When it comes to tennis, human rights, self-awareness and straight-out curiosity, there is only one BJK. Her new autobiography, Billie Jean King – All In, will be out in mid-August. Here’s our interview with tennis’ great leader.
Bill Simons
IT: Congratulations Billie, on your book. It’s such a great read and covers so many bases. You have so many skill sets, an awareness of the moment and a will that cannot be denied. You’ve battled for so much for so long. Do you think you were put here on earth to fight these battles?
BJK: It sure felt like I didn’t have a choice. I told my mother when I was seven, “I’m gonna do something great.” That was the beginning. I was so curious, I drove my parents crazy.
Few are more inquisitive. Just before you went out to play the most important match in tennis history, The Battle of the Sexes in 1973 against Bobby Riggs, the promoter asked, “Hey, Billie, are you ready for this?”
I loved that. I told him, “I was born ready.”
Naomi Osaka is fascinating, beloved and wonderfully different. Sure, she’s made some missteps…
She’s young. I always worry about the kids who win early because everyone’s eyes are on them, and I don’t know if they’re ready. It’s hard. But she’s great. I really want to sit down with her.
What would you tell her about mental health and dealing with the media?
You have to have perspective. I’ve always felt the media is our friend. I like people. In the old days my job was to get to know writers as human beings. I love writers – they have a rough job. I understood their side of the business and that they have deadlines. It’s important to understand the business to get perspective, and most players really don’t understand the business at all. Our story would have never been told without the media.
Osaka gets $55 million [in 12 months] for a lot of different reasons, and part of that reason is the media – hello. They’re people too, they’re trying to make a living. It’s important they tell our stories. You can’t have everything – that just doesn’t work. But Naomi’s depressed – now all I care about is her health.
She has a good agent who cares first about her as a human being, not about the money. But I don’t know who else is around her. I don’t know her coach and if her boyfriend is still in the picture. I didn’t like him giving the finger [at the US Open awards ceremony].
That wasn’t wonderful.
It was her moment, not his. She’s a really great human being…I want her to know her truth. The most important thing is to have compassion and want her to be okay, but depression is very common among a lot of people. I’ve been depressed, but I don’t have depression. I want her to get some help. I want her to be OK, to take care of herself, to get a therapist. But she has to be careful – this is the turning point.
One of the bravest things you did in the book was reveal that when you were a teen on a road trip coming back from Nevada, a man got you into the back of his station wagon and groped you. Has that haunted you? Have you looked at men differently since then?
It’s not a man thing at all – no, no, no, no. A person of any gender can do that. Sexual harassment can come from all different people. It was a person thing, plus his wife was obviously in it with him.
You finally got him to back off by yelling, “Stop! Stop! My father is going to kill you!”
His wife was quiet up there in the front of the car…She was obviously helping him out. Thank God I had a father who had a horrible temper because I actually was telling that guy the truth and I knew saying that was my last chance to get him to stop. Today, with cell phones, I would call my parents so fast.
You said freedom is your favorite word.
I love it. I wanted the three words “I am free” in the title of my book, but my team voted it down.
In a way the most important kind of freedom is the freedom to be yourself.
Absolutely. That’s been a central part of what I’ve been trying to achieve. I’d like everyone to be able to be their authentic self.
Kids are so great these days. They are so accepting. They just look at the person and whether they are a good person, or they like hanging with them. They are so into diversity, inclusion, equity. I have such faith in them. We need to get behind the kids, the ones who really worry about climate change and inclusion. Instead of looking at what you don’t like about them, look at what you do like about them.
You talk about the importance of integrity.
It’s first.
Yet there are so many contradictions in our lives, so many compromises we have to make. You complained to Gladys Heldman, the women’s circuit cofounder, “Why do we have a cigarette company as a sponsor?”
She replied, “Well, do you not want to have a sponsor?”
Also for years so many LGBQT+ people were in the closet. Basically you had to live a lie.
It was horrible, because that wasn’t my authentic self, so every day during those years I was in contradiction. I knew it and was miserable because of it. I was trying to figure out what I was going through. They told me I couldn’t even say anything like, “I’m not sure about my sexuality,” because if I did we wouldn’t have a tour. People now apologize for telling me that, but that was an indication of the times, the fear and depression and all the things that went with it.
I’d like to read to you an incredibly intense, honest statement by my niece. She’s gay and a professor. She recalled, “Less than 30 years ago gay, queer people were getting tortured, beaten and killed for their queerness. I learned to always look over my shoulder and always know who was around me. I still have to do that. Some of the time you can hide, unlike those marked by race. But the marks of queerness are there, too, and no matter what you do, you slip up. Black straight girls on my basketball team talked to me about me brushing their toosh as I walked by, when I did no such thing. But they could feel my difference and latched onto it and gossiped about it. They were a racial minority, I was a gender sexual minority, and each one of our differences was tangible to the dominant group, though in different ways. The queer always had to be careful, always had to hide. We always had to lie and, even then, with all the immense energy invested in deception, you knew it could go wrong, sometimes violently wrong.”
That’s amazing. She’s right on. She’s absolutely right. I could identify with every word. I could feel it, like, yeah – I’ve been there, I get it.
In your book you talk about the South African greeting “Sawubona” – the meaning is “I see you as important.” And we’re all part of one system.
It’s “How are you? I see you. I acknowledge you. I value you.”
I always make a point to look at someone in their eyes. Acknowledging their existence is absolutely everything – right? You want to start off on that note, because sometimes how you start off is how you finish. I just came up with the idea that it’s better to over-respect somebody, to be totally respectful with all of yourself. You know – kind is good.
By the way, I’m hitting tennis balls now. I found life again. I can’t change direction or move, but it doesn’t matter. I just love it. If you’ve let go of tennis for a while, please come back. I forgot how much I love to hit the ball and how I feel – it’s totally magical.
I loved it when you wrote that athletes have to have to feel the grace and rhythm that ballet dancers do, the feeling of shaping time and space. I also love the story that just days before the Battle of the Sexes with Bobby Riggs you were relaxing and watching the halftime of a Stanford-Penn State football game when the Stanford band played the anthem, “I Am Woman” and then spelled out the initials BJK. That showed you the impact of the match. Do you think at its core the battle gave permission to women to gain their voice, to have their own destiny?
There hasn’t been a day that’s gone by without someone mentioning that match. Bill, you just did it. I’ve had so many women tell me it gave them courage to ask for what they wanted or needed. It gave them more self-confidence. I had a woman come up to me the other day and say it changed her life. She didn’t think much of herself, she didn’t think she could do much. But after she saw that match she told me, “From that day forward I felt I could be anything I wanted. I was going to go for it and since then, I’ve had a great life, because of that moment.”
It’s chilling to hear these things. Everything I think about relates to both genders. Men still come up to me a lot, and they usually want to know about Bobby [Riggs], but then they say, “When I was young, I didn’t realize how privileged I was.” When you are the privileged ones, you don’t notice anything. You don’t have to, because you’re in power.
But then they say, “I had a daughter and, my God, did that change everything! I wanted her to have just as much as my son, and it changed my life when I saw that match. It made me think for the first time.” Now I get their granddaughters or kids who tell me they did a report on me or Title IX.
Part two of this interview to be posted shortly.
