Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  This new visibility and grudging respect—plus, she would add, years of therapy—finally helped Billie Jean King be more open and accepting about her personal choices. “It's much better now,” she said at a press conference in 1997. “In fact, if you want to talk about your sexual orientation, the acceptance level is way up. The whole environment has changed.” And talking about it she finally was, although Ilana Kloss still held back. For example, a 1998 interview by Michele Kort for the gay publication the Advocate was titled, “Finally, after 17 years of dodging the subject, Billie Jean King Comes All the Way Out.” King admitted to Kort that she was currently in a relationship but would not give her partner's name: “Someone who's open privately and with probably three quarters of the people around, but not totally. Do I like it? No. Do I respect it? Absolutely. I’ve been there, done that.” Soon King was publicly lending her celebrity to a variety of gay causes—such as the Gay Games, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation [GLAAD], the Elton John AIDS Foundation, and programs to help gay and lesbian youth—with the same fervor and enthusiasm that she had earlier brought to her advocacy of women's tennis and women's rights.87

  “My sexuality was probably the most difficult struggle I’ve had in my whole life,” the tennis star said in a 1999 interview, “and the one thing it taught me was that until you find your own truth, you really cannot be free.” That truth was on display for all to see in a candid documentary, Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer, that aired on HBO in 2006. Backed up by Ilana Kloss's willingness to finally go public about her role in the tennis star's life, King, in her own words, “pretty much spilled my guts” on camera, honestly if painfully discussing her lifelong struggle to accept her lesbianism and make peace with her parents about her sexual choices. While she had talked to journalists about her sexuality in the past, her revelations seemed even more personal and wrenching on screen. At times it felt like sitting in on someone else's therapy session.88

  The documentary images of the past were stirring—winning the Wimbledon doubles with Karen Hantze in 1961; talking awkwardly with Richard Nixon in 1971 after she made $100,000; throwing her racquet in elation after beating Bobby Riggs in 1973; savoring her Wimbledon singles crown in 1975. In the end, though, perhaps the most moving scenes were the most ordinary—Billie Jean and Ilana laughing and talking with the elderly Bill and Betty Moffitt over a meal or in the aisle of a supermarket. The ease of seeing them all together after so many years of misunderstanding and pain said it all. Billie Jean King was finally a free woman.

  Epilogue The Incomplete Revolution

  It's going to take me years to even realize my name's on this. I would never in a trillion years think that this would have happened to a woman—only to a man.

  —BILLIE JEAN KING

  On August 28, 2006, the first night of the two-week-long extravaganza that is the U.S. Open, the United States Tennis Association formally renamed its flagship tennis center in Flushing Meadows the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. “Mi casa es su casa,” King told a capacity crowd of 21,000. “My house is your house. This house is our house.” Thrilled to be the center of adoring attention from the assembled tennis fans, King was serenaded in song by Diana Ross and praised in tributes from John McEnroe, Chris Evert, Venus Williams, and Jimmy Connors. Calling her “the single most important person in the history of women's sports,” McEnroe graciously showed the distance he had come since the Battle of the Sexes that had propelled King into the national limelight in 1973: “I was a 14-year-old male chauvinist pig when they played, hoping Riggs would kick Billie Jean King's ass. But now, as the father of four girls, I want to say for the record that I’m very happy Billie Jean won.” When King was later asked what Bobby Riggs would have thought about the occasion if he were still alive, she offered this answer: “Bobby is going to be saying he is responsible, which is fine. He did have a big influence on my life.” For once, King sold herself short. She earned this one on her own.1

  While public places are occasionally named for women, an honor of this magnitude, especially a sporting one, was unprecedented. When the USTA named its new stadium in honor of Arthur Ashe in 1997, there had been talk about naming a grandstand court for King, but that would have just replicated the old pattern: male star gets the main stadium, female star gets the smaller venue. Nine years later the governing board of the USTA vaulted beyond political correctness by deciding that the most appropriate recognition of King's influence would be to name the entire complex after her. When told the news, Ashe's widow, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, crowed: “Any time a woman one-ups a man, I’m all for it. That's my chauvinistic side talking. I couldn't be more thrilled.”2

  Let us pause here to realize what a gutsy and honorable decision this was. Perhaps the most dominant trend in sports in the second half of the twentieth century was the increasing commercialization and commodification of all aspects of the game. At a time when the naming rights to stadiums and other sports arenas regularly went on the block to the highest corporate bidder (“the Beerguzzle or Fig Newton Center” in Bud Collins's trenchant dig), the USTA walked away from the millions of dollars that it could have reaped if it had renamed the tennis center for a corporate sponsor. “Think about it,” King quipped in wonder. “I didn't pay $10 trillion for this,” earning herself a spot as the New York Times quotation of the day.3

  On the most elementary level, the decision to rename the USTA complex in Billie Jean King's honor was tennis's way of saying “thank you” to the star for her enormous contributions to the development of the sport. As far back as the 1960s, she realized that all was not well in the insular world of amateur tennis. She had a vision of a game which, once freed from its country club image, could truly transform itself into a sport of the people. It is too simplistic to say that she caused the tennis boom of the 1970s, but it is no coincidence that the high point of tennis's popularity in the United States overlapped with the height of her career. King served as ambassador for the sport, introducing tennis to new audiences throughout the country and encouraging millions to take up the sport and follow it actively. The Battle of the Sexes played no small role in tennis's growing popularity.

