Game, Set, Match
Page 25
Temperamentally and politically this wasn't Billie Jean’s fight in 1981. She had been a pioneer for women's professional tennis and also for feminism. Being a spokesperson for gay rights would have to wait a bit longer. But there still is an undeniable way in which her outing, painful as it was for her and the field of women's sports, also held the seeds of a more enlightened future where the sexuality of any athlete, male or female, was irrelevant to his or her athletic performance. Golfer Betty Hicks captured this well at the time of Marilyn Barnett’s revelations when she said, “Billie Jean King, in full view of millions, divested herself of much of the comfort of her disguises. She is now nearly free, and in attaining that freedom, she may have pointed the way for her sisters.”38
BILLIE JEAN KING was not the only tennis player battling rumors about her sexuality in 1981. That summer Martina Navratilova ended a very public, two-year relationship with bestselling lesbian novelist Rita Mae Brown. King and Navratilova, competitors and sometimes friends but of different generations and temperaments, took very different approaches to their personal lives. Billie Jean King’s grappling with her sexual orientation in many ways belonged to an earlier time when gay people, male and female, were far less visible and much less open about their sexuality. King had been raised in a very homophobic environment and claimed she had never met any lesbians when she was growing up. Her sexuality remained something to be hidden, a secret to be ashamed of. She would have preferred to stay in the closet indefinitely.
Martina Navratilova’s attitude was more like, “Yeah, so what?” As she said forthrightly in her 1985 autobiography, “I never thought there was anything strange about being gay.” Navratilova came out well before the changes in acceptance for gay people in American society that began to happen in the 1990s and beyond; she simply couldn't pretend to be something she wasn't. Even though her candor cost her endorsements and public support that gravitated toward the more traditionally feminine Chris Evert,39 there still was so much more money in professional tennis by the 1980s that she had a financial cushion for her unorthodox sexuality. Billie Jean King had to play in nineteen tournaments in 1971 to make $100,000, and her career prize earnings never reached $2 million; Navratilova’s were easily ten times that. Still, the difference mainly came down to temperament, as Billie Jean later realized: “Martina has a personality that doesn't ever, ever worry about consequences.”40
Martina Navratilova was born in Czechoslovakia in 1956 and showed athletic aptitude from an early age. Gravitating toward the sport of tennis, she climbed the ranks of her country’s tennis structure, while also feeling the pull of playing tennis in a noncommunist setting with more personal and political freedom. She had a regular boyfriend but also experienced crushes on girls. She first came to the United States to play on the tour in 1973 as an immature teenager, where she was captivated by American consumer culture and especially its food. (She later referred to her “see-food” diet—” Any food I could see, I’d eat,” with predictably deleterious effects on her weight and training.) In September 1975, after losing in the semifinal of the U.S. Open to Chris Evert, she made the momentous decision to defect to the United States, even though this meant that she might never see her family in Czechoslovakia again. At a time when Cold War rivalries were still quite intense, her defection was major news. Billie Jean King was the only tennis insider with whom Martina shared her intention in advance.41
Young, talented, but cut off from her family and her country, Navratilova experienced a rollercoaster of success and defeat as she tried to find her emotional equilibrium in the aftermath of her highly publicized defection. In 1976 professional golfer Sandra Haynie took Martina under her wing, providing a home in Dallas and a structured atmosphere to discipline and nurture Navratilova’s raw athletic talent and appetite for life. By nature quite open and candid (she once told Barbara Walters that she could go to bed with either sex, but preferred waking up with women), she felt emboldened by her move to America to embark on her first serious relationship with a woman. “A lot of it has to do with freedom,” she explained in her autobiography apropos of her personal choices. “Once I became a regular on the circuit, I saw a lot of women doing what they wanted to do. That sounds like a political statement when I say it, yet it really wasn't a matter of dogma. I just perceived some women doing what they wanted to do, and felt comfortable in their society.” For Martina as well as Billie Jean King and many others, women's sports offered a route to independence and freedom from traditional gender expectations. Still she realized that it was in her interest to keep her sexual orientation somewhat in the closet in order not to jeopardize her application for citizenship. At this point she was still a fairly low-ranked player on the tour, so she assumed this would not be too difficult. As her tennis improved dramatically, so did her public profile.42
