slims Invitational. With great ceremony and more than a little faith, Billie Jean King and eight other women (henceforth known as the “Original Nine”), including Rosemary Casals, Nancy Richey, and Gladys Heldman’s daughter Julie, risked expulsion from the USLTA when they signed $1-a-year contracts, a moment immortalized by a photo of them holding dollar bills in the air. Rosie Casals won that first tournament, but the real winner was the cause of women's tennis, which received more media coverage that week than it had the entire previous year.58

  After the Houston tournament, Larry King and his business partner Dennis Van der Meer proposed that their company, TennisAmerica, be hired to run the women's tour, seemingly oblivious to the potential conflicts of interest since his wife was its main draw. Instead the players stuck with Heldman.59 By early 1971, Heldman had already arranged fourteen tournaments with combined prize money of $189,000. Because the women's movement was taking off at the same time, the public automatically linked what Gladys Heldman dubbed “women's lob” with women's lib, but feminist ideology was not the driving force behind the women's tour. “It was actually more a matter of survival than ideology,” King recalled.60

  The early years of what came to be known as the Virginia Slims tour suffered from the absence of three of the big names in women's tennis—Margaret Smith Court, Evonne Goolagong, and Chris Evert—who stayed loyal to the USLTA, which had set up its own competing women's tour. (The USLTA acted not out of any sympathy or commitment to the future of women's tennis but rather from fear that they might lose control of the women's side of the game entirely. The National Collegiate Athletic Association took a similar stance toward women's sports in the first decade of Title IX’s existence.) Chris Evert was the prize that everyone wanted, because it was clear practically from the start that this talented and photogenic Florida teenager was going to be central to the future of the sport. Billie Jean flew to Florida to meet with the Ever
t family, but Jimmy Evert, Chris’s conservative dad, made the decision that she would not join the Slims tour. As Chris recalled several decades later, “in my defense, at just 16 years old, I wasn't a feminist,” adding, “I wasn't burning my bra because I wasn't even wearing one yet.”61

  While many of the women tennis players resented or snubbed this rising star with her two-fisted backhand and icy composure, Billie Jean King went out of her way to befriend her. Having such an attractive and appealing star, especially when television was beginning to discover that tennis could be a profitable addition to its sports menu, was going to help them all, she reasoned. That, however, didn't keep King from wanting to beat the young aspirant. At the U.S. Open in 1971, where the sixteen-year-old had a phenomenal run of victories, Evert and King met in the semifinals. Billie Jean feared that the women's tour would have no credibility if she, its leading moneymaker, couldn't beat this kid, no matter how talented and poised she was. Age and experience triumphed, and King won handily, dispatching Evert back to start her junior year at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale. King went on to beat her doubles partner Rosie Casals in the final and repeated as the U.S. Open champion in 1972.62

  In the early years of professional tennis, there really wasn't enough money or fan interest to support two competing tours, and in 1973 they agreed to merge into a single organization. One casualty of the merger was the outspoken Gladys Heldman, with whom the USLTA establishment refused to work; having been the facilitator for the revolt, she was forced out just as her vision was paying off. “I was out, but the war was over and that was the most important thing,” she recalled graciously as she stepped aside and returned to World Tennis. When the tour began in 1971, the minimum purse was set at $10,000; by 1973, the figure was $35,000. The following year after the tours combined, it was $50,000. No one doubted anymore that fans would pay money to see women play. According to King, women tennis players made more gains between 1970 and 1973 than in the entire thirty years before.63

  Even with Gladys Heldman gone, Virginia Slims stayed, proving a critical, and controversial, ally to the new women's tour. The Virginia Slims slogan—“ You’ve come a long way, baby”—copied and, many believed, demeaned the ideas of modern feminism. In 1975 the New York Times noted that at base the rationale behind the women's tour was to promote cigarettes and the slogan “served the purpose perfectly as it identified a commercial product and a woman’s sport with women's liberation, a triple-pronged assault that must have seemed irresistible.” This didn't bother Billie Jean King one bit, who enthused about the slogan, “I love it. I think it’s true. I’m in this (women's Lib and Lob) whether I like it or not. I just want to play tennis.”64

  This partnership was forged at a moment fraught with uncertainty for the tobacco industry as a whole: the Surgeon General’s report linking smoking with cancer had appeared in 1966, and cigarette advertising was banned from television as of January 2, 1971. Nevertheless the tobacco company reaped enormous benefits from this decades-long association, as the Philip Morris marketing manager admitted as early as 1976: “When we started out, we had no idea where we were going. We were doing the women a favor. Our name was carrying tennis. But within a year and a half that all began to change. The sport began to carry the product. We had been instrumental in developing a popular sport and we were benefiting from our association with it.” A spokesperson for Virginia Slims put it in even stronger terms in 1983: “We [Virginia Slims] wouldn't be here if it weren't for Billie Jean King.”65

  While King always admitted that it was a “real moral conflict” about whether to accept money from a company whose product was associated with lung cancer, she argued that women's tennis needed the money or “we’d be at the mercy of male officials as we always have been.” King justified the support because the company never asked women tennis players to smoke and because cigarettes, however unhealthy, were legal. Weighing the costs and benefits, “I came to realize that Slims was doing us and the sport so much good that I’d have to live with my misgivings. You give a little to accomplish something big.” Or as she was quoted in Sports Illustrated in 1972: “If I hadn't played—I'll be truthful—there wouldn't have been a circuit. I wasn't about to deprive 80 girls of a living, and I do know people who drink and smoke a lot and also play great tennis.” She never wavered in her belief that the tour had made the right choice, even though this association meant that women's tennis—and her name—was forever linked in the public mind with cigarettes. Others have not been as charitable, and lingering criticisms about Virginia Slims’ sponsorship dogged the tennis star—rightly—for the rest of her career.66

