* !Bjkby Pete Bodo*
Billie Jean King will always be remembered as a firebrand and activist, a woman who's always been sensitive to the sting of injustice, going all the way back to age 12 and the day when Perry T. Jones, the martinet and president of the Southern California Tennis Association, refused to put Billie Jean into a group photo of junior players because she was wearing shorts rather than a tennis dress.
As a woman who crept out of the closet long after her tennis career was over to quietly advocate for gay rights, Billie Jean must have been disappointed with the remarks her career rival and friend Margaret Court made on the subject of gay marriage. But when Australian gay rights activist Kerryn Phelps (note the strategic placement of the LOVE sculpture in this news story) began to beat the drum with the hope of mustering enough support to force Tennis Australian to rename the arena that bears Court's name, Billie Jean stood by her long-time friend (the women faithfully keep a dinner date each year during Wimbledon).
"No, no, no, don't get rid of her for that," King said. "Because you don’t agree with her? Are you kidding? Just because you don’t agree with someone? Please. She deserves it. She’s a great player."
Not long ago, King had the USTA National Tennis Center, home of Arthur Ashe Stadium and the U.S. Open, named after her. Yet the entirely outdoor Margaret Court Arena at the Australian Open in Melbourne Park is just the third-largest court on the grounds (Hisense Arena, with a retractable roof and 11,000 seats, easily dwarfs it—as does the main, roofed stadium, Rod Laver Arena). Is that any way to treat the all-time, all-gender Grand Slam champion (she won 24 major singles titles, and loads more in various doubles), who also is just one of just three women to have completed a calendar year Grand Slam?
"I thought the center court should be Laver and her, named together," Billie Jean added. "They’re the two greatest champions in our game, and she had more Slams," King said. "For her to have court 3 is terrible. I was furious. I went to the heads of Australia, I told them I don’t agree with this. You can’t do this, you can’t give her court 3, she deserves much better than this. That’s a disgrace to women. She won 62 Grand Slam titles, how could you ever give her court 3. It was diabolical."
Absurdly, some activists even wanted to see the Court arena renamed for Renaee Stubbs, the Australian journeywoman who came out as a lesbian to great fanfare in the Age newspaper during the Australian Open of 2006. Stubbs won several Grand Slam and mixed doubles titles, but she never even came close to a final in singles.
Martina Navratilova, another great lesbian champion, was somewhat tougher on Court than was King, but she also rejected calls for a gay jihad against Court in the name of "tolerance" and "human rights." Navratilova said she did not feel uncomfortable at all playing a Legends event at the Australian Open on the Court court: "It's an honor, as always, to be on that court. It's a personal issue. Clearly Margaret Court's views that she has expressed on same-sex marriage, same-gender marriage, I think are outdated."
The attitudes of King and Navratilova, who both support gay marriage, were classy, open-minded and tolerant. They presented themselves—and their beliefs—in a light that will win friends to their cause.