Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  This is where Billie Jean King’s story and that of Title IX converge. In her own career she was working toward the same general goal as the legislation: challenging and eradicating all forms of discrimination in athletics so women could finally have a sporting chance to play on equal terms with men. To accomplish this goal took education, advocacy, political engagement, and even entrepreneurship. Just as she had done in the Battle of the Sexes, Billie Jean King dovetailed her personal and professional priorities with building support for women's sports in the society at large. Not co-incidentally, many of her actions also benefitted Billie Jean King personally, either financially or in terms of enhancing the public visibility and celebrity she craved. To her mind, this was a win-win situation: she got to pursue a lucrative career while also acting as a role model for women athletes everywhere. Not surprisingly, her unbridled ambition and drive also opened her to criticism that she was mainly out for herself.

  After her victory in the much-hyped Battle of the Sexes, Billie Jean King suddenly found herself flush with cash. Even though the money available in the 1970s seems like peanuts compared to today’s multimillion-dollar tournament purses and lucrative endorsement contracts, its scale was unprecedented at the time, especially for a female athlete. The Wall Street Journal estimated that King grossed $500,000 in 1973 from her tournament winnings, the residuals from the Bobby Riggs match, as well as a string of endorsements that included Adidas, Wilson tennis rackets, Colgate toothpaste, Aquanet hairspray, Phase III soap, Bonnie Doon socks, and Sunbeam hair curlers. The following year her income approached $1 million. Billie Jean King’s “open pursuit of money and fame” appalled many in the tennis establishment and subjected her to inevitable criticism and resentment, which she simply shrugged off as sour grapes: “They love you when you’re coming up. But they don't like winners. And they especially don't like me because I talk about money all the time.” She concluded triumphantly, “I’m mercenary. I’m a rebel.”3

  Her coconspirator in these mercenary rebellions—what could easily be called “Billie Jean King, Inc.”—was her lawyer husband, Larry, or as he unapologetically signed autographs “Mr. Billie Jean King.” As he said in 1980, “You’ve got to make a choice when your wife is involved in sports. You can not be involved at all, you can be a nay-sayer or you can come up with solutions. As it happens, Billie Jean’s forte is identifying the problem and mine is identifying the solution.” Just as ambitious and focused when it came to business as she was in tennis, Larry King functioned as a tennis promoter (“I’ve probably promoted more women's tennis tournaments than anyone in the world”), lawyer for the women's Tennis Association, entrepreneur (with a chain of tennis camps called TennisAmerica and as copublisher of womenSports), and real estate developer.4 As Frank Deford deadpanned in a Sports Illustrated profile in 1975: “The lasting vision of Larry is of him standing in a World Team Tennis ticket booth, trying to sell lifetime subscriptions to womenSports, as a friend walks by and calls out to him: ‘How’s the condos going, Larry?’ “Like his superstar wife, he rubbed many people the wrong way and often seemed oblivious to his tendency to conflate what was good for tennis with what was good for Billie Jean King, Inc. But he was enormously useful to his wife’s career, and she could never have accomplished so much, on and off the court, without him as her trusted partner and financial advisor.5

  In the years immediately after the Bobby Riggs match, Billie Jean King used her newly won clout and financial success to embark on new ventures, both business and nonprofit. Dennis Van der Meer, who partnered with the Kings in TennisAmerica, observed her unusual priorities: “Most athletes want annuities and pension plans, but Billie Jean is sticking her neck out and putting her earnings back into the tennis industry.” In addition to exploring alternative streams of income, she was also interested in linking her name with ventures that could help her to maintain her public celebrity and her undisputed role as the best-known female athlete of her time.6

  One of her earliest projects was founding a sports magazine for women called womenSports, which debuted in June 1974. That same year saw the beginnings of the women's Sports Foundation, an advocacy group dedicated to expanding and protecting athletic opportunities for women and girls. The year 1974 also marked the debut of World Team Tennis (WTT), a new venture designed to break out tennis from its country-club setting and make it into a popular team sport on a par with baseball, football, or basketball. Billie Jean King didn't stop with tennis. In the 1970s she actively promoted the establishment of a women's professional softball league and cheered the efforts to set up or expand professional leagues for women in sports such as basketball and golf.7

