Billie Jean King Wants Athletes to Follow the Money

You can draw a line from the one-dollar contract that Billie Jean King and eight other players signed, in 1970, with the publisher and promoter Gladys Heldman, to form a separate women’s tennis tour, and the three million dollars that Naomi Osaka took home for winning the 2020 U.S. Open—the same amount that the men’s winner, Dominic Thiem, received. The contract with Heldman led to the founding of the Women’s Tennis Association, in 1973. That same year, King successfully pushed the U.S. Open to start offering equal prize money to women. You can extend the line further, to the fifty-five million dollars that Osaka made in a single year when endorsements are included—because King not only helped change the paradigm for women’s tennis players but also the marketplace for female athletes, and she played a significant role in the women’s movement.

It would be a mistake, though, to think that King was solely focussed on promoting opportunities for women. As she writes in her new memoir, “All In,” she’s had a keen sense for discrimination of any kind since she was a child. She also believed, early on, that she could do something about it. Billie Jean Moffitt was born on November 22, 1943, in Long Beach, California. Her father, Bill, was a firefighter; her mother, Betty, was a homemaker. Her younger brother Randy also became a professional athlete, pitching in the major leagues for twelve seasons. Billie Jean was introduced to tennis at the age of eleven, at a friend’s country club, but she honed her game on public courts. As a teen-ager, she became one of the top players in the country, and, soon, the world. In 1965, she married a law student named Larry King. They had a loving but unusual relationship. He encouraged her efforts to speak out against the patriarchal structure of tennis, and they became business partners as much as spouses. Billie Jean eventually realized that she was attracted to women. In 1981, she was publicly outed by a woman with whom she’d had a relationship and who was attempting to extort her. Larry and Billie Jean divorced in 1987; King has been with her partner, Ilana Kloss, for more than forty years.

On the court, King won thirty-nine Grand Slam titles, twelve of them in singles. Off it, she not only founded the W.T.A. but also co-founded, with Larry and others, a popular coed pro league, called World TeamTennis, and a magazine, womenSports. She launched the Women’s Sports Foundation and lobbied for the passage of Title IX. Later, she became an advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice. But she is perhaps best known for defeating Bobby Riggs at the Houston Astrodome in a 1973 spectacle known as the Battle of the Sexes. It hardly mattered that Riggs was a fifty-five-year-old, washed-up gambling addict, or that King had won three of the four Grand Slams the previous year—what was at stake was more than a tennis match. Riggs caricatured the role of the swaggering misogynist—but men really did openly talk the way he did. Married women often couldn’t even get a credit card without their husbands’ approval. The pressure on King was immense, and her victory—watched by tens of millions on television—was a cultural flash point (and, much later, a movie starring Emma Stone).

King is seventy-seven now, and still tireless. She speaks with obvious passion and curiosity—one thought sparks another; one anecdote winds into a different one altogether. I’ve rarely done interviews in which the subject was so eager to hear what I think, too. Our conversation has been edited both for length and for clarity.

There’s an interesting scene in your book of you going to the U.S. Open and pushing for equal prize money, in 1973. You’d already lined up some of the money through sponsors.

I didn’t want to come in with one dime less than equal money. We got it through sponsorship. Bristol-Myers was so good to us. These things can happen when somebody has power and can say yes. We really got lucky. But, if you notice, everything we did, we always tried to do everything behind the scenes first. We tried everything behind the scenes first.

I feel like most of the athletes do not understand the business side of things. Athletes say, What should I do? What should I learn about? I go, Learn the other side of the story—learn the business side. Most players just want more money. And I’m, like, Just understand their side, so when you sit down to speak, and have dialogue, you actually have some understanding and empathy for them. And, if you can show that, I think they’ll start to think about you in a different way as well. It’s just about relationships—everything.

This is a volatile moment for labor in tennis, with the launch of the Professional Tennis Players Association, an organization led by Novak Djokovic, aimed at giving players more of a say in the operation of the sport, and a larger share of the revenue. At least initially, women weren’t a part of it—though the group has said that the plan was always to include women. They’re obviously not doing everything behind the scenes first.

They didn’t. They never talked to me, so I don’t know what the thinking is. When I was at Wimbledon, I kept asking people, but nobody seems to know anything. They’ve definitely improved their Web site—they’ve got politically correct language now. They only talk about the women if they’re pushed, though. That’s not good enough. They’ve got heavy hitters, they’ve got money—Djokovic is definitely going to be the best ever, which is really important. But I don’t know how much people want to follow him.

