Billie Jean King took tennis equity to the top of sport. She never got comfortable there

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 for equality for women for more than a half-century now. There has been progress, but not nearly enough, she believes — in life as in tennis.

King has pushed into every room she could and tried to work all of them. She has tried to build all kinds of bridges, believing that if she could just talk to people, one-on-one, she could bend their world view a little closer to hers. Sometimes they bend. Others can break. Yet she’s still at it, trying to check the emotions and frustrations that simmer just beneath. The impatience that reveals itself once she gets through some of the happy and vacant baseline exchanges that go with living inside the sport’s establishment as she tries to disrupt it, little by little, again and again.

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 since 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 the hell 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.

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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, N.Y..

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 Malaga, Spain.

King has played many roles in the event since winning its first edition as part of Team USA in 1963, when it was known as the Federation Cup. Participant, champion, team captain, namesake, marketing partner, cheerleader in chief. She got annoyed last year that dining for staff and 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 moment for her. The BJK finals will overlap with the finals of the Davis Cup, the men’s team competition. For some time, she’s been telling anyone who will listen how much better the two events would be together — a kind of tennis world cup.

She has similar ideas about the WTA and ATP Tour Finals, presently held thousands of miles apart in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Turin, Italy, respectively.

“You have your two big season-ending events for individuals and teams. 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’s got the record to justify them. She convinced the U.S. Open to give equal prize money to men and women in 1973; Wimbledon waited another 34 years. World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka still had to speak on being paid half as much as men’s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner for winning the Cincinnati Open this summer. It is not time to get comfortable. There is more to do.

At this point, there is no doubt that King has had as much impact on modern sports as anyone during her lifetime. How she accomplished it all provides another object lesson on how to gain influence.

As edgy, rebellious and disruptive as she was in her early years, someone who used to rib her good friend Arthur Ashe for not being radical enough, she decided that the only way she could force change and begin to bend tennis to her will was to do it from the inside. She needed to work her way into the corridors of the rich and powerful and act like she belonged, even if it meant a life lived in discomfort. Now, she regrets not working with Ashe from inside the tennis clubs that were so exclusionary when they were both around.

In the 1970s, doing something meant rubbing shoulders with tobacco executives at Philip Morris, who bankrolled women’s tennis. To this day she hobnobs with billionaire corporate leaders despite seriously disagreeing with their politics. She has urged engagement and dealmaking with the rulers of countries that criminalize homosexuality and curtail women’s rights. Nearly every year, she and Kloss sit in Wimbledon’s Royal Box. It doesn’t get much more establishment than that.

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“I don’t think I was ever comfortable,” she said. “I was never really just like, ‘Ohhhh, relax.’ No, I’m always pretty alert, I think.”

Kloss, King’s partner in business and in life, said that they have 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 sport to go, too. They have invested in baseball through the LA Dodgers and in 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 Tour Finals to Saudi Arabia, a country which 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. Last weekend, Coco Gauff won $4.8 million (£3.8 million) for winning the championship, the biggest check in women’s tennis history.

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Any conversation with King delivers surprises. Recalling the early days of the second-wave feminism movement in the 1970s, she says she felt somewhat shunned by its leaders. She wished those women, including her longtime friend Gloria Steinem, had used her and the other players more.

“Jocks were thought of as not too bright, that we didn’t know what we were doing. I used to tell Gloria that we’re not just from the head up. But I think we had a platform,” King said.

King is not bitter. She and Steinem had tea recently; they’re fine. Steinem declined to comment.

She believes her match with Riggs launched the tennis boom in the United States, especially among women, not some Grand Slam final nor Rod Laver’s famous duel with Ken Rosewall in Texas in 1972, which drew more than 21 million viewers as it stretched into the evening programming hours.

Friends have told her that the next day, you couldn’t get on a tennis court.

“Everybody was wearing their tennis gear to the grocery store,” she said.

Despite her pride at surpassing limits, she’s fully aware she hasn’t done it all. While King was playing — and winning 39 Grand Slam 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.

Her main hope of the moment is that the competition that bears her name can have some impact beyond the players who play it 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 Yousafzai, 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 Slams, the International Tennis Federation, which controls the Billie Jean King Cup — have 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 1,000s — one rung below the Grand Slams.

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.

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The biased 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 off-season.

“It’s really maddening, you know, generation after generation,” she said. “If you don’t put the game first, you’re gonna 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 captained for many years 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 on Wednesday, 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 on the U.S. Olympic team in 1996 when she won the gold medal in Atlanta, Ga..

“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 didn’t follow any particular formula. Sometimes she talked a lot, sometimes she was silent. Sometimes the U.S. 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? How can we all work together to have the best end result possible?”

Sometimes it would get uncomfortable. That was fine then and it’s fine now. King, who turns 81 on November 22, is not about to change the habit of a lifetime.

(Top photos: Getty Images; Design: Dan Goldfarb)