  With these ventures, Billie Jean King was thinking not only about her professional future but about how to maintain the momentum of the women's sports revolution until her goal—and that of Title IX as well—of equal access for all men and women was reached. She joked she could already hear the sportswriters saying, “Here comes Billie Jean on another crusade—doesn't she ever get tired?” Even though her grandiose visions might be met with skepticism, so many of her dreams for tennis had already come true that she forged ahead with equanimity. As she said in 1975, “No one believes in World Team Tennis. Nobody believes in womenSports. Everybody looks at you like you’re crazy and you say, ‘Am I crazy?’… Most people don't believe anything until after the fact.” Even if her role in most of these ventures was more the visionary founder and celebrity cheerleader than a hands-on participant or administrator, Billie Jean King found the decade of the 1970s a fertile climate for her experiments in sports entrepre-neurship and self-promotion.8

  ABOUT NINE MONTHS before the Battle of the Sexes, Billie Jean and Larry were driving across the Bay Bridge from Oakland to San Francisco when she began complaining about Sports Illustrated’s lack of coverage of women athletes. After listening to her rants, Larry calmly suggested that she do something about it by starting a magazine of her own. Thus the idea for womenSports was hatched. Billie Jean King later put its founding in more personal, if somewhat self-centered, terms: “The thousands of hours I’ve spent practicing these last 19 years and the thousands of miles I’ve run on the courts have brought me to a secure position financially. Sure, I’ve got a sports car, a house on the beach, all the material things I could want. I’ve even achieved almost all the goals I set out for myself insofar as tennis is concerned. But for some time now, there has been a gnawing, nagging feeling that there was yet one more thing I had to do.” By the time the magazine debuted in the summer of 1974, she was positively giddy with anticipation: “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.” She was all of thirty years old.9

  Starting any kind of magazine is a risky proposition: according to the New York Times in 1974, two out of five new magazines started that year were likely to fail. Bankrolling such a magazine would entail a substantial financial risk for the Kings, one that their investment advisors warned against. Better try real estate instead, they suggested, reminding them that Sports Illustrated, the premier success story in the world of sports journalism, did not even turn a profit until ten years after it was founded in 1954. In addition, neither of the Kings had the least experience in publishing, or as Billie Jean later admitted, “we didn't know a by-line from a center spread.”10 Tennis associate Jerry Diamond captured the combination of idealism and impetuosity behind the idea well, calling it “a wonderful concept—a women's Sports Illustrated—but about ten years before its time. When it came out, women's sports were just emerging. Rather than say, ‘hey, let’s wait a few years, let this run its course,’ nope, they just went ahead and did it.”11

  Billie Jean King was not the first—or the last—to think there ought to be a magazine devoted to women's sports. In March 1973 twenty-six-year-old Marlene Jensen started the Sportswoman, with none other than Billie Jean King on the first cover. The magazine was originally planned as a quarterly, but the response was so strong that it immediately moved to six issues a year. Available by subscription only, its
circulation was only 5,000, but Jensen saw great potential for growth. But when she approached fellow Californians Billie Jean and Larry King for financial backing, they told her they planned to “do it bigger and better” and turned her down.12

  By the time of the Riggs match in September 1973, word was out on the street that Billie Jean King was planning to publish a sports magazine for women. The Wall Street Journal referred to the forthcoming magazine as “Ms. Sports,” although that is the only public reference to such a title.13 Even without the shared title, the influence of Ms. magazine on this venture is clear and omnipresent. When Billie Jean and Larry were in the planning stages, their most influential mentors were Pat Carbine of Ms., John Mark Carter of American Home, and Ellen Merlo, a former managing editor of Motor Trend who was now with Phillip Morris.14

