Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  49 Farrell, Yours in Sisterhood, 190, 194–95; Keith J. Kelly, “Conde Nast Takes Over Competition,” New York Daily News, January 13, 1998, 47; John Moore, “S + F Demise No Victory for Women,” Denver Post, February 10, 1998, D12. Sports Illustrated for Women folded with its December-January 2002–2003 issue.

  50 Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, September 1976, 4; Rachel Shus-ter and Julie Ward, “King: Advocate, activist, champion ‘Battle of the Sexes’ victory helped women, girls build their self-esteem,” USA Today, September 20, 1999, 1C. See also Donna Lopiano: “The function of the Women's Sports Foundation is to be the impatient, intolerant voice of women's sports.… I wish in my lifetime I could see no need for the Women's Sports Foundation.” Quoted in Jennifer Lawler, Punch! Why Women Participate in Violent Sports (Terre Haute, Ind.: Wish Publishing, 2002), 6.

  51 Donna de Varona, foreword, in Cynthia Lee A. Pemberton, More Than A Game: One Woman's Fight for Gender Equity in Sport (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), xvi. See also Judy Klemesrud, “Suzy Chaffee—Somersaults and Serious Thoughts,” New York Times, May 12, 1978, A16.

  52 Billie Jean King says it was while lobbying for Title IX, but I think her testimony in support of the women's Educational Equity Act in November 1973 is the more likely occasion. See chapter 2.

  53 This reconstruction draws heavily on “History of the Beginnings and Leadership of the women's Sports Foundation” (c. 2000–2001), found in the WSF archives. See also the ad for the women's Sports Foundation in the Sportswoman (March-April 1976), that lists those purposes in a slightly different wording. Billie Jean King's check came from the Bob Hope Gillette Cavalcade Awards tournament.

  54 Frontiers: The women's Sports Foundation Newsletter, April-May 1976, found in WEAL, SL; Don Sabo and Janie Victoria Ward, “Wherefore Art Thou Feminisms? Feminist Activism, Academic Feminisms, and Women's Sports Advocacy,” Scholar and Feminist Online, 4.3 (Summer 2006), n 17.

  55 Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, September 1976; Billie Jean King remarks in “All Star Salute to Women's Sports,” Las Vegas, February 17–19, 1978, WSF archives.

  56 Margaret Roach, “A Women's Sports Unit Seeks an Increased Role,” New York Times, November 21, 1976, 185; Frontiers: The Women's Sports Foundation Newsletter, June 1978. By 1978 local women's sports associations were being formed in Atlanta; Boston; Bridgeport, Conn.; Chicago; Delaware; New Jersey; New York City and Westchester County; Oklahoma; the San Francisco Bay area; Seattle; St. Louis; Stamford, Conn.; and Washington, D.C. These groups investigated sports development opportunities and arranged some competitive events but were disbanded between 1982 and 1984. See “women's Sports Foundation Timeline,” at 〈http://womenssportsfoundation.org〉 (accessed May 1, 2004).

  57 “Women's Sports Scrapbook,” Women's Sports and Fitness, October 1997.

  58 See Jon Carroll, “Twenty-of America's greatest athletes battled it out at the Houston Astrodome,” womenSports, April 1975, 37–42; Curry Kirkpatrick, “There Is Nothing Like a Dame,” Sports Illustrated, January 6, 1975, 22–24; and Molly Tyson, “Women's Superstars, The Great Bright Hope?” womenSports, December 1975, 37–39, 57. The special aired on ABC in February 1975. Billie Jean King's publisher's letter (April 1975) made the point about athletes not knowing each other. Even she knew only four of the twenty-competitors before Houston.

  The Superstars competition demonstrates once again the complicated financial dealings of Billie Jean and Larry King. Inspired by the original men's Superstars format, the Kings wanted to stage a similar event for women. Encouraged by a vice president at the Houston Astrodome who promised $150,000 in prize money, Larry and Jim Jorgensen, the president of womenSports magazine, started signing up athletes. Not surprisingly, the promoters of the men's event threatened to sue. In the end, womenSports had to withdraw as a sponsor of the event, and Larry King dropped out, too. Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, April 1975, 4.

  59 “Dinah's Place: An Interview with television's most famous amateur golfer,” womenSports, April 1975, 29–30.