  As her pragmatic approach to sponsorship suggested, for Billie Jean King professional tennis was always made up of equal parts business and entertainment. As she told Sports Illustrated in 1972, “We’re in big business, and until people face reality we'll be dabbling in nonsense forever.… If we can get the money, we deserve it.” She asked rhetorically, “Do female entertainers get paid less than male entertainers? No. Their pay depends on whether they draw at the box office. Entertainment value, getting people through the turnstiles, that’s the name of the game.” When critics pointed out that men played three out of five sets while women played two out of three, King would reply, “People don't want to see stamina; they want to see skill.” (Bud Collins put it another way: “Sometimes a shorter opera is much better than a long one.”) Nor did she shy away from exploiting the sex appeal of both male and female players. “I think tennis is a very sexy sport,” she said, “and that is good. The players are young, with excellent bodies, clothed in relatively little. It offers the healthiest, most appealing presentation of sex I can imagine, and we in sport must acknowledge that and use it to our advantage.”67

  This emphasis on professionalism runs through Billie Jean King’s public statements in the early 1970s much more than feminism. To her mind, a sport was not taken seriously in America if it wasn't professional; if women's tennis—and by extension, women's sports—was going to win the recognition it desired and deserved, it needed a professional basis. Jerry Diamond, an early tennis executive associated with the women's tour, summed up Billie Jean King’s vision: “She made it possible for women to earn a living playing tennisIt’s as though she invented the NBA or pro football, OK?” When she testified before Congress in 1973 in support of the women's Educational Equity Act, she noted, “As an amateur, I was saying the same things I am saying to you today, and nobody could care less.” She was right.68

  Billie Jean King was never shy about the importance she placed on money, even though her open pursuit of that goal often dismayed tennis purists. As she told Life in 1971, “Money is everything in sports. It made me a star.” That was the year that King made $100,000 in earnings, the first woman in sports to reach that pinnacle. (By way of comparison, the average income in 1971 was $10,600, and the average price of a new home was $25,200.) Her feat earned her a somewhat stilted congratulatory phone call from President Richard Nixon, and also, she hoped, the respect of the average sports fan: “‘Big money’ is the common denominator. The guy in the factory can relate to me. He says, ‘If she makes all that much, she must be good.’”Some players on the tour, however, resented the money King received, and wondered if her activism wasn't just a way to grab more attention—and cash—for herself. As one player told Grace Lichtenstein, “Whatever Billie Jean says she’s doing for us, she’s really doing it for herself.” Jealousies and resentments aside, without Billie Jean King there probably would not have been a women's tour, and everyone knew it.69

  Of her nonstop activism on behalf of women's tennis in the 1970s, King later observed, “People thought I was angry. I wasn't. I was determined.” In joint pursuit of maintaining her number one ranking and establishing women's tennis on a sound footing, her life became “an endless succession of not only tennis but also public appearances, airport lobbies, interviews, motels, meetings, and dirty laundry.” Before every tournament, she would fly int
o the city, rent a car, and then visit local media outlets to try to drum up publicity for the tournament and for women's tennis in general. Chris Evert remembered playing Billie Jean King in a “sluggish” night game in the early 1970s. “Later I found out she had spent all day in New York for meetings regarding tour sponsorship. She was always one to put the group ahead of her own tennis.” Evert added respectfully, “Every sport needs a Billie Jean King.”70

  All this activism took its toll. In her 1974 autobiography, written to capitalize on the Riggs match, King put it this way: “But being Number One was a twenty-four-hour job, and my personality just didn't allow me the luxury of letting up at all, even for a minute.” She sounded more tired, and more damaged, when she revisited that period in her 1982 memoir: “I have never been the same since 1972. Those couple years were so intense. I just gave, gave, gave, and afterward there was something that just wasn't there for me to draw on anymore.… Making women's sports acceptable, and making women's tennis, particularly, into a legitimate big-league game was a crusade for me and I threw my whole self into it in ways that exhausted me emotionally as much as they did physically.”71

  This headline from the Washington Post on February 22, 1972, didn't help: “Abortion Made Possible Mrs. King’s Top Year.” A year earlier she had gone off birth control pills because of complications; she thought her period was regular enough to be safe, but she miscalculated. (Actually she and Larry spent so little time together that many friends were surprised that he managed to get her pregnant in the first place.) A strong believer in a woman’s right to choose and still committed to the possibility of having children in the future, she made the decision to have an abortion in California, with Larry’s strong support. In 1967 California had been one of the first states to liberalize its abortion laws by allowing hospital committees to approve so-called therapeutic abortions when pregnancy would affect the physical or mental health of the woman, or in cases of rape or incest, as long as the procedure was performed by a doctor in an accredited hospital. Calling it “the simplest operation I’ve ever had,” King did have two main gripes: the cost ($580, which she thought was outrageous for such a quick procedure) and the fact that her husband, not she, had to give consent for it.72