Search Results

This chapter focuses on Billie Jean King's 1982 autobiography. In it, she reflected on the changes that she had seen in the first forty years of her life, a time of enormous transitions for women, tennis, and America in general. “Any woman born around 1943 has had to endure so many changes—in her educational experience, in her working life, in sex, in her roles, her expectations. But with me, it always seemed like I was also on the cutting edge of that change.” She continued, “I was brought up in a very structured universe—in my family, in school, in tennis, in every part of my world. Then, all of a sudden, the rules all started to change, and it seemed there weren't any rules left. I tried to go with the flow, but always seemed to find myself out in front and on the line.”

This chapter discusses Billie Jean King's first retirement that occurred after winning Wimbledon in 1975. It didn't stick, but she was already devoting increasing time to a variety of business and charitable undertakings while cutting back on her tennis schedule. “I still feel that playing my best on a given day, I can win every match—provided I can concentrate totally on my tennis,” she said in early 1976. “As my life now stands, I will devote four months a year totally to tennis with the New York Sets in World Team Tennis competition. The balance of the year will be filled with business commitments, women-Sports, television commentary with ABC and time off.” Reflecting on her options, she said, “It's really great that the sport has produced enough to allow me . . . this choice. I wish this was true for everyone.”

This chapter explores the lasting legacy of the tennis athlete Billie Jean King in advancing gender equality in sports. Her victory over Bobby Riggs in the exhibition match dubbed as the “Battle of the Sexes,” vindicated the cause of the women’s movement, advancing gender equality in tennis and uplifting women’s self-esteem across the world. It adds that despite her enduring legacy, King’s reputation was often marred by questions of sexuality and the parity of prize money. It suggests that Billie Jean King should be remembered in the simplest way possible: as one of the best female players in tennis who advanced gender equality to improve the sport for all.

This chapter argues that Billie Jean King was the right feminist in the right sport at the right moment in American history. What she proved that night in a courageous performance of physical prowess and nerves of steel was that women did not choke, women were not frail and weak, women could face pressure and take it—live, on national television, with no second takes. In just under two hours, she forced a reexamination of what it meant to be female and an athlete, or as a New York Times editorial later put it, “In a single tennis match, Billie Jean King was able to do more for the cause of women than most feminists can achieve in a lifetime.” Donna Lopiano of the Women's Sports Foundation suggests comparing it to a woman winning the presidency: “That was the magnitude of the sports barrier in those days. For a woman to be accepted on an equal playing field was so far beyond one's comprehension. That's what Billie Jean represented.”

This chapter focuses on the time when Billie Jean King alerted readers of women-Sports to be on the lookout for “the largest gathering of tomboys and ex-tomboys in recent history.” She wasn't referring to a sporting event or pre-Olympic competition, but to the National Women's Conference to be held in Houston on November 18–20, 1977, in observance of International Women's Year (IWY). This gathering brought together 2,000 elected delegates from every state in the union, supplemented by almost 20,000 alternates, observers, and members of the press, to debate and eventually pass a national plan of action on women's issues. In many ways the Houston conference was the high point of feminist activism in the 1970s, as women of varying political agendas came together to build common ground.

ABC Sports capitalized on the notoriety it achieved during the 1970s by licensing an eclectic collection of items and producing non-sports programming. Along these lines, the subsidiary demonstrated that it did not need preexisting events to create popular sports television. It developed made-for-television specials, including Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’s Battle of the Sexes, Evel Knievel’s bone-shattering stunts, and The Superstars, which featured athletes competing in sports outside their areas of expertise. Though commercially successful, these programs were widely belittled as “TrashSports” that degraded the respectability ABC Sports had steadily built. Amid ABC Sports’ investment in TrashSports, the division became embroiled in a scandal surrounding the 1977 United States Boxing Championships, in which elements of the competition were fabricated to ensure its value as a television spectacle. Chapter 6 examines how ABC’s brand extensions and involvement in TrashSports took its sports programming to lengths that no longer necessitated preexisting events, and it uses the controversial boxing championships to investigate the limits to which ABC could manufacture engaging sporting content.

This chapter describes how Billie Jean King dramatically recalled her feelings about the Bobby Riggs match's larger historical significance for reporter Selena Roberts. “My job in the match, and I remember this being very clear, was to change the hearts and minds of people to match the legislation of Title IX and what we were trying to do with the women's movement. It was to validate it, to celebrate it, and to get going toward changing a world where we had equality for both genders.” King had voiced similar sentiments on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the match in 1998: “Title IX had just passed, and I would see people [looking] for an excuse to backtrack. I wanted to change the hearts and minds of people to match the legislation we had just gotten in place.” Recently she upped the ante by claiming that she had helped get Title IX passed in the first place.

This chapter explores how the mythologies of gender roles are being changed by the emergence of headstrong female athletes. Since ancient times, femininity has always been associated with the goddesses of fertility and with the idea that women were always the weaker sex. With the feats accomplished by Billie Jean King, Roberta Gibb, and Danica Patrick in changing the landscape of male-dominated sports, it is likely that the myths of the roles of women will change, dethroning the goddesses of fertility and installing the goddesses of the hunt.

Erica Jong’s smash-hit novel, Fear of Flying, was a work of unabashed sexuality and feminism. It takes the traditional male bildungsroman and turns it into a journey about a woman’s identity and sexual pleasure. But the desire for a “zipless fuck,” sex without any emotional strings attached or desired, proves to be elusive. The book, published when feminism was taking a radical turn and also entering the realm of public consumption (with the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs), garnering massive attention, serves as a model of dealing with sexual excess.