Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  What for her had been a totally private decision that she had shared with only a few friends became a matter of public controversy a year later when she signed a petition that stated, “I have had an abortion. I publicly join millions of other women in demanding a repeal of all laws that restrict our reproductive freedom.” Inspired by a public manifesto by 343 prominent French women stating that they had had abortions, a New York feminist named Barbaralee D. Diamonstein enlisted the support of fifty-three prominent women including Gloria Steinem, Judy Collins, Susan Sontag, Nora Ephron, and Billie Jean King to kick off a comparable American campaign. This was an exceptionally courageous act then: women, especially well-known public figures, simply did not talk about abortion, which remained illegal in most states. (Roe v. Wade was not decided until January 1973.) The petition appeared in the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine, which came out in January 1972. A month later sportswriter Mark Asher asked King about the petition for an article in the Washington Post and she hedged, saying she strongly supported the right to abortion and that “whoever has to have the baby is the one who should make the decision.” When the article flatly stated that she had had an abortion, it was not quoting her directly, but the damage was done, especially when it was picked up by the wire services. King had never told her parents about the abortion, and they were mortified to learn about it from an article in the Los Angeles Times.73

  And yet what began as a moment of personal courage soon became surrounded by obfuscation. When the story was picked up in Time a month later the article repeated King’s general support for abortion reform but stated that, despite signing the ad, she had not had an abortion, quoting her as saying, “I wish I’d known more about the ad before I agreed to sign it.” Her 1974 autobiography discussed the abortion unapologetically and said Larry had seen the petition in the mail and told her she would probably want to sign it, which she did. “I was almost sure the petition said that we signees were only in favor of legalized abortion, not that we’d had abortions ourselves,” she asserted then. Her 1982 autobiography did not mention the petition, only the criticism she received for having an abortion. But in an HBO documentary in 2006 and a recent book by Selena Roberts, Billie Jean King claimed she never saw the letter and that Larry signed her name without telling her, which certainly puts a very different spin on it. There is enough evidence from the time to dispute that retrospective assertion, but the shifting story—and blame—is yet another example of Billie Jean King’s tendency to put expediency ahead of principle when it came to her public image.74

  Not all the publicity she received in 1972 was so painful. That September she won her third U.S. Open title. In December she and UCLA coach John Wooden were named Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year by Sports Illustrated, the first time a woman had been honored. Showing her tendency to assume that what was good for Billie Jean King was good for everyone else, she saw it as “a three-way triumph: for me, for women's tennis, and for women everywhere.75 Soon after the division between the Virginia Slims tour and the USLTA’ “ -backed tour was healed, and all the top women players were competing in the same tournaments. And in 1973, a truly stunning turn of events: the U.S. Open became the first major tournament to award equal prize money to men and women. The fact that Wimbledon did not meet that standard until 2007 confirms what a far-sighted breakthrough for equality it was.76

  There was one final item on Billie Jean King’s activist agenda: the establishment of a players’ union. As far back as 1964 King had tried to organize an informal “strike” by women players over the unequal under-the-table payments they received, but no one else wanted to rock the boat. The need for an organization to stand up for women's interests and speak in a unified voice seemed like a no-brainer to King, even if her fellow athletes didn't yet see it that way: “So often, athletes look everywhere else for the answer to their problems but to themselves. Yet they’re the people who are unhappy with the status quo! Athletes have to be convinced that it’s in their self-interest to set up and control their own organizations.” King made her final push at Wimbledon in June of 1973, when she invited all the women professionals to the Hotel Gloucester and then had one player lock the door until they agreed to form the women's Tennis Association (WTA). In addition to her success as a labor organizer that June, King also won a coveted Wimbledon triple—singles, doubles, and mixed doubles championships.77

  This frenzied, twenty-four-hours-a-day lifestyle provides the context for the Battle of the Sexes match with Bobby Riggs: it was yet another commitment on an already overcrowded athletic and professional agenda. The match was officially announced to the press in July, with the requisite media event in New York City to start the publicity juggernaut in motion. For the rest of the summer, King kept up her commitments on the women's professional tour, knowing that if she bailed from any of the tournaments, she would leave the organizers in the lurch. She was also struggling with injuries and medical problems, including a bout of hypoglycemia. At the U.S. Open in early September, she defaulted to Julie Heldman, raising concerns about her physical condition. But when the night of the Riggs match finally arrived three weeks later, she was as ready as she ever would be, and her preparation showed. After her victory, journalist Grace Lichtenstein proclaimed her a “national folk heroine—an athletic Eleanor Roosevelt.”78

  THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES cemented Billie Jean King’s stature as America’s first female sports superstar. King loved her role as the self-described “mother of modern sports” because it gave her the platform to “make social change” at the same time it provided the basis for her successful professional career as a tennis star and women's sports advocate. She also craved the public adulation that celebrity brings. She often paraphrased Bill Bradley’s description of playing basketball before an adoring crowd, “I just want to go out there and eat up all those love vibes.” Using her celebrity and fame as a bully pulpit to bring her feminist-tinged brand of tennis to a wide national audience, she became one of the most well-known athletes of her time.79

