Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  39 BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 59; Larry King, “My Wife, Billie Jean by her Husband,” Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1974, 144; Mary Kates, “Tennis Tycoon: Billie Jean King Finds Sport Profitable Even When She Isn't Playing,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1973, 1.

  40 Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle, 143; Fleming and Leibovitz, “The battles of Billie Jean King,” 130.

  41 Corri Planck, “Portrait of a Legend,” Lesbian News, April 1999, 18. In this interview King talks about how hard it was for her and her parents, although they are “great now … they’ve come a long way. It was very difficult for them. Being raised in a homophobic family, you just keep trying to face your fears and step by step do the best you can and get more comfortable in your own skin. That is not always easy if you haven't been brought up that way.”

  42 Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle, 169, 146–47, 180. See Robert Lipsyte and Peter Levine, Idols of the Game: A Sporting History of the American Century (Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1995), for many examples of how male sports figures led boisterous and unconventional lives off the field but their exploits were rarely reported in print. This is why Grace Lichtenstein's book, A Long Way, Baby: The Inside Story of the Women in Pro Tennis (New York: William Morrow, 1974) is so interesting—it doesn't keep quiet about Billie Jean King's carrying on, to her consternation.

  43 King, “My Wife, Billie Jean,” 149; Lichtenstein, A Long Way, Baby, 178.

  44 Lichtenstein, A Long Way, Baby, 179; “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” Playboy, March 1975, 60. See also chapter 6.

  45 Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle, 143.

  46 “Larry and Billie Jean King Work to Renew Their Marriage—and Put Her Affair Behind Them,” People Magazine, May 25, 1981, 77; “Mrs. King Will Swap Racket for Recipes,” Washington Post, August 28, 1966, C5.

  47 Dave Kindred, “King and Wimbledon: a Long Road to Greatness,” Washington Post, June 25, 1982, D1; Gilbert and Moore, Particular Passions, 174–75; BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 62.

  48 Robin Herman, “Billie Jean King's Lifestyle: Innovate and Take a Chance,” New York Times, June 15, 1975, S1; Deford, “Mrs. Billie Jean King,” 73. Larry King echoed the same sentiments: “Over there she's considered the third best known American athlete, behind Muhammad Ali and Jim Ryun. Over there they don't know who Mickey Mantle is. But here, they don't know Billie Jean.… LBJ could care less about Bil-lie Jean winning Wimbledon—twice.” Dave Anderson, “Billie Jean: Tennis Queen Who Obeys Her King,” New York Times, September 10, 1967, 226. Note how sexist the headline is.

  49 John Lovesey, “Manolo's King, but a King is Queen,” Sports Illustrated, July 11, 1966, 50; Michele Kort, “Ms. Conversation: Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova,” Ms., February 1988, 58; “Mrs. King Sweeps at Wimbledon,” Washington Post, July 9, 1967, C6; Robert Lipsyte, “Billie Jean,” New York Times, August 27, 1970, 59.

  50 “Mrs. King To Shoot for ‘Grand Slam’,” New York Times, August 27, 1967, 148. Or as she put it another time, “For too long our image was Gussie Moran's 1951 lace panties.” “Women Lobbers,” Newsweek, May 3, 1971, 90.

  51 BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 82–83; Bud Collins, “Billie Jean King Evens the Score,” Ms., July 1973, 101; Bill Bruns, “World's Top Woman Tennis Players Says ‘U.S. Men Are Losers,’ “Life, September 22, 1967, 109.

  52 BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 82; Kim Chapin, “Goodbye Billie Jean, with love from Nancy,” Sports Illustrated, April 8, 1968, 85.

  53 Lipsyte and Levine, Idols of the Game, 284; BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 85.

  54 Figures about the 1968 purses are drawn from the official Wimbledon website: (http://www.wimbledon.org)

  55 BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 91; “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” 60. Larry avoided the draft by serving in the Army Reserve (“My Wife, Billie Jean King by her Husband”). See also Mark Asher, “Across the Net,” Washington Post, September 10, 1967, B7, for fears he might be drafted after law school.

  56 Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle, 68.

  57 Chapter 6 of Mary Jo Festle, Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Women's Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), provides an overview of the rise of women's professional tennis; pp. 144–46 discuss the founding.