  60 “History of the Beginnings and Leadership of the WSF” lists Schulz as a trustee starting in July 1979. Peanuts illustrations are featured in Deborah Larned, “An Interview with Peppermint Patty,” womenSports, August 1977, 57–58. Another example is the United States Commission on Civil Rights, More Hurdles to Clear: Women and Girls in Competitive Athletics (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980). For more on the cartoonist, see David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (New York: Harper, 2007).

  61 “History of the Beginnings and Leadership of the WSF.”

  62 This goal was finally achieved in 2008, as part of the Sports Museum of America in lower Manhattan. Unfortunately this for-profit undertaking failed to draw visitors and closed down in February 2009, orphaning the women's Sports Hall of Fame. See Richard Sandomir, “Financial Problems Shut Down Museum,” New York Times, February 22, 2009, 3; and Sandomir, “Sports Museum Files Petition in Court,” New York Times, March 14, 2009.

  63 Advertisement for the Women's Sports Foundation found in the Sportswoman, March–April 1976; Eva Auchincloss to Mary Dockry, July 21, 1976, WEAL, SL. Perhaps linked to the difficulties that amateur female athletes had in finding support for their training, a fairly strong initial thrust of the WSF seems to have been giving actual cash grants for such things as camps and travel to competition. Perhaps they hoped that they could be a major funder here, but of course the needs of so many individual sportswomen would have swamped all but the wealthiest of foundations.

  64 Eva Auchincloss, “A Certain Perspective: Reflections of the founding executive director (1974-1986),” cited in “History of the Beginnings and Leadership of the WSF.”

  65 “All Star Salute to Women's Sports,” WSF archives; “Miss Blazejowski Gets Award as Top Player,” New York Times, April 25, 1978, 34. See also Byron Rosen, “King Bounces Back in Magazine Field,” Washington Post, January 10, 1978, D5.

  66 “Strides,” Women's Sports, October 1980, 68–69. The Women's Sports Foundation claimed this coalition represented some 15 million people.

  67 Nancy Scannell, “Carter Meets With Women on Title 9,” Washington Post, September 14, 1979, E7.

  68 The Women's Sports Foundation Annual Report, June 1982, found in WEAL, SL, discusses the relationship, which had tax implications. The Women's Sports Foundation was still associated with the magazine in its last issue (April 1998), although it no longer had a column. There is no mention of the foundation in the debut issue of Women's Sports & Fitness (more confusion for librarians and archivists with the ampersand!) in June 1998.

  69 Minutes from 1981 advisory board meeting, found in WEAL, SL; “History of the Beginnings and Leadership of the WSF.”

  70 Pat Griffin, “Changing the Game: Homophobia, Sexism, and Lesbians in Sport,” in Jean O’Reilly and Susan K. Cahn, eds., Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 220–21.

  71 Press Release, August 7, 1975, WEAL, SL; Sports Kit, Summer 1978, WEAL, SL.

  72 “In the Running,” February 1982, found in WEAL, SL.

  73 “Strides,” Women's Sports, February 1981, 60; “History of the Beginnings and Leadership of the WSF.”

  74 “History of the Beginnings and Leadership of the WSF.” In 2000 de Varona was not pleased to have been demoted (in her view) from her role as one of the founders of the Women's Sports Foundation as part of the organization's attempt to write its early history. It is a technicality, but only three people signed the original incorporation papers—Billie Jean and Larry King and their business manager—so the Women's Sports Foundation now only refers to Billie Jean King as the founder. De Varona told Donna Lopiano that she found it disturbing that the Women's Sports Foundation was directing people to drop a reference that has been used for many years [de Varona to Lopiano, October 20, 2000, WSF archives]. Trying to soothe her ruffled feelings, Lopiano acknowledged de Varona's enormous con
tributions to the Women's Sports Foundation over the years but still stuck to her guns about the founders. Lopiano to de Varona, October 20, 2000, WSF Archives.

  75 Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, October 1976, 4.

  76 For the debate about the relation between women's sports, feminism, and consumption, see Cheryl L. Cole and Amy Hribar, “Celebrity Feminism: Nike Style; Post-Fordism, Transcendence, and Consumer Power,” Sociology of Sport Journal 12 (1995): 347–69. See also Leslie Heywood and Shari L. Dworkin, Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

  77 A prime example of the inhibiting effect of such reliance on corporate support occurred at the New Agenda Conference in November 1983, when the women's Sports Foundation planners removed references to lesbianism from promotional material for fear of offending corporate sponsors. See chapter 6.