In the summer of 1979, Navratilova entered into a relationship with Rita Mae Brown, the author of the best-selling lesbian classic Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and a flamboyant character with a reputation as “the Warren Beatty of the women's liberation movement.”43 She and Navratilova bought a twenty-room house in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Brown (who was twelve years older than the tennis star) introduced her to a world of culture and literature beyond tennis. Their highly public affair continued through 1981, when Navratilova moved into a new relationship with pro basketball player Nancy Lieberman, who became her trainer and coach. Rita Mae Brown, who had shown little interest in sports, got her revenge later that year by publishing a thinly disguised roman àa clef called Sudden Death that featured an unflattering portrait of a lesbian defector tennis star with more than a passing resemblance to her former lover.44
On July 20, 1981, Navratilova’s long-anticipated citizenship became final, and she was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Several months earlier the tennis player had given a wide-ranging interview to Steve Goldstein of the New York Daily News where she discussed her messy breakup with Brown and her fears that her sexuality would be used against her and the women's professional tour. (Billie Jean King always denied a persistent rumor that she once candidly told an interviewer in the early 1970s that she was bisexual only to have the article killed when Virginia Slims threatened to withdraw its support of the tour if it was published.)45 Instantly regretting her candor, Navratilova implored Goldstein not to use the material, largely because it might affect her chances for citizenship. He reluctantly agreed, but once her status was finalized, he felt entitled to run the story. Once again she strongly objected, thinking the topic was still too hot after the King-Barnett explosion that spring. But he went ahead with a July 30, 1981, story under the headline “Martina Fears Avon’s Call if She Talks.” In it she was quoted as saying, “If I come out and start talking, women's tennis is going to be hurt. I have heard if I come out—if one more top player talks about this—then Avon will pull out as a sponsor.” Kathrine Switzer, who had parlayed her marathoning into a position promoting women's sports at Avon, saw little consumer outrage at the Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova-Rita Mae Brown revelations. Avon received only nineteen negative letters, she announced, “less than when we change a lipstick shade.” Nevertheless, the next year Avon dropped out as a sponsor of the women's tour.46
The summer of 1981 proved an inauspicious time for Martina to talk candidly about this issue. Nancy Lieberman was not willing to be publicly identified as gay, so Navratilova chose the label “bisexual” to describe herself, and averred that Lieberman was straight. (After her relationship with Navratilova ended, Lieberman temporarily reclaimed her heterosexual credentials through marriage.) Nancy Lieberman remained part of Team Navratilova until 1984, when Navratilova embarked on another quite-public relationship with Judy Nelson, a Texas divorcee with two sons.47
In many ways this notoriety surrounding the private lives of female tennis players was a byproduct of the conscious decision of the women's Tennis Association and its sponsors to market the women's professional tour as personality-driven entertainment. By focusi
ng on its leading players as celebrities and public figures whose lives were of interest to the general public, tennis became, in Peter Bodo’s words, “as much about the people who play the game as it is about the game itself.” Knowing that women's professional sports still had a long way to go to gain acceptance with fans, the tour wanted its image to be one of heterosexual glamour, not lesbianism. Having corporate sponsors such as Avon and Virginia Slims that geared their consumer products toward women reinforced this focus.48
