An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  Such thoughts seem quaint and simple-minded now, but when Margie and I married in 1966 there was no question whose career would take precedence. In fact, we even came up with an equation in which professional decisions and the personal choices that supported them would be made on a 70–30 basis. That would include where we lived and how we spent our money and time. At least 70 percent of the attention and effort would go into my career. The leftover was hers. I accepted the equation; well into the seventies, for example, I took for granted that Margie would keep the kids quiet whenever I wanted to work, including evenings and Sundays. As the decade lurched on, however, she was no longer taking that for granted. She wanted the time and space to write, too. The women’s movement claimed that as her right. The percentages were shifting. For a while, we worked that out with more babysitters. But that meant I had to generate more money for more quiet. I resented that in a vague, passive-aggressive way but was proud that I could generate the money. I tolerated the situation, thinking myself if not liberated at least liberal.

  In 1972, during the tennis boom, a large indoor club opened near my suburban New Jersey town, Closter. The marquee teaching pro was . . . Althea Gibson! I was writing a thriller for which I had gotten an advance big enough to support the family for a year or so. It seemed the right time to finally learn how to properly play this writerly game. My Columbia freshman tennis numerals had been awarded as a gift in return for cutting oranges for the varsity after my backhand was exposed.

  I didn’t mention our previous meeting to Althea when I showed up for my first lesson, and she didn’t make the connection, looking at her clipboard and saying, “It’s four P.M. Tuesday, so you must be Bob.” Then she began barking at me, criticizing my nonwhite shorts and polo shirt, my unshaven face, and my slowness to “housekeep” the court of vagrant balls. She was not a good instructor of fundamentals (probably because I was just too fundamental), but she was demanding and inspiring, and she made me run, concentrate, think ahead, practice, shave, and dress better. By spring we were playing mock games, and every so often, after she’d had a big business lunch, I would score a point. She would scowl, and I could see that old competitive monster rise. On the next point, she would try to drive me off the court with a thunderous serve or hit me with her return. At forty-five, she still had the heat. It dawned on me that, after my mother, she was the first female power figure in my life. I had never had a woman boss or coach, or even an important woman teacher after sixth grade.

  I still lost early in the club’s B-level tournament.

  A year later, Billie Jean became the worldwide symbol of the challenging and threatening woman in what was arguably the most socially significant yet silliest tennis match of all time, the so-called Battle of the Sexes at the Houston Astrodome, live on network TV with Howard Cosell himself at the mic.

  Billie Jean, twenty-nine years old, the best female player in the world, had trained ferociously for what she believed would be her most important match. Her opponent was Bobby Riggs, a fifty-five-year-old hustler whose life up to then had been the prelude to his biggest con. He had already beaten a top-ranked woman, Margaret Court, who had not prepared well enough and had been easily psyched out. That was seen as a setback to the second wave of feminism, led by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, among many others, and to Title IX, the 1972 law barring discrimination by sex in federally funded educational activities. Billie Jean had to win. The movement needed a warrior.

  Billie Jean was carried into the arena by half-naked male “slaves” and Riggs by a “harem” of underdressed young women. I thought the hoopla and the match were absurd, yet I held my breath for her—and for myself. I had a stake in the outcome. I had come to believe in equality for women, not only because it was fair and because I had a sister, wife, and daughter whose dreams I wanted fulfilled, but because I thought it was good for men like me; if women had equal professional opportunities, the men in their lives would have more of a chance to fulfill their dreams instead of spending all their energy making money to support a family. It seemed pragmatic. For me, it would mean more time to take chances writing fiction, a big book, going for the killing. Two years gone from the Times and from daily sportswriting, I was a scrabbling freelancer. It was easy to see Billie Jean playing for me as well as for Margie.

