Game, Set, Match
Page 14
The women's Sports Foundation is an interesting example of the many ideas that Billie Jean King seemed to spray like tennis balls all over a practice court, some of which were good but many of which were not, and most of which either worked or didn't without her active involvement. In other words, she was great at founding things, not so good at staying around to run them. A similar dynamic doomed her broadcasting career in the 1970s, when she proved far too impatient for television work: “My temperament is better suited to charging the net and ending the point—win or lose—than waiting endlessly for the equipment to be set up and the show to unfold.” She always preferred her role as the sparkplug rather than the careful, behind-the-scenes institution builder. To her credit, her commitment to people and organizations she cared deeply about never flagged.75
Billie Jean King was absolutely right on about the need for a national advocacy group for women in sports in the 1970s, a time when there was still so much to be done in terms of just generating basic participation opportunities, overcoming stereotypes, and building goodwill for what was then the novel concept that women and girls had just as much talent and interest in sports as did men and boys. King was also prescient in envisioning an organization that joined the needs and interests of elite competitive athletes with a parallel purpose of encouraging all women and girls to be physically active, even though the balance between those two constituencies sometimes has been a point of contention. From the start she put her sports celebrity at the foundation’s disposal, excelling at garnering financial backing for its initiatives from major American corporations. Not only was supporting women's sports good for public relations, she argued, it was also good for business. After all, female athletes are consumers too. As Nike soon discovered, there was lots of money to be made by telling women to just do it.76
Although it rarely used the word, from the start the women's Sports Foundation had a feminist agenda, precisely because its mission of encouraging participation for women in sports necessitated promoting equal opportunities for them to do so in the first place. And yet its feminism—deliberately—was muted, much more of the liberal than the radical variety, dedicated to working within the existing system rather than mounting an institutional critique of the sports world from the outside.77 As Donna Lopiano later observed, temperamentally Billie Jean King was very good at playing the middle; her role in presenting the women's Sports Foundation as a reasonable and moderate alternative to more extreme positions was a calculated political strategy. It was also the essence of liberal feminism.78
Over the years the women's Sports Foundation has grown into a multimillion dollar outfit with national outreach on all aspects of women's sports, which of course makes it a major success story. It has proven especially adept at using print and electronic media to get its message across. But there is still that other side: more than thirty-five years after its founding, there remains a real, demonstrable need for a women's Sports Foundation to serve as an advocate for women in sports, especially where Title IX is concerned. Billie Jean King’s hope for the day when such an organization would no longer be necessary is still a ways off in the future79
BILLIE JEAN KING’S final professional undertaking in the 1970s was probably the one closest to her heart: World Team Tennis. Like all her other business and charitable activities, Larry was very much involved from the start, making this a true team effort. Like her other endeavors as well, it was conceived to provide a showcase for the tennis player as her career was winding down. It also promised the potential—never fully realized—of turning team tennis into a profitable and popular undertaking that competed successfully for the consumer sports dollar. “The biggest sports in the world are team sports,” Billie Jean reinforced, “and I want to make tennis huge. We’re a small universe and that bothers me.” Tennis traditionalists doubted the team concept would catch on, but Billie Jean King lectured the nay-sayers: “Most people don't ever think any change in tennis will go, and every change in recent years has gone like crazy. Team tennis will, too.” Finally, Team Tennis was a way of putting her commitment to sports equality for women into a concrete, marketable package.80
Billie Jean and Larry King’s philosophy of World Team Tennis (they added the World because they truly believed this would be a global phenomenon) rested on a desire to make tennis, one of the most individualistic of sports, into a team endeavor, complete with rosters of players and a home base whose citizens could cheer them on just the way they would a local basketball or football franchise. Said George MacCall, the first commissioner: “I think the team concept and the league are Americana. Every major sport is built around these concepts.” Following the major sports model, they hoped these fans would be a raucous, engaged audience, like those who had cheered or booed at the Houston Astrodome when Billie beat Bobby, not the traditional stodgy country club set. “Polite applause at tennis matches is ridiculous,” said the tennis star. “People are going to be allowed to get up and walk around, boo, scream, do whatever they want. I think it will be more exciting for the players, more emotional to have the fans involved.”81
One of the real attractions of the team concept for a feminist such as Billie Jean King was the chance it offered for men and women to compete together on a team and have the outcome equally dependent on the efforts of both sexes. “Whatever I do must reflect my values—like equality. People need to see men and women working together to attain a goal—both in leadership and supportive roles. That principle works well with tennis, where both genders work together toward a common goal.” Larry agreed: “That’s the future, I think. Men and women in professional sports together.” Actually tennis already offered a popular precedent: mixed doubles, which in sportswriter Bud Collins’s words, “stands alone among major sports in offering women an opportunity to play with and against men on an even battlefield and in the line of fire.”82
Team tennis took that concept even further: teams would have equal numbers of men and women on their rosters. The format also promoted equality: play was divided into two halves, each featuring one set of men’s singles, women's singles, and mixed doubles; the winning team was the one whose players collectively won the most games. Other innovations included doing away with traditional scoring (first to score four points wins), allowing substitutions, a heavy reliance on the tie-breaker, and a multicolor synthetic court surface. The season ran from May through July, with a two-week break in the middle so players could compete at Wimbledon.