If they had come to you, what would you have said?

I would’ve just continued behind the scenes. If you go back to the sixties, when we finally got pro tennis—“open” tennis—I went around to the men, trying to get one association: the men and women together. They rejected it. It was a rough time, because these guys, some of them are my dear friends, and they didn’t care. And it’s still rough, because, generally, the men don’t really care about us. I don’t see any big push with the women with this new association.

What I wanted in the sixties was one association. I also wanted the players to own the majors—and own the game, basically. And the men said, No, no, no, it’s great the way it is. And I said, Well, it’s going to have challenges, and I think the players should be getting a percentage of the growth, at least. They just looked at me like I had five heads. Larry kept telling me, The guys do not want you—do not even bother with them, because they don’t care. They don’t believe in you guys. And they think that money is theirs. And that was correct. They kept saying, Well, the money should come to us.

That was the sixties. If you look at Sports Illustrated covers [from the time, featuring women], they had skiers, swimmers—all individual sports, always a beauty shot. In the beginning, usually sports that people were interested in were where girls don’t wear that many clothes. Men control the media. That has a lot to do with it. I think they still get away with a lot of that. It was individual sports, where there’s no contact, which is more ladylike to them. So you have to understand the climate and the society at the time. It’s gotten better for your generation, and the younger ones coming up, but it’s still not where we want it.

One thing I want to stress here is that, when a woman leads, she leads for everyone. What people do to us is, when a woman leads, we lead only for women, for change just for women—that’s what people say. It really irritates me, because I think that’s why we don’t have a woman President of the United States. We’re always a support system. We only have half the market all the time because of the way people perceive us. It happened with the King-Riggs match. “Oh, look what you did for women.” No, no, no. You guys, when I lead, I lead for everyone.

A few years ago, Andy Murray said that he knows men in the locker room who would rather take less money, as long as it’s more than the women, rather than equal pay and more money for everyone.

That tells you everything. We have to keep changing. I love kids today—the young, your age and below, are much better. They don’t care. And I’m, like, Yes, I would love to be a twelve-year-old growing up now—except for climate change. Climate change is rough.

I always try to get players to understand the history. The more you know about history, the more you know about yourself—and, most important, you know what can shape the future. I knew all about the history of tennis, and I understood the politics of tennis. Who were the leaders? Why were they like this? How does it work? How did we start?

We started with very privileged, wealthy people. So that’s a lot of our heritage. But, because they were highly educated, they included the women. So, if they hadn’t included us back in the eighteen-hundreds, I don’t think we’d be where we are. Because women’s tennis is the leader in women’s sports, without any question. I can’t believe how much attention soccer gets for equal pay for equal work—they still don’t have it. I want them to have it. I think they have a collective-bargaining agreement that comes up now. I love the soccer kids. I know a lot of them, and they’re fantastic. But what we did is, we actually got equal money for equal work at the majors. I wanted it for the message as much as anything. I mean, the reason Osaka made fifty-five million last year is because of what we did fifty, sixty years ago. I’m really happy we took the plunge. Our hearts were pounding and our stomachs were turning, but we went for it.

I tried to get a women’s tour started. The U.S.T.A.—it was the U.S.L.T.A. then—kept giving us less and less. I went to the U.S.T.A. and pleaded with them to start a women’s tour.

Basically, between the men not wanting us and the U.S.T.A. not helping us, that’s what drove the nine of us to sign that one-dollar contract with Gladys Heldman in 1970. Gladys Heldman, who was fantastic—we signed a one-dollar contract with her to hold this tournament. But I kept saying to Larry, This is great, we’re having this tournament, but now what? We need to have a tour. We need to have a series of tournaments or something by ’71. We have to.

So, in three months, because of Gladys, and her relationship with Joseph Cullman of Philip Morris, we got partners with us. We had no money—Larry had just finished law school. And so it was, like, Oh, my God. Talk about the seat of the pants. So many people really stepped up, and we kept recruiting. Look at the risks all these people took for us. I mean, it’s amazing when I look back.

I remember sitting in Gladys’s bedroom in Houston, and saying to everyone, If you guys expect applause, if you expect us to make a lot of money, you should not vote to do any of this. This isn’t about us. This is about the future generations. So I want us to really think about it. Are you willing to give up your careers? Whatever they may be, whether it’s amateur, professional, whatever—are we willing to give that up? Because, if we vote yes to do this, it’s a major commitment. It’s also maybe the end of our tennis careers. They all said, Yep, let’s do it. So they were brave.