  More than anyone else, Billie Jean made it clear to me that the women’s movement wasn’t just for women. In her push for equality in tennis, she revealed the way male tennis players were controlled through the draconian rules of “amateurism.” (Hard to believe now how players were forbidden to accept money beyond the under-the-table payoffs from promoters and sponsors that kept them in a kind of serfdom.) She was as responsible as anyone for “open” tennis, in which professionals and amateurs could compete together, and then for the honest professionalization of the game for everyone.

  This made male sportswriters uneasy. Gender was very important. We were complicit in keeping women out of press boxes, much less locker rooms. When women sportswriters began showing up, male sportswriters were less welcoming than male athletes. Women diminished the prestige of our tree house, the men-only access we gloated over to friends and neighbors. Equal access reminded us that in Jock Culture most of us were treated like girls, lesser species to be bought, used, toyed with, dismissed by most athletes, officials, and owners. We could get back at them by refusing our services or spreading nasty tales, but boys were the ones with power.

  In 1973, when Billie Jean beat Riggs, Margie and I were both writing from home and making an attempt to share housekeeping and child care. We were trying to edge toward 50–50. I was trying to become more than a theoretical feminist. I took my turn shopping, cleaning, getting up in the middle of the night to feed a baby, later taking the two kids to and from school. As long as I acted like a committed participant, not someone helping out Margie, it worked. Of course, I slipped now and then, and sometimes I needed to go out on a magazine or newspaper assignment to bring in some fresh cash. I came to like the sharing, especially the closer relationship with the kids. Billie Jean’s “liberated” relationship with her husband was a supportive model.

  What I didn’t know at the time, despite the standard Jock Culture rumors of Billie Jean’s lesbianism, was that her seemingly modern marriage—which included being “open” to experimentation—was one of traditional convenience. Billie Jean and her husband, Larry King, whom she often described as the “better feminist,” were in more of a business relationship than a marriage. They slept with other people, in both cases women. It didn’t all come to light until 1981, when Billie Jean was sued—in a sense blackmailed—by a former lover and the story erupted in open court. (She had also been on a 1972 Ms. magazine list of prominent women who had had abortions; Billie Jean claimed she thought she was merely signing a petition in support of choice. Eventually she admitted to the abortion, which enhanced her feminist cred and for a while checked the lesbian rumors.)

  I was disappointed, not about her lesbianism but about the false example of a successful modern marriage. She had told us that Larry and she were not only on the same page politically but mutually supportive. He was cool with her as the major breadwinner and himself as the man behind the woman. And they still had dynamite sex! Meanwhile, so many of our friends—like Margie and me—were struggling with the new demands in male-female relationships. We thought that if the most famous woman in the world (at least in my world) was able to juggle career and marriage, maybe we could, too. Hey, what are role models for?

  In retrospect, the big lie seems less hypocritical than poignant. She was terrified, she told me later, at the prospect of coming out to her conservative southern California blue-collar parents. And she had no professional choice. The conventional wisdom, probably true, was that even a hint of lesbianism would scare off fans and corporate sponsors. Billie Jean’s coming out would have wrecked the nascent women’s pro tennis tour of the seventies. That tour was precarious enough; the only sponsor willing to take a chance on it w
as Big Tobacco, eager to expand the women’s market for cigarettes.

  As time went on, I needed to compartmentalize my negative feelings about her Virginia Slims (“You’ve come a long way, baby”) tour. It was crucial to the growth of women’s tennis and a boost to all women’s sports. Yet was it complicitous in the spike in teenage female smoking and later in women’s increased incidence of lung cancer? If so, was it worth it? How can you make that equation, even assuming the lives saved and enhanced by women’s sports?

  By the time of her forced coming out in 1981, Billie Jean had been supplanted as tennis queen by Chris Evert and then Martina Navratilova, so it had little impact on the game. Her parents embraced her. But the major endorsement deals she and Larry had begun to line up fell away, and she needed to continue playing past her prime. No telling what she might have accomplished as an entrepreneur with money and time.