The financial strategy behind World Team Tennis worked this way: sixteen franchises were sold at $50,000 each, representing fairly large markets such as Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Detroit, San Francisco, and St. Louis. When John Newcombe, then one of the top-ranked men, signed a five-year contract with the Houston EZ Riders in the summer of 1973, the credibility of the league rose. Yet there was a nagging suspicion that not all the franchise owners were very knowledgeable about tennis as the league prepared for its first draft. Noted Bud Collins caustically, “Nobody has gone into business with greater unfamiliarity since Laurel and Hardy joined the Foreign Legion. Anybody who ever held a racquet was drafted. If you weren't, you should quit the game in shame.” From the start the main problem was that attendance never approached the breakeven point to pay the huge salaries needed to lure marquee players to join the effort.83
In 1974, Billie Jean King, still a year away from even her first retirement, was one of the biggest draws. She signed on as the player-coach of the Philadelphia Freedom and was delighted when her good buddy Elton John wrote the song “Philadelphia Freedom” to be used as a team anthem. Ever the optimist, she predicted that women would be coaching in other professional sports such as football, basketball, and baseball within five years. Most of all, she was ecstatic about the new format. “I’ve waited 20 years to see crowds react the way they do at our team tennis matches.” That year the Philadelphia Freedom were the runners-up to Denver in the World Team Tennis league championship.84
But all was not well.
Despite having won the championship, the Denver franchise folded and was picked up by Phoenix. Stories of mishaps, financial and otherwise, in the first season included players not being paid and only 200 hearty souls turning up for some matches. The number of teams dwindled from sixteen to eleven, and only four of the original owners were back. “It was so bad,” said the owner of the New York Sets, “that we couldn't even get people out to see how shoddy the product was.”85
One potential solution was to try to build up the New York franchise on the theory that a strong presence there would garner more media attention and help the league as a whole. In a complicated deal, Philadelphia Freedom owner Dick Butera traded Billie Jean King to the New York Sets, earning a spot as the New York Times “Quotation of the Day” with this remark: “It’s not an easy thing to let Billie Jean go. I feel like King Faisal giving away his oil wells.” Billie Jean King received a reported $600,000 for signing a multiyear contract with the Sets and quickly pronounced herself happy to be a New Yorker, at least for part of the year: “It’s a great place to live if you have the money. I have it and I might as well spend it.” Sounding like a preacher leading a revival, her enthusiasm for the league remained unbounded: “I guarantee you, in five years every player is going to want to be on World Team Tennis first. They don't understand what it means.”86
The 1976 season was somewhat better, but the financial situation of the league overall was still dicey. New players signed on, including Rod Laver, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, and Ilie Nastase, but this just increased the bloated salaries that were sinking the league. For example, the New York Sets payroll totaled almost $400,000: Billie Jean King ($130,000), Virginia Wade ($90,000), Sandy Mayer ($55,000), Fred Stolle ($55,000), Phil Dent ($50,000), with Lindsey Beaven and Linda Siegelman bargains at $8,500 each. Led by King and Virginia Wade, the Sets won the WTT title that year, a special satisfaction to King because it was the only tennis championship that had eluded her. But with fan attendance still hovering in the low four digits, there was no way to turn the franchise into a viable enterprise.87
The whole undertaking was also rife with potential conflicts of interest, many of them revolving around Billie Jean and Larry King. For example, in October 1976 Larry King was named interim president of the New York Sets, where his wife was the star attraction, having just stepped down the week before as president of the league, where his wife was one of the main draws. In 1977 Larry owned interests in the Pennsylvania Keystones and the Golden Gaters in addition to the New York team, and was a major partner in WTT Properties, the league’s main marketing arm. Noted one friend: “It’s not as if Larry is taking the money from both ends and hurting people. It’s just that he’s protecting his interests from both ends.” Larry rationalized these multiple, overlapping responsibilities by saying his commitment to the entire league would help protect the investments of individual backers, of which he, of course, was one of the most prominent. Through the league’s initial ups and downs, he remained totally committed to the concept: “It’s a business. And I know this league is going to make money.”88
In 1977 the league reorganized itself once again, instituting a new draft that aimed to distribute the talent more evenly. World Team Tennis limped along but was basically kaput by the end of the 1978 season, when the renamed New York Apples announced they were folding, and seven of the remaining nine teams followed suit. Larry King captured the logistics of the demise especially well: “The domino theory that failed to materialize in Indochina worked like a charm with World Team Tennis.”89
In retrospect the reasons are obvious—and overwhelming. World Team Tennis never developed an adequate fan base among tennis players willing to turn out to watch the matches. Nor did team tennis manage to attract enough fans from other sports to build up its spectator base, let alone live up to the notion that fans would root for their “home” team against teams from other cities. The absence of male tennis stars such as Jimmy Connors, Arthur Ashe, and Bjorn Borg also hurt the venture. In the end, though, it was a simple fact of economics: the salaries were way too high for the monies coming in, especially since there was no television revenue except for the final league championship. Here those highly individualistic—and well-paid—tennis players bear just as much responsibility for the league’s demise as its flawed business plan or shaky financing.90
By the time the first incarnation of World Team Tennis folded in 1978, Billie Jean King found herself at the inevitable point in an athlete’s career when it becomes clear that while there will be flashes of brilliance and occasional triumphs, she no longer can count on performing at a peak level of performance every day. Luckily she had already been busy laying the groundwork to capitalize on the revolution in women's sports that had coincided with the height of her playing career. WomenSports magazine was ahead of its time—it still is, since there is no mass-market sports magazine geared to women. The women's Sports Foundation continues to grow, broadening its agenda to include a new focus on overcoming physical inactivity and obesity in young girls; Billie Jean King is still very much its most visible symbol. Even Team Tennis, reborn in the 1980s, continues on a fairly solid basis, with Billie Jean serving as its most enthusiastic cheerleader as she continues to wait for the rest of the American sporting public to catch up to her vision of tennis as a team sport.