  American history is full of iconic sports heroes, but until Billie Jean King they were almost exclusively men. Sportswriters and pundits have long debated what elevates a journeyman athlete into an icon, and there seem to be no general rules, except that in each case the athlete comes to stand for something more than just himself and his individual sport. Legendary sports heroes such as Babe Ruth, Knute Rockne, Jack Dempsey, Mickey Mantle, and Jackie Robinson were very much of their times yet also somehow transcended them. These heroes loomed large in the nation’s consciousness, embodying American ideals of hard work and fair play, upward mobility through sports, and the physical grace and perfection of athletic performance. Of course the unsullied public reputations of some of these heroes, so “Godded up” by adoring sportswriters that they seemed almost superhuman, rarely matched their often tawdry off-field lives, but the public showed no thirst for such details. In earlier and less intrusive times, such inconvenient facts were considered strictly off limits.80

  For most of the twentieth century there was no way for a woman to win the kind of celebrity status that male sports heroes held. Sport was like a boys’ tree house with a “No Girls Allowed” sign posted outside: women athletes were shut out from the popular professional and amateur sports that built the careers of sports legends in the first place. To be sure, some female athletes enjoyed a certain notoriety, even fame, at the height of their careers: Gertrude Ederle was lionized in 1926 after she swam the English Channel; Helen Wills Moody and Suzanne Lenglen won renown in tennis in the 1920s and 1930s. Babe Didrikson Zaharias, one of the best all-around athletes of all time, won three track and field medals at the 1932 Olympics and later dominated the women's professional golf tour until her premature death in 1956. But Americans at midcentury weren't ready to embrace a talented female athlete, even one named Babe, with the same degree of idolatry accorded to the legends of baseball, football, and boxing.81

  Starting in the 1930s and 1940s, black athletes provid
ed a new kind of sports idol more connected to the social and political issues of the day. Like women's sports, black athleticism had a long and rich history, but it mainly played out in segregated venues out of sight of mainstream America. When an African American athlete entered the white realm of organized sport, that moment was necessarily packed with meaning. For example, Joe Louis’s victory over German Max Schmeling in 1938 was widely interpreted as a blow to Hitler’s theories of racial superiority.82

  Without Joe Louis there probably would have been no Jackie Robinson, and no integration of Major League Baseball in 1947. Seven years before the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Robinson entered the vanguard of the civil rights revolution when he broke the color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Showing how sport can indirectly influence politics and society, sportswriter Roger Kahn observed, “By applauding Robinson a man did not feel that he was taking a stand on school integration or on open housing. But for an instant he had accepted Robinson simply as a hometown ball player. To disregard color, even for an instant, is to step away from old prejudices, the old hatred. That is not a path on which many double back.”83

  Both Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson were referred to, somewhat patronizingly, as “credits to their race.” By the 1970s conditions were finally ripe for a female athletic superstar such as Billie Jean King to emerge as a “credit to her sex.” Unlike Babe Didrikson Zaharias just fifteen years earlier, or Althea Gibson, who broke the color line in tennis when she won back-to-back Wimbledon and U.S. Open titles in 1957 and 1958, Billie Jean King was the beneficiary of a fortuitous set of circumstances, starting with the fact that tennis was ready to burst into a new level of popular acceptance and thus provide a professional vehicle to sustain her career and build celebrity recognition. Simultaneously the women's movement and the passage of Title IX put questions of feminism and women's sports squarely on the national agenda, which in turn maximized interest in women's sports and created a mass base ready to embrace a female superstar.

  Once again timing is everything, and Billie Jean King was never shy about seizing the moment. In 1978 sportswriter Robert Lipsyte put the tennis star in a category with Joe Namath and Muhammad Ali as celebrity athletes “whose impact on the nation’s psyche was as deep and significant as their effect on the games they played.” In addition to their prowess in their chosen sports, all three had something more: “Call it magnetism or sex appeal or charisma, it allowed people to use them as extensions of their hopes and daydreams as living symbols of the ultimate.”84 Nowhere was this more in evidence than the Battle of the Sexes.

  As a popular sports superstar, Billie Jean King quickly moved beyond just tennis to become a symbol for something even bigger: women's rights and women's changing roles in society. Sportswriter Frank Deford, who wrote some of the most probing early profiles of her and later collaborated on her autobiography, predicted in 1975 that she would be the most significant athlete of the twentieth century, more so even than Muhammad Ali. Unlike civil rights “firsts,” “hers is a deeper and wider legacy: she has prominently affected the way 50% of society thinks and feels about itself in the vast area of physical exercise.” He then put his finger on why individuals like King were so important to the larger process of social change: “Still, the fact remains that in the modern United States, in the modern world, the promulgation and acceptance of sharp new attitudes—what are called movements or trends—utterly depend on the emergence of a personality to embody the philosophy.… When was the last time you saw two minutes of an idea on the six o’clock news?” Like her friend Gloria Steinem, a media superstar who personified the goals of second-wave feminism for the country as a whole, Billie Jean King personified the women's sports revolution in popular culture. In turn, her talent for keeping herself in the public eye allowed her to weather the critical transition for any athlete when playing days are over and retirement looms.85