  Billie Jean King also played a key role in the professionalization of tennis, and by extension the explosion of money and corporate support that has so reshaped (not always for the better) the world of sports since the 1970s. The seeds for today's multimillionaire sports stars, their coffers enriched not just by burgeoning prize money but also by celebrity endorsements and other corporate tie-ins, lie very much in her era. Venus Williams recognized the debt. When she won Wimbledon in 2007, the first time in the tournament's history that men and women received equal prize money, she paid special tribute to King, who beamed proudly from the Royal Box. “No one loves tennis more than Billie Jean King,” she said with feeling. “I love you. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for you.”4

  Despite all this favorable publicity, as the twenty-first century unfolded Billie Jean King was in danger of becoming yet another aging sports superstar elbowing for space in our collective memory. “The Baby Boomers know me, and maybe those a little older than that,” she said before the USTA naming ceremony. “Now, maybe the younger ones will know.” The tennis star was on to something. Americans of a certain age (those folks she predicted would be talking at her funeral about where they were the night she beat Bobby Riggs) could easily recall her as a gutsy tennis competitor, tenacious crusader for women's rights, and staple in popular culture from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. Younger generations, on the other hand, knew her only vaguely, if at all, as an HBO television commentator at Wimbledon or perhaps from Holly Hunter and Ron Silver's made-for-television portrayals in When Billie Beat Bobby (2001). As Jon Carroll noted in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1998, “her public persona is in some strange middle period, as people slowly forget how good a tennis player she was, and how dedicated a propagandist, and how smart about so many things.”5

  It is time to res
cue Billie Jean King from this historical limbo. In the 1960s and 1970s her activism helped to expand opportunities and options for women to participate in sports, in tennis and across the board. She seized the opportunities created by Title IX and the explosion of women's sports to emerge as a true agent for change where athletics were concerned. In turn, by showing what women were capable of when given a sporting chance, she helped chip away at the old assumptions and barriers that had limited women's full participation in all aspects of American life. Few public figures, let alone athletes, can point to such a deep and far-reaching legacy. And yet like most legacies, hers contains an implicit challenge to do more. Seen in this light, Billie Jean King's unfinished agenda stands as evidence of the incomplete revolution that is women's sports, and by extension women's roles in society—of how far we still have to go.6

  Even though her outsize achievements distanced her from the lives of most American women, Billie Jean King's life choices and options were very much part of the story of twentieth-century women's history. Born in 1943, a time when traditional gender expectations still held sway but cracks were beginning to appear, Billie Jean repeatedly showed the kind of restless, searching quality that was typical of many women of her generation.7 She was ambitious and wanted to do something with her life beyond just marriage and children, but what? Like so many other women coming of age in the 1960s, she aspired toward something that didn't quite exist yet—the chance for fulfilling work and career. She knew from the start that she was not a prime candidate for a traditional marriage, and luckily she found a husband who was liberated enough to envision marriage on their own terms. She questioned heterosexual norms and experimented with relationships with women. She also faced the kind of sexist putdowns that were an accepted part of the landscape then: the assumption that her tennis career was just temporary until she returned home to raise a family, the inability to get a credit card in her own name, the sexist belief that nobody would pay to watch women play tennis. In her heart she knew all these things were wrong, but she lacked the intellectual or political framework to understand or challenge them. Instead she just gutted her way through these contradictions on her own.

  Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s the forceful ideas of modern feminism entered the American mainstream and began to change women's lives in revolutionary ways. Billie Jean King was in the vanguard, but she also profited from this new climate for women in fundamental ways: it allowed her to build a career as a professional tennis player and to lay the foundations for a kind of public sports celebrity that had been previously unavailable to women. Out of necessity as well as inclination, her whole career was linked with advocacy on women's issues; she grasped something that second-wave feminism often missed—that sports are politics and thus an integral part of the struggle for women's liberation. Even though the moment in the 1970s when feminism commanded center stage quickly passed, it left in place a radically different American society, one where an ambitious and talented superstar such as Billie Jean King could create a successful career by devoting herself to the causes that she cared most about: tennis, women, women's sports, and the connections between them.

  No matter how charismatic or driven she was, however, Billie Jean King did not single-handedly cause the women's sports revolution. Things were already beginning to change in the insular world of women's sports in the 1950s and 1960s, and the pace of change exploded exponentially in the 1970s. Following an ERA of dissent and political protest when civil rights dominated national discourse, it was just a matter of time before activists took notice of the terribly unequal resources offered to girls who wanted to play sports. Here the revival of second-wave feminism assumes a central causative role by providing a historical moment when women's issues were suddenly and forcefully thrust on the national agenda. Even though sports were never a top item on the agenda of second-wave feminism, the general questioning of women's traditional roles, responsibilities, and expectations provided an opening to look at sports with new eyes and fresh perspectives.

