Game, Set, Match
Page 26
What would it be like to set foot on a tennis court again—an extremely public and exposed act—after the bombshell that May? The first test was a previously scheduled doubles match in Tokyo with fifteen-year-old Andrea Jaeger. King had immediately contacted Jaeger's parents and offered to withdraw but they and their daughter would have none of it, which meant an enormous amount to the tennis star. So did the warm rounds of applause that she received when she stepped on court in Tokyo and in tournaments to come. Unlike the chilly corporate reception, King found that as far as fans and players were concerned, she could go home again.62
In the end Billie Jean King played actively until a month before her fortieth birthday but without the consistency and focus that had once defined her game. For example, in February 1982, just two months after the first trial, she defaulted a first-round match in Detroit to Ann Kiyomura because she literally could not force herself to go through the motions. She began to get her old form back that June at Wimbledon, no doubt spurred on by the pride of playing her hundredth singles match there. She won that match and also beat Tracy Austin, the teenage phenomenon who had won the U.S. Open in 1979 at age sixteen, before losing to Chris Evert in three sets in the semifinals. Then in August she lost in the first round of the U.S. Open to unknown Susan Mascarin.63 She had similar ups and downs in 1983, reaching the semifinals of Wimbledon again at age thirty-nine but losing to Andrea Jaeger, who was half her age, in less than an hour 6-1, 6-1. King was so used to owning Centre Court that she knew this shellacking was a sign, but it was still so hard to let go: “It's like asking Nureyev to stop dancing and Sinatra to stop singing,” she said, before accepting the inevitable. This time her retirement stuck.64
No longer being an active player on the tour freed up time for advocacy in other areas. At the top of her postretirement list was participating in “The New Agenda: A Blueprint for the Future of women's Sports,” a conference sponsored by the women's Sports Foundation and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) in November 1983. Two years in the planning, the conference “developed in recognition of the need to identify a cohesive plan for the future of women's sports at what appeared to be the close of one phase of the women's sports movement and the beginning of another.” Worried about the Reagan administration's commitment to scaling back the role of the federal government, as well as an impending Supreme Court case (Grove City v. Bell) that had the potential to severely restrict Title IX, women's sports leaders realized the need for collective action to prevent backsliding. “Unless we continue to fight,” said Donna de Varona, president of the women's Sports Foundation, “we will lose those opportunities.”65
The women's Sports Foundation chose Washington, D.C., as the site for the three-day conference because they wanted to demonstrate the breadth and political clout of those who cared about women's sports. To build media interest and represent a range of viewpoints invited speakers included Senators Bill Bradley and Ted Stevens, USOC president William Simon, and Vice President George Bush, as well as Donna Shalala, Diana Nyad, Wilma Scott Heide, and Sally Ride, a crack tennis player long before she won fame as America's first woman in space. As keynote speaker, Billie Jean King exhorted the more than 600 delegates and panelists to spend the next three days “trying to find solutions for the next 10 years.” She then delivered a special challenge: “I look forward to seeing in my lifetime, pigtails in the World Series worn by a woman. This is my challenge to The New Agenda. You can make it happen.”66
An undercurrent of homophobia hung over the conference, spurred in part by the general defensiveness about the role of lesbians in sports as well as the specific fallout from Billie Jean King's recent outing and subsequent trial. Leaders of the women's sports movement worried that foregrounding the issue of lesbians in sport too prominently would cause the loss of corporate support and public goodwill that the conference was specifically designed to tap. An early brochure promoting the conference had, without the approval of organizers, included lesbianism as one of the topics to be addressed. The skittish conference executive board feared that the topic would cause corporate sponsors to withdraw,67 and references to lesbianism were removed from all subsequent publicity. In the end the issue of lesbianism in sports figured only tangentially in the long list of final resolutions. Judge for yourself: a cop-out avoiding the issue, or a politically savvy way to keep the topic on the agenda without offending corporate sponsors or inviting media attacks? In a nutshell, that is the dilemma of a liberal feminist approach to social change.68
By the time of the New Agenda conference, Billie Jean King was settling into a postretirement routine that, while not as lucrative as it might have been before Marilyn Barnett's revelations, nevertheless offered the aging tennis star ample compensation, financial and otherwise. Unlike most players of her era, she had long been involved in the business side of sport, and now that became her main focus, even though she noted that her hard-won credibility in the corporate world came “by the seat of my pants.” In 1981 she and Larry had restarted a pared-down version of World Team Tennis; in addition to serving as its biggest fan, Billie Jean became commissioner of the league in 1985 when Domino's Pizza became its major sponsor. King also did promotional work for the Virginia Slims tour and played on its Legends circuit. She did television commentary for NBC and HBO and kept up an extensive speaking schedule. One newspaper article in 1988 compared her frenzied lifestyle to a presidential campaign, which is of course precisely what she wanted. No downtime for her: she always had to be busy, surrounded by admirers, on the go and in the public eye.69
Tennis was still the main love of her life, but the sport was changing in the 1980s as a new generation—and tons more money—flooded into it. Even back in the 1960s King had been known as “The Old Lady” on the tour, but now compared to teenaged prodigies such as Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger, the label really was true. The rivalry between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova dominated the 1980s, with Martina holding the edge, but even these two established stars were being pushed by younger players such as Monica Seles and Steffi Graf as the decade ended. Billie Jean King offered an interesting explanation for why the female tennis stars kept coming: “I have often said that women's sports will have arrived only when women's team sports are accepted, but until then women's tennis will have a much larger pool of talent to draw on than will men's.”70