You need to win two sets out of three to prevail in women's tennis. In terms of Billie Jean King’s main business and charitable undertakings in the 1970s, she won two of those sets—the women's Sports Foundation and team tennis—and put up a good fight for a women's sports magazine. Not a bad outcome for a tennis player, on or off the court.
Billie Jean King’s favorite place on earth is probably Centre Court at Wimbledon. Here she plays in a singles match at Wimbledon in 1962, where as an unseeded, somewhat chunky eighteen-year-old player she knocked off top seed Margaret Smith in the first round. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZ62-120847)
Women of Billie Jean King’s generation more often aspired to marriage than careers, but she wanted both. Her husband, Larry, whom she married in 1965, wholeheartedly supported her dream. Their marriage, which lasted until 1987, spanned the explosion in women's professional tennis, but in 1965 they were just two young kids wondering what the future would hold. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZ62-115796)
Billie Jean King was never afraid to speak truth to power. In 1970 King and eight other players defied the United States Lawn Tennis Association by setting up their own professional tour sponsored by Virginia Slims. Here Nancy Richey, Billie Jean King, and Julie Heldman hold a press conference on October 7, 1970, to announce their decision. Showing the condescension with which the media treated women at the time, the original caption referred to the tennis players as “girls.” (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
In 1971 Billie Jean King became the first female tennis player to earn $100,000 in a year. Hoping to raise the profile of women's tennis, she milked this milestone by donning a crown at a New York event and later received a congratulatory phone call from President Richard Nixon. Note the banner behind her with the first words of the Virginia Slims slogan: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
You can't have a spectacle without the media, and both Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs were more-than-willing participants in the hoopla leading up to the Battle of the Sexes on September 20, 1973. Here they trade barbs at a press conference the day before the match. When the verbal jockeying ended and the tennis began, it was all Billie Jean, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
Billie Jean King’s victory in the Battle of the Sexes confirmed her status as America’s first female sports superstar. A month after the match Garry Trudeau’s popular comic strip Doonesbury featured a series of cartoons inspired by the event. Here a young Joanie Caucus celebrates a feminist breakthrough at the daycare center where she works. Soon after, Joan Caucus applies to law school, joining the legions of
women who seized the opportunities created by second-wave feminism and popular culture moments like the Battle of the Sexes. (DOONESBURY © 1973 G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.)
Dissatisfied with the coverage that women athletes received in mass-circulation magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Billie Jean and Larry King decided to start their own, womenSports, which debuted in June 1974. No surprise about who graced its first cover—Billie Jean—but note the back cover advertisement for Virginia Slims cigarettes, symptomatic of the close (too close, many would say) relationship between Billie Jean King, women's tennis, and the tobacco industry. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
Billie Jean King pioneered the concept of tennis as a team sport, and she has always been World Team Tennis’s most enthusiastic supporter. Typical of the way that business and sport overlapped in the King family, Larry also found opportunities in Team Tennis as a promoter and team owner. Here Billie Jean King publicizes her trade from the Philadelphia Freedom to the New York Sets (soon to be the New York Apples) in 1975. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
The symbol of the first-ever National women's Conference held in Houston in November 1977 that most captured the popular imagination was a 2,600-mile torch relay that began in Seneca Falls, New York. In this widely circulated image, the torch triumphantly arrives in Houston. Decked out in a bright blue Women on the Move t-shirt, Billie Jean King joins the final mile, along with (from left to right) feminists Susan B. Anthony II, Bella Abzug, and (far right) Betty Friedan, as well as runners Sylvia Ortiz, Peggy Kokernot, and Michelle Cearcy. The torch run made the front page of many newspapers, but sports were not a top priority at the conference. (copyright © Diana Mara Henry)