  58 Jane Leavy, “Whatever Happened to Peaches Bartkowicz?” womenSports, January 1978, 20–24, 46–48, 52; King and Starr, We Have Come a Long Way, 127. See also Nancy E. Spencer, “Once Upon a Subculture: Professional women's Tennis and the Meaning of Style, 1970–1974,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 21 (November 1997): 363–78; and Spencer, “Reading Between the Lines: A Discursive Analysis of the Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs ‘Battle of the Sexes,’ “Sociology of Sport Journal 17 (2000): 386–402.

  59 Jane Leavy, “Daring Decade: How Women Served and Won,” womenSports, January 1978, 23. See chapter 3 for more on how Larry King's business dealings often overlapped with his wife's, causing potential conflicts of interest.

  60 Parton Keese, “Women Set Up Tennis Tour,” New York Times, October 8, 1970, 66; Dan Wakefield, “My Love Affair with Billie Jean King,” Esquire, October 1974, 386.

  61 Gilbert and Moore, Particular Passions, 171; Chris Evert, “Happy Birthday, TENNIS,” Tennis, May 2005, 16.

  62 BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 112. When the final was delayed by rain, King sent this telegram to Evert: “When you left New York, the skies opened up and it poured rain. The heavens weren't happy you were gone.” Recalled Evert to a reporter years later, “You know, Billie didn't have to do that.” Howard, The Rivals, 51.

  63 King and Starr, We Have Come a Long Way, 142; Festle, Playing Nice, 149; King and Starr, We Have Come a Long Way, 120. See also Spencer, “Once Upon a Subculture.”

  64 Burling Lowrey, “Women's Tennis: A Call for a Realistic Appraisal,” New York Times, August 31, 1975, 152; Mark Asher, “Women's Lob Championed by Top Lady,” Washington Post, September 5, 1971, 162. For a general discussion of the issue, see John L. Crompton, “Sponsorship of Sport by Tobacco and Alcohol Companies: A Review of the Issues,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 17 (December 1993): 148–67.

  65 Marty Bell, “Is She Paying Off?” womenSports, December 1976, 61; Gregory M. Lamb, “Virginia Slims Tennis Tournament—linking smoking and sports?” Christian Science Monitor, February 11, 1983, 10.

  66 Collins, “Billie Jean King Evens the Score,” 40; Curry Kirkpatrick, “The Ball in Two Different Courts,” Sports Illustrated, December 25, 1972, 33. Robert Lipsyte, for example, was so outspoken in a November 20, 1992, piece in the New York Times (“Amid All the Smoke, the Ethics are Indistinct”) that Billie Jean King accused him of crossing the line “from acceptable advocacy to unacceptable insult” in a letter to the editor on December 20, 1992, S9. In 1993 Ira Berkow compared her to an ostrich with her head in the sand by claiming that not smoking meant not endorsing cigarette consumption. “A Match for Smoking, Not Tennis,” New York Times, December 7, 1993, B15.

  67 Kirkpatrick, “The Ball in Two Different Courts,” 32–33; “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” 70; King and Starr, We Have Come a Long Way, 120; BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 146. Billie Jean King's was an equal-opportunity sexism: “I like to see guys’ legs and their bahoolas.” “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” 67.

  68 Stephan Wilkinson, “The Visionary of Tennis,” Working Woman, September 1988, 86–87; U.S. Senate, Hearings on the women's Educational Equity Act, 1973, 83.

  69 Robin Herman, “Court Queen and women's Lib Symbol,” New York Times, September 10, 1974, 47; “Billie Jean King goes for the Net Profits,” Life, November 1971, 109; Lichtenstein, A Long Way, Baby, 154. Even some feminists, King complained, were hypercritical of her emphasis on money, causing her to dismiss them as “liberal Democrats who couldn't stand to see anyone make a profit.” BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 160.

  70 Jenkins, “Racket Science,” 77; BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 124; Evert, “Happy Birthday, TENNIS,” 16. To those who envied the supposedly glamorous life of a touring pro, she would retort that they’d never s
een her washing her tennis dresses and socks in a motel sink. Stewart-Gordon, “Billie Jean King—Queen of the Rackets,” 155.

  71 BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 130; BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 20–21.