Of course this passing of the torch is inevitable, but older players felt that the newcomers were much more out just for themselves, whereas in their days they had had more fun and felt more part of a community. Mary Carillo called the younger players “coddled and cocooned”: “They don't understand what players before them did to make conditions so good for them today. They think all those Jacuzzis and cable TV sets always were in the locker rooms and that the money always was good. They don't understand that they have responsibilities to the sport, to the public, to the media. They just don't get it.” Rosie Casals seconded this view in 1983: “The unfortunate thing is that the younger players have difficulty relating to what we went through. We were staking new territory.” Two years later Casals was even more caustic: “There is no sense of history and no respect for the older players. They take the money for granted. Everyone is greedy and they don't want to give back anything to the game.”71
To some extent this was sour grapes on the part of an older generation (a similar generation gap affects feminism), but it was also a comment on how the world of professional tennis had grown so quickly that it was almost unrecognizable to its older players. As Billie Jean King said in 1988, “I think it's difficult because the young ones now make so much money and they’re so insulated. We didn't have much money, we had to depend on each other. That was the good side. The downside was that we didn't have the money and opportunities they have now.” Reflecting on this gap, King noted that all the players of her generation were still working for a living before adding this afterthought: “And the generation before me looks at my generation like we’ve got it made, because we m
ade more money than they did.”72
The bottom line is that in terms of professional opportunities for women, no sport has even come close to producing the number of female stars as tennis, and Billie Jean King deserves a lot of credit for the sport's phenomenal growth. As a reporter observed in 1999, the trailblazing tennis star “has made more money than anyone else. Sadly, for Billie Jean, of course, the money was not made by her personally, but rather by the generations of women tennis players who emerged after she had spent a decade roughing up the authorities in the battle for equality of status and reward.” Rather than complaining, King applauded the money that poured into tennis. In 1990 when she was working with teenage phenomenon Jennifer Capriati, a millionaire at the age of thirteen, she reiterated her view that money talks. “I’m glad to see so much money in tennis. Just because we stopped at a certain point doesn't mean they should. The only thing I regret is not making more money at the end of my career.”73
Billie Jean King was never a very introspective person, but even she could not ignore the passage of time. “I hit my 30th birthday, no problem—same with 40. But 50—whoo, that's very big. For the first time, I’m having a midlife—well, maybe mid-life-plus—crisis. I’ve made myself stop and realize that I’m working too hard, that I’ve got to slow down. I’m trying to balance my days better. That's become a big word to me now—balance. I’ve learned to say no sometimes.” Health problems, including arrhythmia, as well as the loss of her close friend Arthur Ashe to AIDS in 1993, also encouraged her to take stock.74
What she hadn't learned to say publicly yet was that she was not ashamed of being a lesbian. The tennis star later told a reporter for a gay newspaper that she felt she had been out since 1981, but that was news to the reporter—and most of the world. After the Marilyn Barnett explosion, King slipped most of the way back in the closet for the next fifteen years. When she and Larry finally divorced in 1987, it received no media attention. She and Ilana Kloss were partners on and off the court, but when it came to public presentations, they were all business. Discreet too—requesting double beds when they travelled together.75
Billie Jean King had always struggled with her weight, and in her forties it ballooned to close to two hundred pounds. This weight gain wasn't simply because she had retired from professional tennis, although she did find it harder to be motivated to eat wisely and stay in shape when she was no longer competing. Like many other women, she was using—or abusing—food as a way of dealing with emotional distress, specifically “my struggle to get my family to accept my sexuality.” When she realized that only professional help would allow her to overcome her pattern of binge eating, she entered the Renfrew Center for eating disorders for six weeks of intensive therapy. (One wonders what the teenaged anorexics who were the clinic's principal clientele thought of the fifty-one-year-old tennis star joining the therapy sessions.) She started exercising and made physical activity a key part of her life once again. She also forced herself to be more open about her life choices. As she realized later, “Every time I’ve gotten in trouble—when you have trouble in your life—it's been for not accepting responsibility. Every time I’ve accepted responsibility for my life—for my finances, for my relationships—usually things start to work out for the better.” Soon after she and her parents finally reconciled.76
“I always think if I hadn't been so visible maybe I would have worked through this part of my life faster,” Billie Jean King told an interviewer in 1998. “But maybe I wouldn't have. Maybe I would have been more in the closet. It's just so scary. I don't think people have any idea.”77 Not that it has ever been easy being gay in America, but in many ways King, born in 1943, grew up during the worst possible time—the 1950s and early 1960s—to be confronting what her society identified as an aberrant and even dangerous form of sexual behavior. At the height of the Cold War, with conformity and heterosexual gender definitions the enforced norm, gays who were open about their sexuality risked rejection by friends and family, the loss of employment, even public disgrace. If homosexuals were mentioned at all in popular culture, they were portrayed as a threat or menace to the American way of life—” something awful, like a horribly contagious disease or some unimaginable perversion,” as Steven Seidman put it in his study of recent gay and lesbian life. As a result, homosexuality remained secretive, closeted, out of the public eye, engendering feelings of shame and inferiority.78
This was the homophobic climate that Billie Jean King grew up in, and those dark years no doubt abetted her desire to keep whatever transgressive sexual feelings she had safely and securely hidden in the closet. While she always joked that she was about twenty years ahead of her time, unfortunately in this case her timing was off by several decades. If she had been born in 1983 or even 1963 rather than 1943, her coming-out process would have occurred in a much different and more supportive cultural climate.
