This is an important book. It’s the story of one truly remarkable woman, but it’s also the story of the women’s movement, and the fight for gender equality both in the field of sports, and in the world at large. It’s an account of an athlete coming to terms with her sexuality, in a very public way, at a time when honesty on this issue, was a hard road to walk.
Billie Jean King was a brilliant tennis player. She won thirty-nine major titles in her career, twenty of them at Wimbledon. She competed and won in the doubles and mixed doubles along with the singles tournaments. She’s considered by many to be the greatest doubles player in the history of tennis. She was the first female athlete to earn more than $100,000 in prize money in a single season. She was also the first woman to be chosen to be Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year. Her accomplishments on the tennis court alone make her a historic figure, but there’s a lot more to Billie Jean King than her tennis, as this book makes clear.
She was an activist, fighting for and championing women’s rights, and (later in life) LGBTQ rights. She helped to form a separate women’s tour, when the Lawn Tennis Association refused to pay female tennis players on par with their male counterparts. In 1969, most tournaments paid the men five times as much as the women. The low point in women’s pay inequality came in 1970 when the Pacific Southwest Championships directed by Jack Kramer announced prize money which had a 12 to 1 differential between what the male and female tennis players could win.
This provoked the top nine female tennis players to take a stand. They boycotted that tournament and went on to create their own tennis tour which was, at the time, sponsored by Virginia Slims. Billie Jean was one of the founders, and the first president of the Women’s Tennis Association which was formed in 1974.
In 1973 she was challenged to what was dubbed the Battle of the Sexes match against fifty-five-year-old former tennis champion Bobby Riggs. He was a self-proclaimed male chauvinist who went on TV making outrageous and insulting comments about the inferiority of women’s tennis. That match drew a great deal of publicity, and a world-wide television audience of around fifty million people. Bille Jean went out on court knowing how vitally important this match was for the future of women’s tennis. She beat Bobby Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-4, 6-3.
While her life on court and her fight for equality forms the crux of this book, she addresses other issues as well, like her sexuality, the difficulties she had to face when she was outed against her will, her relationship with her then husband, Larry King, her current partner, Ilana Kloss who’s been with her for the last forty-two years, her struggles with her weight when she stopped playing competitively, and more.
She brings such a palpable honesty to her account of all these aspects of her life that it feels like she really is telling it like it was, though she might have been kinder in writing about some of the people in her life than they really deserved.
She begins the book by recounting her childhood, and she sets the scene not just of her home life, but of what the world was like for female athletes, and by extension women, back in the fifties and sixties. I know the history of the women’s movement, but reading this book, I was reminded once again, just how hard won our rights and freedoms are, and how recently they were won.
Just fifty years ago the world was a very different place for women. This is not to say that the battle is over. Women’s rights are being rolled back as we speak, so the fight continues. And that makes this book all the more timely and relevant.
The narrative is engaging, and the book is mostly well-written. It feels a bit rushed towards the end, but that’s a minor quibble. I listened to the audio version of this book, narrated by Billie Jean, herself, and that made it extra special. She’s not a trained audio book reader, and she’s not performing, so you can hear her pause at the difficult moments, and you can hear her feelings in her voice as she shares this honest account of her life, and you’re right there with this amazing woman.
between the pages 