  In 1975 Billie Jean King won her sixth (and final) Wimbledon singles title, crushing Evonne Goolagong Cawley 6-0, 6-1, and promptly announced her retirement, calling herself “the most fortunate woman athlete who ever lived up to this time.” Thirty-one years old, she was just plain tired—tired of keeping the tour going, tired of the travel, tired of the politics. Plus she needed another round of surgery on one of her knees. “Now I can have beer and ice cream,” she gleefully told the press.86

  Not surprisingly, the retirement did not stick. The next year she was back on the tour. “Retiring was the best thing I ever did,” she said, “because I learned that I didn't want to be retired. I drank my beer and I ate my ice cream, and I saw myself getting soft and fat and said, ‘Hey, that’s not me.’”After considering other career options and opportunities, she realized that what she really loved best was playing tennis. And she felt she could still be competitive even as she aged: “I still had the ability. And I missed the game. As you get older, you acquire a different perspective. You realize the joy and love of what you do. It’s like a Horowitz playing the piano, or a Nureyev dancing. You keep remembering how much you like it.” To naysayers who questioned why she was still playing at the then-ancient age of thirty-six, she replied: “People forget that I didn't have these opportunities until I was past 25. I know what I’ve got. I know it’s a privilege to be here. Tennis is what made me. Why should I leave it if I can play at a level that makes me happy?” Validation of that outlook came at Wimbledon in 1979 when she eclipsed the record previously held by the venerable English player Elizabeth Ryan and won her twentieth title paired with Martina Navratilova in women's doubles. She finished her career with thirty-nine Grand Slam titles overall.87

  Billie Jean King used to joke that she could get high just by hitting a backhand. She took physical as well as emotional pleasure from the game: “Sometimes I go up for an aggressive volley and really smash it, and I find myself thinking, ‘How unladylike—but how great it feels.’ Any kind of experience that is so close to perfection can't be bad, can it?” For her, tennis was “a medium of self-expression”: “I love that the ball doesn't come over the net twice in the same way in a lifetime and that I’m always in the process of finding new solutions.” As her active playing days on the women's tournament were drawing to a close, Billie Jean King could draw satisfaction from what she had accomplished in the 1960s and 1970s for women's tennis and for women in general. Luckily after 1972 it was not up to her alone to fight the good fight where women in sports were concerned, thanks to “two funky little Roman numerals” called Title IX.88

  Chapter Two In the Meantime

  THE EARLY DAYS OF TITLE IX

  Thirty years after the Bobby Riggs match, Billie Jean King dramatically recalled her feelings about its larger historical significance for reporter Selena Roberts. “My job in the match, and I remember this being very clear, was to change the hearts and minds of people to match the legislation of Title IX and what we were trying to do with the women's movement. It was to validate it, to celebrate it, and to get going toward changing a world where we had equality for both genders.” King had voiced similar sentiments on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the match in 1998: “Title IX had just passed, and I would see people [looking] for an excuse to backtrack. I wanted to change the hearts and minds of people to match the legislation we had just gotten in place.” Recently she upped the ante by claiming that she had helped get Title IX passed in the first place.1

  Billie Jean King’s memory is playing tricks on her. Without challenging the larger significance of the match for either the emerging feminist movement or the struggle for gender equity in sports, a more historically grounded look at the early days of Title IX suggests that public awareness of the law in general and its impact on women's sports in particular was not necessarily as widespread in the fall of 1973 as her retrospective memories claimed. Passed without fanfare a little more than a year earlier, Title IX was never mentioned by name in all the voluminous coverage the match received. When Billie beat Bobby, she wasn't carrying the banner fo
r Title IX precisely because the law was not yet associated with women's sports in the popular mind. That changed soon after, in part because of her role in raising the nation’s consciousness where women's sports were concerned. Just as important an influence on the early days of Title IX were the actions of a small band of Washington insiders—bureaucrats, activists, and lobbyists—who gradually realized that this little-noticed general education law would have its most profound impact on an area no one had anticipated: sports.

  Even if Billie Jean King exaggerated her role in the passage of Title IX, she always grasped its larger significance: “Oh, my God, it’s the third most important piece of legislation in the 20th century. There was the vote, civil rights in the ’60s, and Title IX in the ’70s.” The events leading up to Title IX’s passage in 1972, and the struggle ever since to figure out how to implement the law fairly, demonstrate how athletics became part of the broader political and cultural struggles of contemporary American life. Title IX also provides a textbook case of the difficulties—and the rewards—of putting abstract principles of liberal feminism such as equal opportunity and gender equity into concrete, everyday practice. From the start the law sparked high expectations as well as conflict and ambiguity, which continue to this day. So too does the revolution in women's sports that Title IX helped to set in motion.2