Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports

1. The Making of a Sports Icon

Chapter One The Making of a Sports Icon In her 1982 autobiography, Billie Jean King reflected on the changes that she had seen in the first forty years of her life, a time of enormous transitions for women, tennis, and America in general. “Any woman born around 1943 has had to endure so many changes—in her educational experience, in her working life, in sex, in her roles, her expectations. But with me, it always seemed like I was also on the cutting edge of that change.” She continued, “I was brought up in a very structured universe—in my family, in school, in tennis, in every part of my world. Then, all of a sudden, the rules all started to change, and it seemed there weren’t any rules left. I tried to go with the flow, but always seemed to find myself out in front and on the line.” This sense of being ahead of her times, a trailblazer on a variety of personal and professional fronts, characterizes many aspects of Billie Jean King’s life. She remains positive about the future: “I have to be. I’m always 20 years ahead of the times.”1 Practically as soon as the American public began to take notice of a brash young Californian named Billie Jean Moffitt King, fans and detractors alike 16 The Making of a Sports Icon realized that there was more to her than just her tennis. “Billie Jean is not just a tennis player,” noted a fan in the Reader’s Digest in 1974. “She’s a cause.” Like other sports stars such as Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and Joe Louis, who grabbed national attention to become icons of their individual sports and ambassadors of sport in general, Billie Jean King won a following for her role in transforming amateur tennis into a successful professional sport with broad national appeal. Soon after, she emerged as one of the nation’s most prominent and outspoken champions for the female sex—“Mother Courage with a backhand.” In 1990 Life magazine named her one of the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century.2 And yet, as with any idol or icon, it is important not to conflate Billie Jean King the symbol with Billie Jean King the person. “Even my own autobiography sitting up there on my shelf gives me the willies,” she told women­ Sports in 1977. “It’s like two different people. There’s me, and then there’s that tennis player. I feel like I’m not what I am.” Fearless and bold in public but more conventional in private, she struggled to reconcile her transgressive (for the time) sexual feelings with her desire to be universally liked and respected. America at the time was not ready for a gay tennis superstar, so her sexual orientation was kept firmly closeted. To her the rationalizations were compelling: she didn’t want to hurt women’s tennis, and she didn’t want to embarrass her parents, who would have found such a choice incomprehensible . This deceit meant that for most of her career—even after she was outed in 1981—she was living a lie. As we will see in chapter 6, King’s search for acceptance, from her public and especially from herself, turned into a lifetime journey.3 Billie Jean Moffitt was a war baby. When she was born on November 22, 1943, her twenty-five-year-old father, Bill, was in the navy, stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, as a physical education leader for stateside troops; her mother, Betty, had stayed home in Long Beach, California, for the duration of his active duty. Like many children conceived during wartime, Billie Jean was named after her absent father instead of her mother’s original choice of Michelle Louise. King later couldn’t resist imagining the headlines: “Michelle Louise Whips Bobby Riggs in Straight Sets.”4 Both her parents had grown up in broken homes during the Depression, and memories of those hard times were not easily dispelled. Her mother remembered a succession of stepfathers and times when all the family could afford to eat was potatoes. Her father’s mother deserted the family when 17 The Making of a Sports Icon Bill was thirteen, leaving him with adult-sized responsibilities for a younger brother after an older sister died of cancer. Born and raised in Montana, at some point in the 1930s...