  Ms. debuted as an insert in a late December 1971 issue of New York Magazine; its first stand-alone issue followed quickly in January 1972, dated Spring 1972 in case it had to sit on newsstands for months. Instead it sold out in eight days. The magazine quickly became the popular embodiment of second-wave feminism, with a circulation of between 400,000 and 500,000 and readership near 3 million. Like all new ventures, Ms. struggled financially, but it managed to forge an incredibly strong link to its readers and subscribers. It wasn't just that Ms. filled a niche: it aimed to be part of the revolution in women's lives symbolized by the revival of feminism. WomenSports aimed to fill a similar role for those who were passionate about sports.15

  Whether womenSports was modeled on Ms., Sports Illustrated, the Sportswoman, or something else, Billie Jean King had a clear vision of why her magazine was necessary. As she told the Wall Street Journal at the time of the Riggs match, “No one knows woman athletes as personalities. Women athletes need a vehicle to communicate with others as well as with themselves.” In her debut publisher’s letter in the June 1974 issue, she articulated her vision more fully: “I am proud to be a woman athlete. My hope is that through womenSports, many more women will take pride in their performance in sports and take pride in the enjoyment a well-toned body can bring them. If athletics is beneficial for men, which I believe it is, if sports competition builds character in men through discipline, which I also believe, then athletics must hold the same benefits for women.” Setting her sights high, she aspired to make womenSports “not only a service to other women, but a magazine of which all women can be proud.”16

  Billie Jean King was listed on the masthead as publisher, but other than her monthly publisher’s letter (which copublisher Larry often drafted), the editorial content was under the control of Rosalie Wright.17 That boundary failed, especially at first, to keep womenSports from seeming like all Billie Jean King, all the time. The first issue was especially embarrassing, even to the tennis star herself. King was mentioned forty times in a ninety-six-page magazine and appeared in six of the twenty advertisements, plus graced the cover, which had the consequence of making the magazine seem like a promotional vehicle for the tennis star. A creative—and peeved—reader from Harrison, New Jersey, sent in a collage containing every one of those mentions. Somewhat sheepishly, the editors replied: “WomenSports is not intended to be a showcase for Billie Jean King, but since at this point, there are few equally famous women athletes, Billie Jean is naturally the advertisers’ choice. By exposing the public to other great female athletes, we hope to rectify the situation, resulting in future commercial endorsements by other women sports stars.”18

  In some ways, however, the pendulum swung too far the other direction: the editors adopted an unofficial policy of minimizing coverage of the tennis star, which had the consequence of making it seem like she did nothing in the wider world of sports except write monthly publishers’ letters. The editors finally relented when they realized that “covering women's sports without covering Billie Jean has seemed like trying to cover national politics without mentioning the President.” In May 1977 she was back on the cover with a featured story called “The Bodacious Billie Jean King” about her decision to compete at Wimbledon after prematurely retiring from competition the year before. In this case, it seemed only fair that her magazine would get the scoop.19

  The demographics of womenSports’ readers contained few surprises. Results from a readers’ survey that appeared in the December 1974 issue confirmed that 98 percent of readers were women, three-quarters of whom were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. Fifty-five percent were college graduates; 65 percent lived in their own residence; and 60 percent worked as teachers or other professionals. Confirming a pattern seen at Ms., readers devoured the magazine from cover to cover, typically spending between one and two hours reading its various articles and features. Presumably these well-read copies were then passed along to friends, increasing the readership.20 In October 1974 the editors reported distributing 300,000 copies to newsstands, but this proved a fairly ineffective way of reaching new readers, who consistently reported great difficulty finding the magazine for sale. Competing for shelf space and attention on newsstands against more well-established competitors was just one of the challenges faced by this fledgling enterprise.21

  What was it like to read womenSports in its early days? The magazine offered its subscribers and readers who managed to find it on newsstands a glossy, upbeat selection of articles and features devoted to women in sports that in many ways was not all that different from a traditional women's magazine such as McCall’s or Redbook: “a glossy cover photograph, an ad on the back cover, a rhetorical style that emphasized a personal tone, and a table of contents with titles of self-help articles.” Except that in this case the self-help was about sports. Because the magazine had a three-month lead time, the content emphasized profiles and features rather than coverage of actual sporting events, meaning that womenSports could never compete with a weekly such as Sports Illustrated, which combined its trademark longer profiles with stories about what had happened in the world of sports the week before.22