  78 Lopiano made the point about King in a presentation at the Humanities Center at Harvard on November 17, 2008. For her earlier thoughts on how radical and moderate feminist positions play off each other in the struggle for social change, see Donna A. Lopiano, “Political Analysis: Gender Equity Strategies for the Future,” in Greta L. Cohen, ed., Women in Sport: Issues and Controversies (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications,1993), 104–16. On the limits of the WSF's liberal feminist agenda, see Michael Messner, Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 146–50; M. Ann Hall, Feminism and Sporting Bodies: Essays on Theory and Practice (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1996), 96–99; and Griffin, “Changing the Game.”

  79 Don Sabo, who has conducted major research projects for the organization, made this point in Messner, Taking the Field, 191.

  80 James Martin, “The World According to Billie Jean King,” Tennis, June 2002, 18; Everett Groseclose, “New Team-Tennis Circuit Opens for Business Tonight, Challenging the Sport's Traditions,” Wall Street Journal, May 6, 1974, 32. General tennis histories treat team tennis only in passing. See Bud Collins, My Life With the Pros (New York: Dutton, 1989); Peter Bodo, The Courts of Babylon: Tales of Greed and Glory in the Harsh New World of Professional Tennis (New York: Scribner, 1995); and Billie Jean King with Cynthia Starr, We Have Come a Long Way: The Story of Women's Tennis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988).

  81 George Solomon, “Team Tennis Seeks Identity,” Washington Post, August 15, 1973, D8; Paul Attner, “Team Tennis Debuts Monday,” Washington Post, May 5, 1974, D1. As Billie Jean King put it optimistically: “Some day team tennis will be all over the world. That's why we put the ‘World’ in the league's name. That vision was the idea from the beginning, even though not many people were sharp enough to notice it” John S. Radosta, “Apples Set Tonight for Call of ‘Linesmen Ready? Play!’“New York Times, April 28, 1977, 99.

  82 Joel Drucker, “The Once and Future King,” Women's Sports and Fitness, November/ December 1992, 78–79; Wheeler, “The Men Behind the Women,” 23–24; Bud Collins, “The Sex-Free Zone,” Tennis, August 1998, 36.

  83 Groseclose, “New Team Tennis Circuit Opens”

  84 “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” 196; “People in Sports,” New York Times, June 7, 1974, 28.

  85 Tony Kornheiser, “Footing Is Firmer as W.T.T. Slips Into Its Third Season,” New York Times, May 2, 1976, S1.

  86 “Quotation of the Day,” New York Times, February 6, 1975, 71; “What They Are Saying,” New York Times, July 20, 1975, 59; Herman, “Billie Jean King's Lifestyle.”

  87 Kornheiser, “Footing Is Firmer.” Laver was the highest-paid player, guaranteed a salary of $165,000, followed by Evonne Goolagong ($150,000) and Chris Evert ($140,000).

  88 Radosta, “Apples Set Tonight”; Gerald Eskenazi, “Conflict-of-Interest Questions Confront Sports,” New York Times, January 8, 1977, 12. See also Kornheiser, “Footing is Firmer”; “Buchholz is Named Commissioner of W.T.T.,” New York Times, September 17, 1976, 91; and “People in Sports,” New York Times, October 8, 1976, 25. When Team Tennis was reincarnated in a much smaller version in the 1980s, this same pattern continued, according to Frederick C. Klein, “Will Larry King's Team Tennis Net a Profit?” Wall Street Journal, July 6, 1983, 24: “Mr. King's approach to leadership in Team Tennis couldn't be simpler: He's it. He owns it, signs the players, controls the purses, and sells franchises for a fee like McDonald's does.” Larry and Billie Jean also owned the Chicago team. Larry admitted that this could be a conflict of interest “if we were important enough for that.”

  89 Greg Hoffman provides a full discussion and detailed chronology in “Sudden Death: Why Did World Team Tennis Fail? Let Us Count the Ways,” Women's Sports, August 1979, 34–38, 52–53; the quote from Larry King is on p. 36. See also Gerald Eskenazi, “How W.T.T. Became World team-less Tennis,” New York Times, November 20, 1978, C9; and Barry Lorge, “WTT Plans Signings, Then Draft of Players,” Washington Post, March 30, 1977, D5.

