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

4. Before the Sports Bra: A Short History of Women’s Sports through the 1970s

Chapter Four Before the Sports Bra A Short History of Women’s Sports through the 1970s On July 10, 1999, more than 90,000 fans at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl and an American television audience estimated at 40 million watched the U.S. soccer team defeat China for the Women’s World Cup. Tied 0-0 in regulation and after two grueling overtimes, the game came down to a tense penalty shoot-out. When strong goaltending by Briana Scurry kept the Chinese from scoring, Brandi Chastain kicked the next penalty shot to win the match for the United States 5-4. Overcome with emotion and emulating the universal gesture of jubilant male soccer players, she dropped to her knees and tore off her jersey, revealing an incredibly ripped body and a black Nike sports bra. That iconic image came to symbolize the triumphs of the women’s soccer team, and by extension, the new legitimacy of women athletes everywhere.1 While much had been written leading up to the match about the connection between the team’s players and a younger generation of predominantly female soccer fans, the event also resonated with an older generation of women athletes—those who grew up long before the sports bra was 118 Before the Sports Bra invented. Whatever the sport, they too had wanted to play but never had the opportunities that girls and women of the Title IX generations did. To have dreamed of playing before 90,000 cheering fans on national television would have been absolutely incomprehensible in their sporting days. No wonder, noted the Pittsburgh Post, that these older, aging former athletes feel “a bit giddy as they reflect on their careers and lives as pioneers. In a way, the broad-based fascination of the World Cup has become the happy ending every female athlete sought but seldom realized.”2 Of course, there was a precedent for such giddy feelings: the night Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in 1973. Played before enthusiastic crowds and huge television audiences, both events riveted national attention and sparked nationwide conversations about the status of women in sports. Like the women’s soccer team, which came to symbolize the aspirations of female athletes everywhere, Billie Jean King stood for the aspirations of an earlier generation of women at a critical moment in American history. The Battle of the Sexes cemented Billie Jean King’s reputation as America’s first female sports superstar; the World Cup match extended star status to an entire team. The charismatic members of the women’s soccer team were quickly dubbed “the daughters of Title IX” by the media, but the 1999 World Cup victory is best seen as part of a long and varied tradition of female athletic participation rather than the result of a single piece of legislation.3 Even though participation and opportunities seemed to explode in the 1970s, the story is more complex than that. Title IX did not invent women’s sports. As Billie Jean King’s early career showed, there were women’s sports and committed women athletes before Title IX—they just didn’t get much support or public attention. And changes were already underway before Title IX was passed, laying the groundwork for women’s sports seemingly spontaneous emergence in the 1970s. Just as second-wave feminists sometimes acted as if they had discovered sex discrimination, thereby erasing a long history of agitation for women’s rights, so too does a focus just on Title IX shortchange all that went before in the history of women’s sport. BillieJeanKingbelongedtoatransitionalgenerationofAmericansportswomen . Her career served as a link between older patterns of extremely limited sports opportunities for girls and women and the glimmerings of a brave new athletic future where women’s sports commanded respect and resources (almost) commensurate with men’s. The decade of the 1970s was when this sea change began, and, as always, Billie Jean King was right in the 119 Before the Sports Bra thick of it. Her ability to forge a professional tennis career at the same time she emerged as a public advocate for women’s sports was deeply influenced both by long-term historical patterns and the contemporary context dramatically unfolding around her in the 1970s. For most of American history, sports have been a male preserve. Competitive athletics were seen as “natural” for men and boys, but somehow “unnatural” or illegitimate for women and girls...