  Nevertheless, I believe that Billie Jean was the most important sports figure of the twentieth century. Not only was she the symbolic leader of a movement representing half the world’s athletes and potential athletes, she had also been a leader of the revolution that had overthrown the most oppressive concept in sports, amateurism, a dictatorship in which sports officials, well-paid executives if not wealthy aristocrats, controlled unpaid athletes. Early on, the control came through class—only athletes rich enough to support their training and travels could compete in tennis, golf, and Olympic sports. Later, as working-class kids like Billie Jean rose, the control came through doling out money surreptitiously. By cracking open tennis to professionals, Billie Jean helped create a climate of player power that would sweep through all sports, eventually leading to free agency in baseball.

  Billie Jean and Muhammad Ali were the mom and pop of the so-called Athletic Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, even though neither of them was political or intellectual in the way of the academic commandos of that movement. But leaders such as Jack Scott, Richard Lapchick, and Harry Edwards, among others, found models for courage and action in the superstars’ principled stands.

  Billie Jean was a populist visionary. I admired her concept of World Team Tennis, which would not only make the game more accessible to spectators but bridge the gap between player and fan. She created a league in which top pros played on traveling teams in small venues and afterward gave clinics to local players. They helped create community-based recreational coed teams of all age groups, much like bowling leagues. It’s a terrific program that still exists, although nowhere near what I think it might have been had Billie Jean not lost so much influence, money, and momentum in the wake of her palimony trial.

  For all my scholarship in women’s jock studies, I failed my first important exam. In 1988, my seventeen-year-old daughter, Susannah, was playing high school field hockey, a beneficiary of the Title IX surge in women’s sports. I was a fan on the sidelines, thrilled to watch Susannah racing downfield, red-faced and roaring, “Get outta my way!” She was an all-state forward. Sports was our tenuous connection. Her mother and I had just separated, our marriage a casualty, in some ways, of the changing rules. With Sam away at college and Susannah a very independent high school senior, 50–50 wasn’t hard in the day-to-day running of a household. Now the problem was our emotional balance.

  Margie was writing and editing at a local feminist newspaper. I thought I was being enthusiastic and supportive, while she thought I was being patronizing and pedantic. Maybe I just missed print journalism. She also thought my interest in her fiction was a form of pressure. In 1980, she had published a roman à clef about the Times, Hot Type, which I liked, but a chauvinistic review in the Los Angeles Times and disappointing sales had depressed her. She kept starting and discarding new novels. I wanted her to work harder. And make some money.

  In the late eighties, The Washington Post Magazine offered us a weekly column about the contemporary minefield of middle-class, middle-aged male-female relationships. My friend Jay Lovinger was the editor, and serious money was involved. I was wildly excited. Margie turned it down. Since I was a TV correspondent then, the heavy lifting would be hers, she said. Less time for her work. What work? I might have shouted. I didn’t know how to deal with my anger and disappointment, the last straw in a pile of discontents, and eventually I left the house.

  So we would stand on the sidelines of Susannah’s games, barely talking. But my discomfort was quickly swept away in the pride of my daughter’s team and the pleasure of watching her play. I was a fan! I loved those games. Too bad they were so fraught. Susannah was playing field hockey because the Northern Valley Regional High School at Demarest had no soccer team for girls, the sport she had played passionately for years in a local recreation league. Susannah and her friends had complained. They had been upset and talked about a petition, but there was no strong organizing support beyond their group. They had given up, found other sports, or stopped playing sports. We didn’t talk about it much at the time. The split-up in the family absorbed most of our attention.

  Susannah still loves soccer and plays when she can. It still upsets her to think about not playing high school soccer. When we recently talked about it, she said she found it ironic that I could have been writing about Babe Didrikson, Althea Gibson, and Billie Jean King in the eighties and not have been at all involved in the gender inequity right in front of me. When Susannah and her friends asked the school for a soccer team, they were told that they already had field hockey; they couldn’t have a second fall field sport.

