‘I WANTED TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE’
Billie Jean King is famous for her tennis wins but she’s most proud of her off-court success as an equal pay campaigner, she tells Joanne Finney
Tennis superstar Billie Jean King on why she’ll always fight for fairness
Billie Jean King can still remember how she felt the moment she picked up a tennis racket for the first time aged 10. It was a warm September day in 1954 and a school friend invited her to public courts in southern California where they lived. ‘I grew up playing basketball, softball and baseball. I loved team sports,’ she says. ‘But what I realised that day was how many times I got to touch the ball. I had to put my total self into it, you cannot make a pass to someone and get a breather in tennis. It was constant and it was exciting.’ After just one session with her first coach, Clyde Walker, she knew what she wanted to do with her life.
Now 77, Billie Jean grew up in the suburb of Long Beach, with her younger brother, Randy, firefighter father, Bill, and mother, Betty. ‘We were a blue-collar family,’ she remembers. ‘My parents were strict but very loving. We worked hard – my brother and I had chores. One of the best things they did for us was not to care how good we were. There was no pressure. I remember saying to my mom when I was seven, “I’m going to do something great with my life.” She replied, “That’s good, now keep drying those dishes.”’
Tennis became central to Billie Jean’s life and she was soon competing as a junior player. She ran errands for neighbours to pay for her first racket and, when her family couldn’t afford the airfares to the east coast where lots of tournaments took place, the local community raised the funds.
She gained international recognition when she and Karen Hantze became the youngest pair to win the Wimbledon women’s doubles title in 1961, when Billie Jean was just 17. Five years later she triumphed again at Wimbledon, winning her first singles title against Maria Bueno. She followed up with repeat wins in 1967 and 1968. In 1967 she also won her first US Open singles championship and the Australian Open singles title the following year. In total, Billie Jean was ranked number one in the world six times, from 1966 through to 1975, with 39 Grand Slam titles, 20 of them at Wimbledon.
Although she loved being part of the tennis world, she soon began to notice the inequalities within it. She was just 12 and playing at Los Angeles tennis club when she first noticed the lack of diversity: ‘I looked around me and realised that everybody in tennis that I’d seen up to that time wore white shoes, white clothes, played with white balls, and everyone who played was white. I said to myself: “Where is everybody else?” That epiphany has driven me for the rest of my life. I knew from then on I wanted to make the world a better place through tennis.’
Indeed, when asked what she’s proudest of, it’s not the trophies or the rankings, it’s the successes she’s achieved off the court. And the list of these is impressive: when concerns over
Even if you’re not a born activist, life can make you one
the disparity between male and female tennis players’ prize money weren’t addressed, Billie Jean (along with eight of her contemporaries, known as the ‘Original Nine’) boycotted the women’s tour and launched the Virginia Slims Invitational. Three years later, she was pivotal in founding the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA). Her most sensational moment in the fight for equality was perhaps the iconic ‘Battle Of The Sexes’ match she won against male player Bobby Riggs in 1973 in front of 30,000 spectators.
Even today, she’s still fighting. In 2014, she founded the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting equality in the workplace. Last year, the Federation Cup was renamed the Billie Jean King Cup – the first time a major global team competition has been named after a woman. It’s no coincidence that from this year, the prize pot awarded to the women is equivalent to that offered to the men playing in the Davis Cup. ‘I’m very big on money,’ she says, ‘I don’t think women are taught to follow the money enough, it gives you opportunities, power, mobility.
‘Women’s tennis,’ she continues, ‘is better than it was when I was a young woman, but it’s got a long way to go. In the majors, women are on equal prize money but in the total tour, they’re still not. Sports is just a microcosm of society, it’s reflecting what’s going on in the world.’
She doesn’t know where this fire within her comes from, only that she felt it from a young age. ‘Even if you’re not a born activist, life can make you one.’
PRIVATE BATTLES
While she was vocal about inequality, for a long time there was one area of her life she didn’t speak about: her sexuality. Aged 21, Billie Jean married her college boyfriend Larry King and the couple were happy for many years. Then in 1981, she was very publicly outed when Marilyn Barnett, an assistant she’d had a secret relationship with, sued her for palimony after they separated. The resulting backlash cost her a great deal, personally and professionally. ‘It’s so different today than it was then,’ she says. ‘I was booed on court, I lost all my
endorsements, I had terrible notes from my sponsors; one even called me a “slut”. Today, coming out would be applauded. Today, I would get a call from the president of the United States, most likely.’
It was the start of a tumultuous time in her life and, after periods suffering from disordered eating, she sought help. ‘I was already in trouble with binge eating when I was 11 or 12. For me, it started around puberty. I think part of it was being my gender, the pressure on girls.’ After she finished competing, her weight fluctuated and, by the time Billie Jean started treatment for binge-eating disorder, she was sometimes eating up to 10 bars of chocolate a day.
‘Therapy was so big for me,’ she says. ‘My generation was taught not to ask for help, so it was a big breakthrough for me to ask. In one session, my therapist said: “Do you realise you give away all your power to your parents?” I realised I was still trying to be a good little girl, who made her parents happy. They were homophobic and there was a lot to deal with there. It was important that I gave them a lot of time to figure this out for themselves. I took a long, long time to figure it out myself.’ Spending time at Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders in the mid-1990s was a turning point for Billie Jean. ‘Finally at 51, I felt comfortable in my own skin,’ she says.
Reliving some of the more difficult events in her life as she wrote her new memoir, All In, was ‘like going through hell’ but she was determined to share her story, in the hope that by being open and honest it might help others to be, too. As she says in the book, ‘Once I began living truthfully, I felt like I could breathe again.’ She’s in a much better place emotionally these days. For the past 41 years, she’s been in a long-term relationship with her former doubles partner Ilana Kloss. The couple never had children but are very close to their siblings’ children and grandchildren, and are godparents to ex-husband Larry’s two children with his second wife, Nancy.
THE LONG VIEW
Deciding to retire from tennis wasn’t easy, she says. ‘I shouldn’t have quit the first time, I should have played one more year of singles,’ she confides. ‘But I had a bad knee, then I had a bad foot. It was time for the younger ones. I was 39 or 40, so it was a pretty good effort.’
She’s recently started playing tennis again after a 25-year hiatus. ‘It’s so much fun,’ she says. ‘I’m not playing tennis, I’m hitting the ball! There’s something about it that gives me such emotional satisfaction.’
Although she will always be a campaigner and is still heavily involved in the tennis world, she now also makes a bit more time for herself. ‘When you're older,’ she says, ‘You have a better perspective. You think about what’s most important in life. For me, that’s to live your truth but also to help others.’
All In (Viking) by Billie Jean King is out 9 September