BILLIE JEAN KING All In: An autobiography. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Billie Jean King was a champion on and off the tennis court, working for inclusion and civil rights as she made tennis history.
Whenever Muhammad Ali met up with tennis legend Billie Jean King, he liked to say, ‘Billie Jeeeean, you’re the Queen.’ And ‘the Queen’ she was. No other female player has had such an impact on the world of tennis and sport more generally. She was a maverick who fought not only for the rights of female players, but also players of colour, African Americans and the LGBTQ+ community. Billie Jean King was a keen promoter of tennis for children, for communities denied opportunities to play, and for women’s sport more broadly. She was also a passionate advocate of human rights. ‘The Queen’ is a candidate for being the woman who has had the most significant impact in the history of world sport.
In All In: An autobiography Billie Jean King provides an extensive and enlightening account of her career and activities on and off the court. It is warts and all – she often criticises herself for her past failings, and takes readers through dark periods in her life.
All In basically covers the period from the 1950s, when Billie Jean discovered tennis, up to her retirement in the early 1980s. (A useful ‘mixed doubles partner’ here is Greg Ruth’s 2021 Tennis: A History from American Amateurs to Global Professionals.) The great strength of All In is how it relates the broader context of the times to events along Billie Jean’s pathway, while simultaneously describing the personal unfolding of her life.
Billie Jean King was a phenomenal player. She won 39 Grand Slam events from the 65 Finals she contested from 1959 to 1983; 12 Singles, 16 Doubles and 11 Mixed Doubles. She won 126 career Singles titles out of 166 Finals. She also won countless other Doubles and Mixed Doubles trophies. Billie Jean King was a great tennis player, but tennis for her was a vehicle for something else.
From an early age she had a keen sense of injustice and felt the need to act to make the world a better place. In the preface to All In she says, ‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a restlessness, an ambition, and an urgency.’ As she found her way into the world of tennis she noticed the way the old men who controlled the amateur game favoured boys. She never forgave Perry T. Jones, the ‘czar’ of the Southern California Tennis Association, when he barred her from a photo of junior tennis players because she was wearing shorts rather than a dress. She also noticed that top-ranked teenage boys received free lunches at the lunch counter of the Los Angeles Tennis Club while she had to make do with cut lunches.
Coming from a working-class family (her father a fireman, her mother a homemaker), Billie Jean attended school with kids of different backgrounds and different coloured skins. She was aware of the Brown v Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court that helped propel the civil rights movement in America. She was also aware of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to break the colour bar in American baseball. And there she is, 12 years old, at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, when something happens:
I was used to the idea that athletes came in all colors. But as I looked down on the grandstand court from my seat in the bleachers, I was struck by how white everything was. Everybody played in white shoes, white socks, white clothes. Even the balls were white. Everybody had white skin. Where was everybody else?
At that moment I had an epiphany … I told myself that day that I would spend my life fighting for equal rights and opportunities for everyone, so no one felt scorned or left out. I believed our church’s teaching that I was put on this earth to do good with my life. Now I had a better idea what my calling could be: I could bring people together through tennis. If I was good enough and fortunate enough to be No. 1 in the world, tennis would be my platform.
All In documents Billy Jean’s path to becoming No. 1 and dominating women’s tennis for two decades, and how she used her status as a champion to fight ‘for equal rights and opportunities for everyone’. But in saying this, Billie Jean King found herself caught in a strange paradox that took her until her fifties to resolve. While she experienced success in taking on the tennis establishment and others in pushing for equal rights and opportunities, she was less successful in coming to terms with herself.
Prior to tennis going Open in 1968, Billie Jean would criticise tennis officials for favouring male over female players, providing them with more resources, including under-the-table payments and providing them with the best courts and times during tournaments, thereby diminishing the exposure of female players. Colleges provided male tennis players with full scholarships, not females. With the advent of Open tennis, promoters began the process of organising tours and tournaments to cash in on the popularity of tennis. The promoters, however, either didn’t want to include women or offered fewer tournaments with substantially less prize money (sometimes as little as one tenth) for women compared to men.
After failing to convince promoters and male players to change their minds, with the help of former tennis player and businesswoman Gladys Heldman, the editor of World Tennis magazine, Billie Jean found sponsors and organised the Virginia Slims Tour for female players. In 1973, she formed the World Tennis Association that now organises and operates women’s tours and tournaments, except for Grand Slams. All In provides the background to these developments.
The 1960s and 1970s were a time of social ferment in America with movements for civil rights, feminism, and opposition to the war in Viet Nam. Billie Jean was caught up in these events and became involved in feminist issues such as abortion rights (she had had an abortion herself). She ‘always defined feminism as advocating equal rights and equal opportunity for everyone’.
In 1973 she found herself at the centre of the feminist zeitgeist when she defeated Bobby Riggs in ‘The Battle of the Sexes’. She takes readers through the circus associated with this event and gives a detailed analysis of the tactics she used to beat Riggs. She says that in the five decades since her victory, ‘it is not an exaggeration to say not a day has gone by without someone talking to me about the Battle of the Sexes match’. Billie Jean then found herself being a spokesperson for women in sport and other concerns. In addition, she initiated various ventures to further promote women’s sport as well as spriuking the Virginia Slims tour.
Billie Jean married Larry King in September 1965, just shy of her twenty-second birthday. They were both involved in various tennis business ventures. In her late 20s she found herself being attracted to women as well as men, and had a lesbian affair around the time of the Battle of the Sexes match. In 1980 she was outed by a former lover, who was trying to sting her for cash and lifetime support. Billie Jean decided to own up to the affair as something in her past, maintaining that her relationship with her husband was solid. In fact her marriage existed in name only, and she had found her lifetime partner in tennis player Ilana Kloss.
All In provides harrowing details of why Billie Jean stayed in the closet for so many years, and the psychological devastation that came from being outed. She lost millions in endorsements and had to put off retirement to keep the wolf from the door. While she had no hesitation fighting on behalf of others, Billie Jean had an aversion to personal conflict. She developed a major eating disorder and became depressed. At age 51 she underwent counselling, which she says saved her life. For those who have no experience of counselling, this chapter makes for valuable reading. Since then she and Ilana have been involved in numerous activities to act on the epiphany Billie Jean King had as a 12 year old.
All In provides a fascinating account of an extraordinary individual who not only had a profound impact on the operation of tennis during tumultuous times, but also used her position to advocate for human rights more broadly.
Billie Jean King with Johnette Howard and Maryanne Vollers All In: An autobiography Alfred A. Knopf 2021 HB 496pp $45.90
Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at Melbourne University who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things. He took up tennis late in life and played his best ever shot at age 68; proud to think he achieved a best-ever at such a tender age.
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