The goal was that any girl born in this world, if she’s good enough, would have a place to compete. No. 2, she would be appreciated for accomplishments, not only her looks. And No. 3, the most important one, was to be able to make a living playing tennis.

Women were involved in tennis from the start in part because it was considered a more ladylike sport. How did that affect your own involvement in the game? I know your brother was a professional baseball player, and your mother had been a talented athlete, too.

I played all sports. I was playing basic, blue-collar-type sports, like baseball, softball, track and field. My mother’s forte was in swimming. My dad, my brother, and I are useless in swimming. But she would never talk about herself. She was very much a woman of her time, and everything was for my dad to look good. It’s always about the guy. My mother was very sweet about it. She let him have all this attention. She was very much a woman of that time. But, in the meantime, I was getting frustrated, and my brother to a probably lesser degree, because he was younger—we’d say, What about Mom?

My mother made me stop playing football. I was irritated with her that day. And that’s where she said, Oh, I want you to be a lady at all times. I go, Mom, what does that mean? Of course, she couldn’t answer it very well. But I hated that, when she said that. I said, Mom, you have no idea how hard it is, how much coördination and energy tennis takes, and how you have to use all of yourself.

Historically, this bias against sports that weren’t “ladylike” intersected with a specific type of homophobia about women in sports. Obviously, we’ve made progress when it comes to gay rights.

Compared with my generation, or the generations before me, it’s night and day. Is it easy? No, it’s still not easy. Because coming out is so personal. Each family is different. For me, with my homophobic parents, with the times, the people on the tours—they said that if I talked about it, there wouldn’t be a tour. Once I heard that it’s going to damage the tour, it is not just about me anymore. There was also dealing with Larry, who I dearly loved. Every bit of information that I was receiving—and of course I’m so full of shame already.

There was a trans woman on the tour in the seventies, Renée Richards, and you were one of her biggest supporters. Given the current cultural climate, that seems remarkably progressive for 1977. How did that come about?

I think tennis was one of the first sports, if not the first, to have a transgender woman playing. That was a whole process. The women were, like, We don’t want her on the tour. I go, Whoa, whoa, let’s slow down, let’s go through this. You don’t want her to walk around because—I mean, come on. I went and talked to doctors. They said, No, she’s a girl. She’s a woman. Let her play. I called Renée. I went back to the women with what I found. I found this really worked, at least for our group. I said, Well, how about if we let her on the tour for two weeks? Let’s see how that goes. I said, She’s really nice, you’re really gonna like her. She’s smart. She’s wonderful.

We didn’t know enough about testosterone—I don’t think we do still—about how it’s metabolized. I think it’s so much more complex than we realize. And I keep talking to scientists about it who are actually working in this area.

Anyway, after two days, the women said, Oh, my gosh, she’s so great, I’m so happy she’s on the tour.

What you’re describing—reaching out to people who don’t initially agree with you, and giving them the space to come to the right conclusion—can be hard, especially when the stakes seem so high.

I always think it’s important to listen to every opinion, because you never know. Muhammad Ali and I used to talk about how you never know how another person is going to touch your life or how you’re going to touch theirs. We talked about that a lot. Sometimes, how you start is how you finish. Even the first step in tennis, you know, to your outside leg—if you get a little befuddled and don’t quite get that right, usually you don’t get to the ball.

One thing I try to tell young people, particularly, is: Don’t take anything personally. It’s not too hard for me. I mean, it is sometimes, and I can sound bitter, when I talk about things, to a point. But then I tell myself, O.K., stop it. What good is it going to do? I have a similar attitude about the country.

Do you think the bias against women’s sports that don’t fit a certain vision of femininity still exists?

I think it’s changed since my generation. 1996 was the year of women for the Olympics. The reason for that was Title IX. They’d finally gotten enough coaching, enough experience, enough competition. Title IX changed everything for women’s sports.

I was interested in the role you played in the Title IX legislation, testifying before Congress. It seems almost impossible to imagine something so ambitious right now.

I always tried to be really practical. That’s why I wanted to go to law school. Larry didn’t like [law school], but he always was reading contracts. So I always thought that would be great, to have that background.

I mean, we were entrepreneurs and promoters, and starting new things. Like the womenSports magazine. We were out of our minds to start that. I didn’t care. I loved it. We love publishing. We love writers.

