By Matthew Futterman / The Athletic
Billie Jean King is losing patience.
Maybe that’s what happens when you’re 80 years old and the actuarial tables say time is running short. King has been advocating equality for women for more than half a century. There has been progress, but not nearly enough, she believes — in life or in tennis.
King has pushed into every room she could and tried to work all of them. She has tried to build bridges, believing that if she could just talk to people, one on one, she could bend their worldview a little closer to hers. Sometimes they bend. Sometimes they break. Yet she is still at it, trying to check her emotions and frustrations and deal with the impatience that reveals itself as she tries to live inside the sport’s establishment while trying to disrupt it.
Long ago, King made a cold calculation. She didn’t want to be someone who was “just going out talking, standing on a soapbox,” as she said during an interview last week, conducted over video because she and her partner, Ilana Kloss, have been nursing a respiratory illness.
“It’s what you do that matters.”
That, she said, required practicality. Practicality comes with a price — but seriously, what is taking so long?
“I have this saying that when you read history, it goes fast, but when you live in it, it goes slowly,” she said.
King, the 12-time Grand Slam singles champion, a founding leader of the WTA Tour, the slayer of Bobby Riggs in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” showdown, is tennis royalty 365 days a year. That is especially true in late summer, when the U.S. Open happens at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, New York.
Another reminder comes in the fall, when the finals of the Billie Jean King Cup, the national team competition that bears her name, bring together some of the best women’s players in the world. This year they have come to Málaga, Spain.
King has played many roles in the event since winning its first edition as part of the U.S. team in 1963, when it was known as the Federation Cup. Participant, champion, team captain, namesake, marketing partner, cheerleader in chief. She was annoyed last year that dining for staff and news media at the event was slow, getting in the way of their work. She got on those responsible and told them to fix it.
In one way, this year’s edition is a breakthrough for her. The King Cup finals overlap with the finals of the Davis Cup, the men’s team competition. For some time, she has been saying how much better the two events would be together — a kind of tennis World Cup.
She has similar ideas about the WTA and ATP Finals, held thousands of miles apart in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Turin, Italy.
“You have your two big season-ending events for individuals and teams,” she said. “To really showcase the sport, just like the majors, right? It becomes just like a fifth major.”
She says all this with a combination of satisfaction and those “why does it take so long for people to listen to me” shakes of the head that punctuate her sentences. She has got the record to justify them. She persuaded the U.S. Open to give equal prize money to men and women in 1973; Wimbledon waited another 34 years. The women’s world No. 1, Aryna Sabalenka, still had to speak on being paid half as much as the men’s world No. 1, Jannik Sinner, for winning the Cincinnati Open over the summer. It is not time to get comfortable. There is more to do.
Kloss, King’s partner in business and in life, said they had learned to treat these rooms as opportunities: to learn and build relationships with people who can help them get where they want to go, and where they want sports to go, too. They have invested in baseball through the Los Angeles Dodgers, women’s ice hockey, the Angel City women’s soccer team and media startups. King created the Women’s Sports Foundation in 1974, two years after Title IX banned sex discrimination in schools.
“You might not get everything, but I think if you know somebody, you feel like there’s a connection,” Kloss said. “In person, building those relationships has served us both incredibly well.”
King has caught her share of flak for this approach. At an event celebrating the creation of the WTA on the eve of Wimbledon 2023, she voiced her support for a deal in the tens of millions of dollars to bring the WTA Finals to Saudi Arabia, a country that human rights groups have criticized for its record on freedom of expression, criminalization of same-sex relationships and women’s rights.
“I think I would take the money,” she said at the time, reiterating her long-held support of engagement as a vehicle for change. Her fellow figureheads of women’s tennis, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, wrote in The Washington Post that engaging as a vehicle for change would mean awarding a marquee event and all its cachet to a kingdom yet to earn it.
The WTA took the money. On Nov. 9, Coco Gauff earned $4.8 million for winning the championship, the biggest check in women’s tennis history.
Despite her pride at surpassing limits, King is fully aware she has not done it all. While King was playing — and winning 39 Grand Slam tournament titles (12 singles, 16 women’s doubles, 11 mixed doubles) — and for years after, gay and bisexual women in tennis felt they had to hide their sexuality. Now, statistics would suggest that men do, since tennis has yet to have an openly gay male player come out during his career. Brian Vahaly, the American former world No. 63, came out after retiring in 2007.
King’s main hope at the moment is that the competition that bears her name can have some influence beyond the players, on and off the court. This year, the event will host a summit on women’s leadership in business and sports on the morning of the final. Malala Yousufzai, the Pakistani education advocate who was shot by the Taliban when she was 15, is among the featured guests.
Leadership is another current frustration. Each entity with a seat at the table where tennis decisions are made — the tournaments, the tour officials, the leaders of the Grand Slam events and the International Tennis Federation, which controls the Billie Jean King Cup — has interests to protect. The net result, she feels, is currently a schedule that burns some players out before the end of the season. That hurts her directly when some of the best players, including Gauff, opt out of the Billie Jean King Cup because they are simply out of gas by mid-November.
Instead of shortening the schedule, the ATP and WTA Tours have extended the lengths of their biggest tournaments, the 1000s, which are one rung below the Grand Slam events.
Instead of spacing out the team competitions that many players say give them a break from the eat-what-you-kill nature of the rest of the year, they stick those events at the end of the year.
King and Kloss — and plenty of players — would prefer the season ended shortly after the U.S. Open, before pivoting to team competitions and a longer offseason.
“It’s really maddening, you know, generation after generation,” she said. “If you don’t put the game first, you’re going to screw it up in the end for yourself. It’s so obvious.”
This year’s event also has a small circle-of-life moment for King. She was the captain for many years of a U.S. team that often featured Lindsay Davenport, the former world No. 1. Now Davenport is the U.S. captain.
In an interview in Turin last week, Davenport said King came into her life at a key moment, in 1995. She was 19, floating around the top 20, and unsure of how much further her tennis could take her.
King told her she had no limits. The next year, King was coaching Davenport to a gold medal with the U.S. Olympic team in Atlanta.
“When you hear it from someone like that, it goes a lot further than just hearing it from, you know, a local pro or your parents,” Davenport said.
As a captain, King did not follow any particular formula. Sometimes she talked a lot, sometimes she was silent. Sometimes the United States had four women in the top 10, and King had to manage egos, spread out the playing time and, as Davenport put it, “teach us that these few weeks out of the year, it was going to be bigger than just yourself.”
“How can you get your teammate to play better?” Davenport said. “How can we all work together to have the best end result possible?”
Sometimes it would get uncomfortable. That was fine then and it is fine now. King, who turns 81 on Friday, is not about to change the habit of a lifetime.
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