  90 Eskenazi, “How W.T.T. Became World team-less Tennis.”

  Chapter Four

  1 Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World (New York: Harper Collins, 2000) offers a well-paced narrative. See also Brandi Chastain and Gloria Averbuch, It's Not About the Bra (New York: Harper Collins, 2004).

  2 Elliott Almond, “Kick Start: Groundwork in Place for Women's Team Sports to Make Move,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 11, 1999, D1.

  3 See Jessica Gavora's complaints about how the media uncritically linked the soccer success with Title IX, such as Time calling the team the “daughters of Title IX.” Jessica Gavora, Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 5. For more on the media's coverage, see Neil Christopher-son, Michelle Janning, and Eileen Diaz McConnell, “Two Kicks Forward, One Kick Back: A Content Analysis of Media Discourses on the 1999 women's World Cup Soccer Championship,” Sociology of Sport Journal 19 (2002): 170–88; and C. L. Cole, “The Year That Girls Ruled,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 24 (February 2000): 3–7.

  4 Stephanie Twin, Out of the Bleachers: Writings on Women and Sport (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1979), 93.

  5 Betty Spears, “The Emergence of Women in Sport,” in Barbara J. Hoepner, ed., women's Athletics: Coping with Controversy (Washington, D.C.: Division for Girls and women's Sports of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, 1974), 26–42. For a general history of women's higher education, see Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

  6 For a lively discussion of the intersection of fashion and sports history, see Patricia Campbell Warner, When the Girls Came Out to Play: The Birth of American Sportswear (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). For general histories of men's sports, see Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1999); Michael Oriard, King Football (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); S. W. Pope, ed., The New American Sport History: Recent Approaches and Perspectives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); and Randy Roberts and James Olson, Winning Is the Only Thing: Sports in America since 1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

  7 Chapter 4 of Warner, When the Girls Came Out to Play, covers the history of bathing costumes. Of course, as James Laver remarked, “the only sensible costume for bathing in is no costume at all” (ibid., 61), which was precisely the practice for men before the activity became coed.

  8 Quoted in Susan Ware, “Gertrude Ederle: ‘America's Best Girl,’“in Ware, ed., Forgotten Heroes: Inspiring Portraits from Our Leading Historians (New York: Free Press, 1998), 311. On the WSA, see Linda J. Borish, “‘The Cradle of American Champions, Women Champions … Swim Champions’: Charlotte Epstein, Gender and Jewish Identity, and the Physical Emancipation of Women in Aquatic Sports,” International Journal of the History of Sport 21 (March 2004): 197–235. For a general history of the sport, see
Karen Karbo, “Swimming: From Gold Spangles to Gold Medals,” in Lissa Smith, ed., Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998).

  9 At Beijing in 2008, women represented 42 percent of athletes (4,746 out of 11,196). For general introductions to the history of women and the Olympics, see Paula Welch and D. Margaret Costa, “A Century of Olympic Competition,” in D. Margaret Costa and Sharon R. Guthrie, eds., Women and Sport: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1994); Jennifer Hargreaves, “Olympic Women: A Struggle for Recognition,” in Jean O’Reilly and Susan K. Cahn, eds., Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007); and Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, The Best Olympics Ever? Social Impacts of Sydney 2000 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

  10 Anita L. DeFrantz, “The Olympic Games: Our Birthright to Sports,” in Greta L. Cohen, ed., Women in Sport: Issues and Controversies (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993).

  11 Ellen W. Gerber, “Chronicle of Participation,” in Ellen W. Gerber, Jan Felshin, Pearl Berlin, and Waneen Wyrick, eds., The American Woman in Sport (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1974), 72; Richard Swanson, “From Glide to Stride: Significant Events in a Century of American women's Sport,” in Hoepner, women's Athletics, 49. See also Nancy Theriot, “Toward a New Sporting Ideal: The women's Division of the National Amateur Athletics Federation,” Frontiers 3 (1978): 1–7; and Nancy Theberge, “women's Athletics and the Myth of Female Frailty,” in Jo Freeman, ed., Women: A Feminist Perspective, 4th ed. (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1989).

  12 Gerber, “A Chronicle of Participation,” 64–68.

  13 Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport (N ew York: Free Press, 1994), 98. This quote from sport historian Joan Hult actually came from the 1940s or 1950s, inspired by the disconnect between her teachers telling her not to engage in high-level competition and those same women all turning out for a field hockey tournament on the weekend.