  Since traditional media outlets such as newspapers and Sports Illustrated rarely gave the topic of women's sports more than a passing mention, sports-minded readers welcomed an entire magazine devoted to this one topic. But it was not simply a women's magazine, mainly because of its clearly articulated political stance on women's sports. For example, the very first issue in June 1974 featured extensive coverage of Title IX. Calling the law “37 words that will change the world,” Ellen Weber noted that “HEW is about to do for women's athletics what the 19th amendment did for women's rights.” In addition to regular features on Title IX, the magazine alerted readers to the need to support funding for the women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA), covered the ongoing struggle between the AIAW and the NCAA over control of women's athletics, and provided trenchant criticism of American amateur sports opportunities as well as specific critiques of the United States Olympic Committee, the main governing board.23 However, with the exception of two features during the bicentennial year of 1976—an insert on the Equal Rights Amendment in concert with other women's magazines in July and a guide to the 1976 election in November—the only “politics” was the kind that had a specific link to sports.24

  In this respect there is a clear difference from the wide range of issues found in Ms., which was first and foremost a feminist magazine. Interestingly, even before womenSports debuted, the coverage devoted to sports in Ms. was already on the upswing. The first Ms. sports article, “See Jane Run,” which chronicled the obstacles facing Olympic runners, ran in January 1973; the first sports cover was July of that year, featuring—no surprise—Billie Jean King. When Ms. covered sports, it tended to focus on questions of equity foremost: access, bias, prize money, and the like. It ran early articles on the sexual harassment of female athletes by male coaches and “how to” articles about challenging your local little league or school department to provide better access to sports resources for girls. It also covered Title IX and the battle between the AIAW and the NCAA. According to one reckoning, the sports coverage in Ms. inc
reased 320 percent between 1972 and 1977, comprising 2.5 percent of total editorial space. The consistent inclusion of such articles confirms that sports, athletics, and Title IX were definitely on the agenda of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, even if never a top priority.25

  While the mere fact of publishing a magazine devoted to women's sports in the 1970s comprised a feminist statement, the format of womenSports and the presentation of its features were more traditional, by design and intent. Again, a comparison to Ms. is instructive. The Ms. cover story on Billie Jean King that ran in 1973, aggressively titled “Billie Jean Evens the Score” and written by sportswriter Bud Collins, very much portrayed her through the lens of feminist politics by focusing on questions of equal rights and prize money and her conflicts with the USLTA as part of the general radicalization of King herself and professional tennis in general. When womenSports featured Billie Jean in its first issue a year later, the article had a far less feminist thrust. Titled “How To Win,” it talked mainly about her training regime and her motivation for winning. “Maybe the reason I love to win is because it hurts so much when I lose. And I can't stand the pain.” How do you get to be a winner? “To be a winner you must have total self-awareness. You’ve got to be aware of how much training your body needs, how much practice you need, and how much time you need to prepare yourself mentally.” The contrasting tone of those two Billie Jean King profiles captures the difference between a feminist magazine and a more traditional magazine devoted to women's sports to a tee.26

  Because it was not providing coverage of actual events, womenSports tended to focus on a variety of sports, using its pages to introduce top athletes and teams to fans and participants alike. Tennis obviously received a lot of coverage because of the link to Billie Jean King, but over the first few years practically all major sports played by women in the United States, including softball, surfing, running, volleyball, soccer, basketball, field hockey, and skiing, received prominent features that focused either on the sport or on a leading athlete associated with it. (Of course the problem for a magazine like this is what to do when it has profiled all the major sports. Editors have to start over again and think of new ways to write the same article for both new and recurring readers.) No doubt influenced by Billie Jean King’s own priorities, the magazine gave special attention to the attempts to set up women's professional leagues.27