  72 Mark Asher, “Abortion Made Possible Mrs. King's Top Year,” Washington Post, February 22, 1972, D1; “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” 64. She felt “it was absolutely the wrong time for me to bring a child into the world,” a direct reference to her marriage, not because of concern about how a pregnancy would affect her tennis career. BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 156–57. See also BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 22–23.

  73 “We have had abortions,” Ms., Spring 1972, 34–35; Asher, “Abortion Made Possible Mrs. King's Top Year.” See “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” 64, on not having the “guts” to tell her mother herself.

  74 “Two Pros,” Time, March 20, 1972, 103; BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 157; BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 22–23; Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle, 87. In her defense, note the double standard at work: few male sports figures would ever have to field such personal questions. “They ask me about my abortion. Do they ask a football player if he's had a vasectomy?” Collins, “Billie Jean Evens the Score,” 40.

  75 BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 147.

  76 See epilogue.

  77 Collins, “Billie Jean King Evens the Score,” 43; Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, March 1975, 4. Of all her activism, King always said that this moment meant the most to her. Bud Collins, “Starry Tribute was Fit for King,” Boston Globe, November 10, 2003, D7.

  78 Lichtenstein, A Long Way, Baby, 244.

  79 Larned, “The Bodacious Billie Jean King,” 60; Robert Lipsyte, “Helping Others Before Helping Herself,” New York Times, July 12, 1998, SP11.

  80 This section owes a debt to Lipsyte and Levine, Idols of the Game; the “Godded up” quote is on p. 82. See also Dave Zirin, What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005); and A People's History of Sports in the United States (New York: New Press, 2008).

  81 For general histories of women and sport, see Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport (New York: Free Press, 1994); and Lissa Smith, ed., Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998). See also chapter 4.

  82 Lipsyte and Levine, Idols of the Game, chapter 7.

  83 Roger Kahn quoted in Lipsyte and Levine, Idols of the Game, 164–65. See also Zirin, What's My Name, Fool? on Jackie Robinson's significance.

  84 Robert Lipsyte, “Instant Legends and Super Heroes,” Washington Post, March 30, 1978, DC7.

  85 Deford, “Mrs. Billie Jean King,” 72.

  86 Dave Anderson, “Now I Can Have Beer and Ice Cream,” New York Times, July 5, 1975, 21.

  87 Tony Kornheiser, “Smile, Even Though You’re Aching,” New York Times, November 22, 1977, 59; Larry Eldridge, “King still volleys with abandon, but what comes after tennis?” Christian Science Monitor, March 15, 1983, 18; Jane Gross, “Billie Jean King Is Up to Her Old Tricks,” New York Times, March 17, 1980, C1. Navratilova, in turn, totally challenged the timeframe of an athletic career by competing successfully until her fiftieth birthday loomed. She too was on a quest for Wimbledon titles, eventually tying King for the record with a total of twenty. See Howard, The Rivals.

  88 BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 201; Pete Axthelm, “The Battle of the Sexes,” Newsweek, September 24, 1973, 84; Joel Drucker, “The Once and Future King,” women's Sports and Fitness, November/December 1992, 78; Donna Carter, “Title IX Turns 25: A Struggle from Entitlement to Empowerment,” Denver Post, June 10, 1997, D10.

  Chapter Two

  1 Selena Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005), 93; Mark Starr, “The Battle of the Sexes,” Newsweek, September 21, 1998, 90; Billie Jean King, Pressure Is a Privilege: Lessons I’ve Learned from Life and the Battle of the Sexes (New York: LifeTime Media, 2008), 22. Here is the full quote: “In the early 1970s, I was playing regularly while also working to get the women's professional tennis tour (then known as the Virginia Slims Series) started and helping to get Title IX—the groundbreaking legislation that would require all high schools, colleges, and universities receiving federal funds for education to spend those funds equally on boys and girls—passed in Congress. (It was eventually passed on June 23, 1972, about a year before the Battle of the Sexes.)”

  2 She added: “It's not just sports. Women or men should not be discriminated against.” Sara Glassman, “Still in the Battle; Tennis Champion Billie Jean King changed women's sports, and if she has her way, she's not done yet. Not even close,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, February 26, 2006, 1E.

  3 U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., March 1971 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 580. See also Jane Sims, “Sex Bias Ban for Colleges Urged on Hill,” Washington Post, August 31, 1971, A2, where Green says the antidiscrimination provision “would be the most revolutionary cause of the 1970s for women.” Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) provides general background on the passage of the legislation. See also Jo Freeman, “How ‘Sex’ Got Into Title VII: Persistent Opportunism as a Maker of Public Policy,” Law and Inequality 9 (1990-1991): 163–84.