Thank goodness for Chris Evert, America’s sweetheart and the most popular player for most of the 1970s and 1980s. “I was lucky in that I was the first really feminine, big-name player of the Open era, at least in America, and I carried that to the hilt,” she recalled. “I made sure my earrings and makeup were always perfect.” Tour player Wendy Overton agreed with Evert’s approach: “I think it’s important as an athlete to maintain an air of femininity. We should look nice out there. We’re entertainers, people are watching our actions. You just don't show up in a pair of dirty old shorts and T-shirt anymore.” Billie Jean King later made reference to “the feminization of women's tennis” in the 1980s, a development that she viewed as a positive and necessary step for the continued growth of the women's professional tour. The attempt by women's tennis to present a salable, acceptable feminine image that did not raise red flags about musculature or sexual deviance was not dissimilar to the charm school required of the All American Girls Baseball League in the 1940s or the focus of the women's National Basketball Association in the 1990s on family fun and personal fulfillment. In each case promoters played up the trappings of heteronor-mativity to counter the negative stigma associated with women's sports, and the women athletes played along.49
Lesbianism wasn't the only challenge that the image-conscious WTA faced in its early years. In 1976 transsexual player Renee Richards petitioned to play on the women's tour, throwing the WTA into an uproar. WTA executive Jerry Diamond later judged Richards’s challenge more threatening than the revelations about Billie Jean King’s lesbian affair: “I consider that, a transsexual playing women's tennis, much more daring, as far as the public is concerned, than [someone] admitting to a homosexual relationship seven or eight years ago. We survived that, and we'll survive this.” The main issue was whether Richards would have an unfair advantage since she had earlier competed as a man. Both Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova supported her cause and most of the players eventually came around too, but this was not the WTA'S finest hour.50
Richard Raskind, captain of the 1954 Yale tennis team and a nationally ranked player, was a prominent ophthalmologist, married and the father of a son, who had long harbored feelings that he was really a female trapped in a male body. In the 1960s he began hormone treatments (his friends feared he had cancer as he lost facial hair and body mass) and eventually underwent surgery to bring his body into anatomical conformity with his feelings as a woman. Now known as Renee Richards, she moved to California to start a new life. Hankering to see how she would do on the burgeoning women's tennis tour, she entered a small tournament in La Jolla, California. It is not clear how she hoped to keep her new identity a secret, because her six-foot-two height and distinctive serve caused several people in the small world of tennis, including Bobby Riggs, to guess her secret. When she won the tournament, a local reporter claimed that a “man” had won a woman's tournament, and the controversy entered the public domain.51
Having lost her anonymity, Renee Richards now claimed that she wanted to be able to enter major women's tournaments such as the U.S. Open. “I said to myself, o.k., now, damn it, they’re putting my private life out in the street. I’m going to pursue every right I possess to prove I’m a woman and a tennis player.” The Women's Tennis Association and many women players were not eager to welcome her into their ranks, fearing that her former experience as a player on the male tour and the supposed advantage she held physically would give her an unfair edge. As Rosie Casals put it em-pathically, “I’m 100 percent behind Renee in her fight for civil rights. But when it comes to sports, she's not physically a woman. And there's always the chance that one day some 20-year-old male tennis champ will go out and get his plumbing changed and ask for the same right to play. We have to draw the line somewhere. And we decided to draw it here.” When Richards entered a warm-up tournament in South Orange, New Jersey, in August 1976 (the tournament director who accepted her entry had played against her as Richard Raskind), most of the top players boycotted the event. Denied entry to the U.S. Open in 1976, she continued to play on satellite tournaments over the next year.52
Despite her own struggles with her sexuality and a reputation as an outspoken advocate of human rights and social change, Billie Jean King took a while to take a stand on Renee Richards. “I haven't made up my mind,” she said in August 1976. “She may have undergone an operation to become a female but you must remember that she still has male hormones. More than that, she has played men's tennis for 30 years. That is a tremendous advantage. It is an advantage that should be weighed before she is permitted to compete with women.”53