  They could have used a sportswriter, a male TV sportswriter at that, to remind school officials that the boys had both soccer and football in the fall. Title IX, anyone? The law was sixteen years old then and still not being rigorously enforced. In retrospect, I feel ashamed. And stupid. What a chance to put into practice all that abstract reporting, that pose of liberated macho, make a fuss, challenge the school, create a soccer team. Be useful.

  In 2009, I interviewed Billie Jean for a weekly PBS show I was hosting, LIFE (Part 2), about aging and renewal. She had just written a book, Pressure Is a Privilege, in which she offered a new spin on the 1973 Battle of the Sexes. Now it was the Battle of the Ages, and the late Bobby Riggs was her current role model for successful aging, for never giving up. Her victory, she said, had come about because she respected what he had done in the past. He wasn’t just a fifty-five-year-old hustler to her, he was someone who had won the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 1939 and so must never be taken for granted. Respect history and your elders. That’s why she had prepared so hard.

  I thought that was good (certainly good for the show), but Billie Jean has always had a second serve that can surprise you. She also said that she had come to a number of new thoughts through long-term talk therapy. For example, she understood how sports competition can be used as an escape from everyday life, as a way of putting off all the issues that need eventually to be addressed. You don’t have to face your fears when you can focus on the next match. Once she stopped playing regularly, she said, she found herself substituting binge eating for the addiction of competitive matches.

  It was a fascinating insight, but we didn’t have a chance to develop it. Next time, we promised. Billie Jean has always been a mind in motion, one of the smartest athletes I’ve known, and I left with unanswered questions. How many athletes find in sports an avoidance of responsibility and stay in sports to defer adulthood? We easily understand the adrenaline rush of competition; what about the narcotic of dissociation from everyday life?

  Covering sports, particularly on deadline, can offer a similar rush, and during the absorption of chasing a story it’s easy to justify not fulfilling the obligations of a relationship, of a family. Maybe I’ll get to the next Thanksgiving with the in-laws, the next school play or teacher meeting, the next meltdown, drug scare, college application. Can’t make this one, I’ve got to file my story.

  Chapter Eight

  Jock Liberation

  Just as the feminists were going to make my life as a m
an easier, the Athletic Revolutionaries of the 1960s and ’70s were going to bridge the gap between the jocks and the “pukes”—the label a Columbia University crew coach had slapped on anyone in 1968 who wasn’t on his boat, which included hippies, pot smokers, antiwar demonstrators, bearded weirdos, guitar players, and, yes, English majors. (When the coach, Bill Stowe, used that word in an interview, he looked at me with a cheerful condescension that made clear which side of the gap I was on.) In hindsight, I don’t think any of the Revolutionaries could have bridged that gap because they were jocks—enlightened but still entitled, ambitious, focused, driven, able to dissociate from everything but the path to the goal. Compared to them, even while ruthlessly plunging ahead on a story, I feel woolly, distractible, sometimes handicapped by the lack of certainty that nothing matters except winning. Sort of puke-ish, I am.

  Maybe I was attracted by their certainty that sports was important and was being perverted by the establishment. That reinforced my own growing sense that professional and big-time college sports were merely an extension of the reigning power structure, those pale, male, straight preppies who made money and made war. They were jocks. They were big bullies.

  Thus the story that most interested me when I became a columnist in 1967 and could pick most of my own assignments was the growing resentment among athletes, particularly black college football players, at their exploitation by authoritarian coaches who dictated their lives on and off the field. A player could lose his scholarship for growing an Afro or a mustache in defiance of rules, for dating a white woman, for just acting uppity. Meanwhile, he was subject to “stacking,” a practice in which black players were forced into nonleadership positions (many black high school quarterbacks, for example, were turned into running backs and defensive backs in college) and to playing while hurt, risking their careers, even permanent injury, in the interests of their coaches’ game plans.