Sometimes I think we get going too much nowadays because you need social media every single day. Sometimes that’s good news, bad news. It’s good because you can get it out quickly. The bad news is it’s forgotten twenty-four hours later.

Look at Naomi Osaka. Osaka talks about her depression, and now overnight everybody’s asking about mental illness, right? And, of course, I think it’s emotional. It’s more than mental to me. Mental, emotional, they’re very different. Great athletes, the people who truly win, are the ones who are emotionally better and stronger and know how to handle situations. They talk about, Oh, they’re mentally stronger. No, they’re emotionally stronger. Mental is what you think. And these guys, they’re all good enough thinkers to win, but it’s who can handle it when the pressure’s on, and that’s emotional. I always think they don’t separate those enough.

It seems that one thing you really understood is that money is power—and money is, to some extent, respect. But money’s obviously not an uncomplicated kind of power. I sometimes find myself wishing that we could decouple respect and money. You guys didn’t have a lot of money; it was sort of less complicated, maybe, then. But now there’s so much money coursing through professional sports—not enough through women’s sports, maybe, but, still, it’s there. Is that something you think about?

I do, because I want money to do good. It can do a lot of bad, too. It’s how you use it. But it is very powerful, and allows you to mobilize, allows you to create change—hopefully for the better.

I visualize everything. I visualize how I want tennis to look. I visualize how I want the world. I try to get women to follow the money. I want women to understand that money’s powerful, and it’ll help them have more choices in life, more mobility, take better care of your kids. I mean, come on. It’s, like, Follow the darn money.

Money can be isolating in some ways.

Yes, it can. But, sometimes, athletes don’t reach out. They internalize a lot.

It does seem as though athletes are lately talking more openly about mental health.

The W.T.A. actually has a policy: if you go to them, they will get you help, and it’ll be all confidential. I don’t think the players are reaching out to the association like they should. I think we need a much stronger rookie school for the players, in both associations.

We know how tough it is to be an athlete. But pressure is a privilege if you want to be a professional athlete. That’s a choice. You do not have to be a professional athlete. I’m also slightly biased, in that, in the old days, we didn’t have social media. If the traditional media had not told our story, we would not be where we are today.

I think it’s helpful that we bring it up and we all talk about it and discuss it. I don’t want people to feel alone. I think a lot of times they think they’re alone and the only one, and that’s not good. I think being up front about mental disease: good. It’s a disease—it’s like my eating disorder.

Can you say a little bit more about that? In the book, you make it clear that your eating disorder had something to do with grappling with your sexuality.

When I overate the way I liked to, it pushed my emotions down to the bottom of my stomach. I did it to keep my emotions down, and to get numb. It’s like drinking too much: I’m numbing myself because I feel pain.

I was trying to figure out my sexuality, and that’s what I would do: stuff the pain away for just a couple of hours, and that would give me relief. I’m much better now. I check myself. I’ve had so much help in therapy, it’s made such a big difference—not only in my personal life but just in every way, understanding people better.

My dad always had to mention something about food, where, Oh, you guys are eating a lot, or Slow down. My mother was always worried about her weight. But it was absolutely related to my sexuality. I was trying to figure out how to come out. I’m told, You’re going to screw up the tour, you can’t do that. Then I’ve got Larry, and I’ve got my P.R. person telling me, Don’t say anything. Say it’s just your private life. I have all this feedback not to talk about it. And yet, I’m already there—I don’t want to talk about it because I’m so shame-based. What changed everything, though, is when my therapist said, Why have you given all your power to your family, to your parents? When are you going to take your power back? And that’s what changed everything. I was fifty-one when I went to [the Renfrew Center, a private facility focussed on treating eating disorders,] to get help with my eating disorder.

A lot of players are more open about talking to psychologists, but sometimes these are sports psychologists, who have a different emphasis.

I’ve talked to players about this. I said, I think you should go to a therapist first and talk to them first. And then I would get a sports psychologist, once I’ve discussed it with my therapist. I think therapy is more important first. Therapy helps to understand who you are, how you are. A lot of the challenges the players have stem from their emotional self and what they feel about themselves. I know a lot of players lose because they don’t think they deserve to win. You’ll see them get right to the brink of winning and then they can’t do it. Why? Something’s going on there. So they need to find out.

Sometimes a sports psychologist is probably enough, but a lot of times I don’t think it is. I always ask players, Have you gone to therapy yet? And I would say ninety-nine per cent of the time they say no. And then I say, Well, if I had a choice, I’d go to a therapist first.