Billie Jean King’s life too big for one book
Leylah Fernandez and Emma Raducanu bring the 21st century with them.
The Sept. 11 attacks happened the year before they were born. They live on a globe that, to them, is finite and manageable. Fernandez has an Ecuadorian father and a Canadian mother of Filipino extraction; Raducanu’s parents are from Romania and China.
Raducanu defeated Fernandez for the U.S. Open women’s championship Saturday afternoon in
New York. Raducanu won $2.5 million and Fernandez won $1.25 million. That’s the same money Novak Djokovic and Daniil Medvedev will make in the men’s final today.
In no other sports do women get the same-sized pie.
Fernandez and Raducanu never saw Billie Jean King hit a tennis ball in competition. But they must know by now that King is their benefactor, the crusader who browbeat tennis into true gender equality, the champion who became a rising tide.
They are the sum of Billie Jean’s imaginings.
King’s autobiography, “All In,” is in the bookstores. It is big and loud and thorough and, for those who actually try to visualize putting the same irons into the same fires, quite exhausting.
She learned the game at public parks in Long Beach, from kind instructors who didn’t charge a dime. Now the National Tennis Center in New York is named for King, as is the dazzling new Long Beach library.
She grew up on 36th Street in the Wrigley section, daughter of a firefighter, amid strict boundaries that left room for enormous support. She wound up with a Presidential Medal of Honor.
Nelson Mandela sought her out. Elton John wrote “Philadelphia Freedom” about her.
She was 12-6 in Grand Slam singles titles and won 39 major championships all told, including a record 20 at Wimbledon. She saved women’s tennis, and maybe even feminism at large, when she slayed an outrageous dragon named Bobby Riggs, in front of 30,000 fans in the Astrodome. Few players in any sport have walked through such high pressure, in front of a prime-time ABC audience, and a celebrity section comparable to AliFrazier.
She had an abortion when it was still a crime in much of the U.S. She was outed by Marilyn Barnett, the lover who sued her. That cost her millions
in endorsements, even from Phil Knight and Nike. Eventually the world was pulled by her magnetic field, as it often was, and King became an LGBTQ hero.
In so many ways, hers is the story of America.
Yet King, who gritted through rampant illnesses and injuries to finish seven different years as the world’s No. 1 player, was stopped in her tracks by an eating disorder, and how it masked far deeper issues.
At the Renfew Center near Philadelphia, a counselor asked King to visualize a safe space. “I couldn’t find one,” she said.
Eventually she did. She and partner Ilana Kloss brought their relationship
into the light. In 2014, King went to the Sochi Winter Olympics and facilitated the rescue of Vladimiar Slavskii, a 17-yearold gay activist who had grown up bullied and threatened in Russia. On the wings of a question she asked often – “What can we do for him?” – King placed him at Cal State L.A., and Vladimir beamed as he saw his first Pride parade.
King’s whole life is based on the principle that the current condition does not have to be the permanent one. She and her brother Randy, who became a successful major-league reliever for 12 years, went to a PCL game between the L.A. Angels
and the Hollywood Stars. The afternoon was ruined when Billie Jean realized that all the players were men.
She won’t see that barrier come down, but she was also taken aback when she attended the Pacific Southwest tournament at L.A. Tennis Club. “I was struck by how white everything was ... white shoes, white socks, white clothes,” she writes. “Even the balls were white. Everybody had white skin. Where was everybody else?
“I told myself I would spend my life fighting for equal rights and opportunities for everyone. I could bring people together through tennis.”
When it came time to
mobilize women on the tennis tours, or to ditch “shamateurism” in favor of open tennis, she carried those flags, ran those associations. When Dennis Murphy came up with the idea of World Team Tennis, she ran that, too.
None of the dizzying events of her life made her forget the well-meaning coach who had told her, “You’ll be good because you’re ugly,” or having no place to play in college after she had already won a doubles title at Wimbledon.
And now, with her conquests behind her?
“I wish I had nine lives,” King writes.
She lived through two lives Saturday.