Money, and the conditioning of women not to discuss it, is a theme that spins through All In, a comprehensive new memoir by Billie Jean King. “Like it or not, in this culture money is a measuring stick,” writes the tennis champion and equal-pay pioneer, a celebrated battler and astute tactician both on court and off.
That “like it or not” is as close to apologetic as King gets these days, and she confesses to finding it hilarious watching old videos of herself using “soft, measured tones” when she must have been “growling inside”. Deemed a radical regardless, King excelled at irritating the men who controlled professional tennis precisely because the currency of her activism lay in keeping financial score.
In one pertinent moment, she recalls her “calculated strategy” of openly vying in 1971 to become the first sportswoman to win $100,000 in a single year. Just five years later, Chris Evert became the first to win $1 million.
That her legacy continues to be so quantifiable in cash is a point that All In taps over the net for an easy winner; if anything, King could have opted to smash it home harder. Because it isn’t only the current top-earning female athlete (Naomi Osaka, an estimated $60 million) who happens to be a tennis player. In 2019, a ranking published by Forbes found that all 10 of the 10 highest-paid sportswomen traded in forehands and backhands.
King delivers the spice. She contrasts her efforts to close the chasm between male and female prize money – in 1970, a ratio of 12-1 existed at one tournament that remains an equality laggard in 2021 – with Australian rival Margaret Court’s unhelpful observation that “if you worry about money, you become hard”. The comment irked her: Court had been no slouch herself chasing side deals during the sport’s pre-Open “shamateur” era.
Also resurrected is male player Stan Smith’s advice to the ladies to “settle down” before all their ball-bashing “defeminised” them and left them “too independent”. The selectively deployed “market forces” argument for why men should be paid more – which still surfaces today, like a weeping stain – is obliterated with reference to Smith, as King delights in telling a newspaper she sells more tickets than him.
Some chapters cover ground dramatised by the smartly scripted 2017 film Battle of the Sexes, in which the young King (Emma Stone) aces a media circus of a match against aged chauvinist Bobby Riggs (a tragic figure whose amateur career was cut short by war). That night at the Houston Astrodome in September 1973 is colourfully chronicled. But of more historical importance is the formation of the breakaway Virginia Slims tour, in which the “Original Nine” players and promoter Gladys Heldman segued from Women’s Lib to “Women’s Lob” courtesy of a tobacco sponsorship, outwitting tennis authorities’ bid to freeze women out of the game.
Wisdom worth repeating comes as King stresses the value of negotiating in a language opponents can understand. She made the case for equal pay to the US Open with a deodorant sponsor already on board to finance it: the tournament director, she says, “couldn’t believe that I’d brought money to the table, not just rhetoric”.
Tennis nostalgia fans will enjoy how she recounts her forays to her beloved Wimbledon, from doubles victory as Billie Jean Moffitt alongside Karen Hantze on her 1961 debut to her last singles appearance in 1983. She retired with 39 Grand Slam titles in singles and doubles; unsurprisingly, some losses still rankle.
There is no attempt either to gloss over the pain of what was a long-unresolved distance from husband and business partner Larry King – a distance they both knew sprang from her affairs with women. After her Battle of the Sexes triumph, Billie Jean was admired as “an American maverick”, and yet openness about being gay was impossible. She describes her denial of her lesbianism in a 1975 Playboy interview as “an example of the gymnastics I was doing at the time”. It took a personal toll.
When a former partner sued her in 1981 for palimony – dubbed “galimony” – and outed her, the corporate world gave its verdict in dollars and cents. This timet it took them away. Within two months, King lost at least $500,000 in endorsements. “In the long run, I lost millions,” she writes.
Today, after a period of post-retirement vulnerability, King (77) is happy, and happily married to another ex-player, Ilana Kloss, with whom she has been in a relationship for four decades. She is an effusive TV presence when she pops up at Slams, and at least some of that on-screen personality flares on to these pages.
In 2006, the US Open complex at Flushing Meadows was renamed the Billie Jean King National Tennis Centre, while the women’s national team competition is now called the Billie Jean King Cup.
These honours notwithstanding, it is hard to see how King will ever be repaid.