Although gay activism had its roots in the postwar period, the appearance of the gay liberation movement is commonly dated to the Stonewall riots in 1969, when gay men at a bar in Greenwich Village fought back against police harassment. Throughout the 1970s gay leaders drew parallels with the earlier civil rights movement and tried to build public support for extending the rights of full citizenship to all Americans. They also urged gay men and lesbians to shed their old defensiveness or reticence about sexual life choices by publicly affirming their sexual orientation, which in turn fostered a sense of community. So too did public events, such as the early Gay Pride parades and mass public demonstrations such as the 1979 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which brought 100,000 marchers, gay and straight, to the nation's capital. Despite this increasing visibility, the gay rights movement was far from a national phenomenon yet. Journalist Amy Hoffman, who worked at the pioneering Gay Community News in Boston in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recalled “how completely off the map” gay people were at the time to mainstream society: “We simply did not exist, especially as far as the media were concerned.”79
While gay men and lesbians share much common history, political mobilization and social life often developed separately along gender lines. Just as pioneering gay men in the 1940s and 1950s organized prohomosexual groups such as the Mattachine Society and ONE, lesbians in San Francisco came together in 1955 to found the Daughters of Bilitis. Congregating in urban areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, lesbians began to reach out to each other in the 1950s and 1960s.80 Soon after, some second-wave feminists embraced lesbian identities as part of a broader political stance against patriarchy. As Radicalesbians wrote in their pathbreaking 1970 position paper “The Woman-Identified Woman,” “Lesbian is the word, the label, the condition that holds women in line. When a woman hears this word tossed her way, she knows she is stepping out of line.… Lesbian is a label invented by the Man to throw at any woman who dares to be his equal.”81
Older lesbians, the product of the closeted and more discreet 1950s and 1960s, were often perplexed by lesbian feminists’ aggressive political and theoretical agendas. Nor was the mainstream women's movement necessarily welcoming of lesbian rights as part of its feminist agenda. Betty Friedan was especially hostile to the so-called “lavender menace.”82 While Billie Jean King never used such a loaded term, her relationship with the emerging gay liberation movement in the early 1970s was just as fraught. By now a sports celebrity and advocate on behalf of women's professional tennis, she made no public connection between her sexual relationships with women and the nascent gay liberation movement.83
One backdrop for the increasing visibility of gays in modern American life was the growing awareness of the enormity of the AIDS crisis. The first story about the disease appeared in the New York Native on May 18, 1981, just two weeks after Billie Jean King's press conference acknowledging her affair with Marilyn Barnett. The Gay Men's Health Crisis was founded that same year. But very little publicity or attention occurred until the summer of 1985 when Rock Hudson disclosed that he had AIDS; he died three
months later. As legions of gay men succumbed to the disease, the crisis politicized many gay activists, especially younger militants in groups such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Starting in 1987 ACT UP activists shed the decorum of past generations to stage attention-getting demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to remind the world that when it came to AIDS “Silence = Death.” Coming out became practically a moral imperative in such a crisis situation. As a consequence, the controversial practice of outing public figures began to happen more frequently.84
The momentum continued to build in the 1990s, especially after mid-decade, as the walls between the formerly separate gay and straight worlds began to dissolve. Partly this was because of the enormity of the AIDS crisis, but it also reflected a growing acceptance and awareness of the roles that gay people played in all aspects of American life, sports included. For example, the Clinton administration's “don't ask, don't tell” policy in 1993 confirmed that gays were playing important roles in the military. Performers such as the Indigo Girls, Billie Jean's dear friend Elton John, and—in 1997—the biggest of all, Ellen DeGeneres, came out.85 By the late 1990s surveys found that three-quarters of all Americans knew a gay man or lesbian personally. In turn, such familiarity fostered dramatically rising public support for gay rights in mainstream America as part of a broader shift toward a more multicultural United States where social diversity, not conformity, was valued.86