By the following April, by which time Richards had played in seven tournaments and won $10,000 in prize money, King had reconsidered, and she now welcomed Richards into the women's tour, asking her to be her doubles partner in several tournaments while she worked her way back from knee surgery. “Look, Gladys,” King told tournament director Gladys Heldman. “If the doctors say she's a woman, that's good enough for me. No, I'll go even further. If Renee thinks she's a woman in her heart and mind, then she is a woman.”54 Martina Navratilova took a similar stand, although hers was laced with pragmatism as much as principle: “If the real experts said she was a woman, I figured, let her play. Besides, I took one look at her warming up one day and knew she wasn't going to dominate women's tennis—and she certainly wasn't going to dominate me.” In her estimation, “Renee Richards looked like, and played like, a pretty good forty-two-year-old male player.”55
When the United States Tennis Association demanded that Richards pass a chromosome test similar to the sex testing used in the Olympics, she sued. In the end it took an injunction from a New York State court for Richards to enter the women's draw at the 1977 U.S. Open. Richards drew third-ranked Virginia Wade in the first round and promptly lost. The main factor working against Richards was her age, plus the fact that she did not have the fitness or tournament readiness to compete on the professional tour. She continued to play occasional tournaments, winning the women's over-thirty-five title at the U.S. Open against Nancy Richey in 1979.56 She popped up prominently in the tennis world again when she served as Martina Navratilova's coach from 1981 to 1983, until personality clashes with Nancy Lieberman forced her out. The parting with Navratilova was amicable, however, and as a final gesture of support, Martina loaned Richards money to reestablish her ophthalmology practice in New York.57
Despite the WTA'S fears, the women's tour has not been swamped by male-to-female transsexuals in the years since, and Renee Richards became something of a historical footnote, despite what she saw as her pathbreaking fight for transsexual rights.58 Regarding lesbianism, the mantra “play it, don't say it” still primarily holds sway in women's sports. A few female athletes have disclosed their sexual preference while still playing, especially in individual sports such as tennis and golf, joined by an occasional team player such as WNBA mstar Sheryl Swoopes, but the numbers are still minis-cule. More than twenty-five years after Martina Navratilova first came out, she is still the athlete most widely known for the public embrace of her sexuality, not that she has that much company. In her inimitable phrasing, “I don't see any line forming behind me.”59
The subject of homosexuality remains even more taboo for male athletes, for whom hypermasculinity and aggressive heterosexuality are the accepted—and enforced—norm. As a result, the cases of out athletes have been few and far between. Tennis legend Bill Tilden was arrested on a morals charge in the 1940s after his playing days were ove
r, but he never publicly discussed his homosexuality. The first professional athlete to come out was football player Dave Kopay in 1975, but only after he retired. The few male athletes since who have come out tend to be from individual rather than team sports (diver Greg Louganis, figure skater Rudy Galindo) or retired (baseball players Glenn Burke and Billy Bean). In 1999 Billie Jean King predicted that it would take a male superstar, not a woman, “the taller the pedestal, the better,” “a gay Michael Jordan,” to break open the resistance to homosexuality in sports.60 Needless to say, this has not yet happened.
IN THE AFTERMATH OF Marilyn Barnett's revelations, Billie Jean King faced an uncertain future, financial and otherwise. There was literally no precedent or script for a female athlete to continue a career as a sports celebrity after being so cruelly and publicly outed. Because King's playing career was winding down when the allegations surfaced (she was thirty-seven), she was especially concerned about how the scandal would affect her future.
In fact, the publicity had an immediate impact on her financial situation, starting with the $100,000 in legal bills she ran up challenging Barnett's claims. She and Larry later claimed that they lost out on $1.5 million in endorsements, including the cancellation of a $500,000 contract with Mur-jani jeans and another $300,000 deal with Illingworth-Morris to bring out a Wimbledon-themed line of clothing. Income from television commercials, corporate appearances, and coaching dried up, and the timing of the revelations also threatened Larry and Billie Jean's efforts to get World Team Tennis off the ground again. With much of the corporate world showing cold feet when it came to associating itself with a lesbian athlete, it was clear that she would need to keep playing in tournaments—not for the love of the game as before, but in order to pay the bills and rack up some financial equity for the future.61