  4 Bernice R. Sandler, “‘Too Strong for a Woman’—The Five Words that Created Title IX,” in National Association for Women in Education newsletter, About Women on Campus (Spring 1977): 2.

  5 Ibid., 1. The “godmother” quote was originally from the New York Times. See 〈http://bernicesandler.com〉.

  6 Sandler, “‘Too Strong for a Woman,’ “3-4. See also Bernice Resnick Sandler, “Title IX: How We Got It and What a Difference it Made,” Cleveland State Law Review 55 (2007): 473. See also the oral history of Bunny Sandler conducted by Jill Reid, December 9, 1985, part of a series of oral histories the Equality Center in Washington, D.C., undertook in the mid-1980s for a manuscript on the early history of Title IX. This manuscript was never published, but drafts are found in Dunkle, SL. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references to oral histories are ones done in conjunction with this project.

  7 For background on the passage of the law, see Karen Blumenthal, Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX: The Law that Changed the Future of Girls in America (New York: Atheneum, 2005); and Welch Suggs, A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). The quote from Sandler is from “‘Too Strong for a Woman,’“4.

  8 A detailed legislative history is found in Rep. Patsy Mink's remarks, “In Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Education Amendments of 1972,” Congressional Record, July 17, 2002, H4860-4863.

  9 Sandler, “‘Too Strong for a Woman,’”5. See, for example, Albert A. Logan Jr., “Universities Told They Must Grant Equal Opportunity for Women,” July 6, 1970, 5; Cheryl M. Fields, “House Bill's Sex-Discrimination Ban Worries Newly Co-Ed Institutions,” October 18, 1971, 1, 2; Fields, “There's Still a Long Road to Travel Before Colleges Get U.S. Aid,” November 15, 1971, 1, 3; Fields, “Senate Approves College Aid Bill; Forbids Sex Bias,” March 6, 1972, 1, 2, all from the Chronicle of Higher Education. In general, the Chronicle gave fairly extensive coverage to how the emerging feminist movement was challenging business as usual in higher education, providing stories starting in the late 1960s and continuing throughout the 1970s on the beginnings of women's Studies, the WEAL class action case, and the general struggle for academic women to find a stronger niche in the male bastion of higher education at the time. Bunny Sandler had a regular column called “The Academic Woman” on gender issues in education in 1973.

  10 “Sex Balance by Edict,” New York Times, August 15, 1971, E14. See also the editorial “women's Rights and the Colleges,”
Washington Post, September 16, 1971, A18, which was more supportive of the pending legislation. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post discussed the sex discrimination provision in passing, but not as fully as did the Chronicle.

  11 If Congress had intended to exclude athletics, it could have amended the original language the way it did for admissions, the service academies, and certain religious schools. See Charles Percy to Caspar Weinberger, May 1, 1974, Dunkle, SL.

  12 Congressional Record, August 6, 1971, S13554; Congressional Record, July 17, 2002, H4861-4862. In October 2002 Title IX was renamed the Patsy Takemoto Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in honor of the legislator who had died the previous month.

  13 Cheryl M. Fields, “$19-Billion Higher Education Bill Wins Passage, Nixon's signature,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 3, 1972, 1; “How Supporters and Opponents View the Higher Education Bill,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 5, 1972, 1. The Pell Grants were named for Senator Claiborne Pell, the chair of the Senate Education Committee, who was their main proponent. In later years Edith Green, who grew increasingly conservative politically in the 1970s (she left Congress in 1975), spoke out against Title IX, claiming the regulations went far beyond her original intent in areas such as athletics and physical education. See Edith Green, “The Road Is Paved with Good Intentions: Title IX and What it is Not,” Vital Speeches of the Day 43 (March 1, 1977): 300–303. See also Edith Green to Patricia Harris, November 17, 1979, Dunkle, SL.

  14 Suggs, A Place on the Team, contains the full text of Title IX in Appendix A. The rest of Title IX concerns the exemptions of admissions, single-sex colleges, religious organizations, and the military academies, as well as language describing federal administrative enforcement, judicial review, and amendments to other laws.