  The other major player spurring the women's sports revolution was Title IX. The passage of the Education Amendments Act in 1972 put the force and legitimacy of the federal government behind the demands for women's sports sweeping the country. The controversy over the law and its implementation publicized what second-class citizens women and girls were in the modern world of sports and gave parents and sympathetic school administrators an important tool for education and change. And Title IX caused results, with dramatic jumps in girls’ participation occurring in the 1970s and steady if slower growth ever since. Despite political attacks and attempts to cut back its scope, Title IX has served as a force for gender equity in sports and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

  The combination of Billie Jean King's advocacy, the supportive climate of second-wave feminism, and the legislative clout of Title IX set the women's sports revolution in motion in the 1970s. The changes that have occurred for women in sports since then are truly staggering. Perhaps the most fundamental is the challenge to the “maleness” of sports: it is now okay for women and girls to be athletes. Wanting to participate in sports, and being good at them (often better than the boys), is no longer seen as freakish or unnatural; women train and compete with an intensity that was unheard of in the 1970s. Women and girls find greatly increased participation opportunities in schools, recreational leagues, summer camps, even professional leagues in fields such as basketball, volleyball, tennis, and golf; they have teams, coaches, uniforms, and playing fields. Women athletes are much more visible in the media in terms of coverage, endorsements, and fan support and have many more professional opportunities to earn a living in sport after leaving school. The groundwork for all these changes was laid in the breakthrough decade of the 1970s.

  The downside is that women athletes now often take access to sports for granted. As tennis phenomenon Jennifer Capriati tellingly said in 2002, “I have no idea what Title IX is. Sorry.” (Title IX sponsor Edith Green made a similar point in a different context: “The trouble with every generation is that they haven't read the minutes of the last meeting.”) Girls and women in high school and college today have lived their whole lives in a post-Title IX land of opportunities, a huge difference from women just twenty or thirty years their seniors. They often have no idea how recent—or hard fought—these gains are. In some ways, Title IX lets everyone off the hook, because the law makes it seem like the problem of girls’ and women's access to organized athletics has been solved. Lost in the celebration is the other half of the equation: that Title IX, and by extension, all of women's sports, are a work in progress, and there is still much, much more to be done.8

  This is where feminism comes in, specifically the kind that Billie Jean King pioneered in her legendary career. There is a tendency now to dismiss feminism as a relic of the past, to talk about the amazing opportunities girls have these days, to act as if the revolution is over and the mission accomplished. Well, it isn't. Confronting how deeply gendered and unequal the whole sports structure remains today is one way to show how incomplete this revolution is, and how much more remains to be done.

  Even though many Americans shy away from the “f” word, feminism's underlying concepts are especially relevant to the world of sports. Ask parents whether their daughter should have a right to play ice hockey or wrestle, or have access to the town's playing fields for her soccer practices, and all of a sudden many of the tenets of modern feminism come flooding out: equal opportunity, equal access, fairness and equity, taking girls and women seriously, powerful bodies to match sharp minds. As a sports lawyer astutely observed during a recent legal case, “There is no more radical feminist than the father of an elite girl athlete.” Pointing out the inequities that still affect girls and women in sports has the potential to be a national consciousness-raising moment of monumental proportions.9

  As we move into the twenty-first century and the fifth decade of the women's sports revolution, it is time to put a
fresh name on the political and cultural principle that will insure continued progress toward the elusive goal of gender equity in sports. In Billie Jean King's honor, let's call it sports feminism. What does this perspective get us? Based on the mutual realization that sport is good for feminism and feminism is good for sport, sports feminism offers a vision of athletic, activist women who have both an intellectual and physical dimension. Female athletes are what women's liberation looks like: strong, confident women who by showing what women can do athletically change hearts and minds about what women can do generally.

  Without denying the amazing changes that have happened since the 1970s, sports feminism looks toward the day when organizations such as the women's Sports Foundation are no longer necessary and women are not content to have 42 percent of participation opportunities when they make up a hefty majority of students in educational institutions. Instead of being grateful that more girls and women than ever before have a chance to play, it asks why they still don't get the same societal support and resources as men and boys. It asks why the percentage of women coaches is declining, not rising, and why, if men coach women's sports, it is the rare woman who gets offered the comparable chance to coach a men's team. Sports feminism questions an athletic system structured around keeping men and women separate, rather than encouraging them to play and compete together, and challenges any archaic notions of female inferiority by insisting that women have as equal a right to be athletes—with equivalent respect, support, resources, and opportunities—as men. It also challenges the pervasiveness of homophobia in the world of sports, seeking instead a safe space for women no matter what their sexual preference. In other words, it's not content with the way things are; it is always challenging the status quo. Of course Billie Jean King has been doing this her entire life.