My post the other day, A Night of Historical Importance, generated a fair amount of interest. After posting, I battened down the hatches for the storm to come, but I was truly surprised by the number of TennisWorld readers who shared my sentiments, if not always for the same reasons, or with the same point-of-view. I understand things were a little different at the message boards at Tennis-X, where the amateur pundits were much less receptive to my point-of-view.
Cruising through the comments and addressing some of the direct criticism some people here leveled at me made me think I ought to flesh out a little more thoroughly why the ceremony for what is now the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center so rubbed me the wrong way, given that it was an honor that BJK earned and deserved.
So here's one thing: there was almost no mention of the game of tennis, and BJK's history and nature as a champion tennis player; the entire focus appeared to be on Billie's "social significance." It's as if BJK was a some kind of social activist who just happened to play tennis. This was regrettable for various reasons, not the least of which is the NTC is a tennis facility, the people gathered here were tennis fans (in addition to the scores of New York's typical scene makers), and - I suppose this was debatable - who knows what Billie would have become were it not for her talent at tennis.
Surely that counts for something?
So let me focus on just one aspect of why Billie Jean's saga becomes a little less heroic if you embrace this Big Picture view of her as a paragon of activism instead of a great tennis player who also had a profound impact on the history of women's changing aspirations and roles. The time I checked (about 18 seconds ago), Billie Jean was still on the elite, 10-person Board of Directors of Philiip Morris (now, officially, Altria), an empire founded on the cigarette (for the full back story on this, you can check out the appropriate chapter in my book, *The Courts of Babylon* ).
I'm not a fervent anti-smoker (having been one for long periods of my life, I sympathize with my addicted brethern. I also made Matt Cronin give me a Marlboro Light just the other night.). And I don't believe in legislating against people who choose to smoke (adults, anyway). I was also friends with Joe Cullman III, who essentially built the PM/Altria behemoth on what is still an amazing cash cow - cigarettes. Joe did great things for the arts and tennis (principally as a sponsor and also patron of the International Tennis Hall of Fame), he was a great friend of the Atlantic Salmon Federation and a passionate outdoorsman (that counts with me), and a model CEO.
Joe was also a terminally optimistic, well-meaning guy who to some degree got blind-sided when the deadly effects of smoking became known and public. He didn't see where cigarettes smoked in moderation were any more dangerous than social drinking, and in this he was at best, naive - at least in continuing to fight the tobacco wars. But I do share the opinion that dismantling PM would have had a devastating effect on tens of thousand of lives (employees etc.), and know that Joe was trying to diversify the company to become less reliant on cigarettes.
But remember, this is one enormous cash cow - like dope, really - and even as the evidence of harm and the debate over smoking grew increasingly heated, the response of Big Tobacco was to move the aggressive marketing abroad, where other cultures and governments still allowed cigarette makers more latitude to operate. But is it morally more acceptable to give away free cigarettes near schoolyards in Brazil than Boca Raton? We all know the answer to that one. This, was, and remains, a thorny, complex issue.
In any event, most of you know that the women's pro tour was brought to what still remains its high- water mark by Virginia Slims, a division of PM targeting women smokers. Women pro players were schooled in how to handle questions about the cigarette link, and I once had a falling out with Martina Navratilova for challenging how she could so freely pontificate from the moral high ground on so many issues yet meet any question about the VS-tennis link with - literally - a by-rote recitation of the PM party line: I don't smoke and I don't encourage people to smoke. Nothing more.
A few years ago, the New York Times columnist Ira Berkow took Billie Jean to task in print for continuing to work with PM, charaterizing her her an ostrich with its head in the sand. This was brave move but it was a rare exception, and most of BJK's ardent supporters found convenient ways to rationalize away the criticism. PM/Altria today is still very much in the cigarette business, one that you can no longer defend as easily without resorting to simple - and relatively benign - libertarian principles (which I happen to embrace).
So I'm not criticizing Billie Jean out of hand for her unbroken support and continued relation with PM/Altria. It doesn't trouble me all that much. But if she wants to define yourself as a social crusader, and want to be seen (or others want you to be seen) through a larger prism than the one provided by tennis, she's leaving a significant flank uncovered. The real Big Picture social observor or thinker the King camp seems to be courting might just be wondering, Oh, women's tennis, fine. But who was it for, who benefited, and what was your position or role on the larger social stage?
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I don't know if Monday night's ceremony was the right stage for addressing these things, but it would have been nice to hear Billie Jean or some of the other speakers bring a little more honesty and humility to the proceedings. As a writer might say, trust the story, because it's interesting - certainly more interesting than what has become the standard feminist/activist narrative.
Another area where some fleeting acknowledgment of the real story would have been more compelling is in tennis history. This partly has to do with why Billie Jean became great, and why she stayed great for so long. And part of that story has to do with the birth of the pro tour, and the conditions under which it was incubated.
I mentioned in a comment the other day that Chris Evert has been very gracious in accepting the conventional wisdom on Billie Jean. One of Chris's great virtues is the ability to tread the line between diplomacy and searing honesty with convincing verve. I know she thinks the world of Billie Jean, and I also know she's acutely aware of the fantasy-island elements in the narrative. What's she going to do, get in a cat fight over it with someone who's an old friend?
Many of you (older readers, anyway) never did like Evert, the ultimate mainstream winner. But Evert wasn't the only woman who resisted the early activists of the women's pro game. So did Evonne Goolagong Cawley, whom many of you adore because she was the ultimate non-mainstream champion (she never did have Evert's competitive abilities). I feel okay writing about this because I was there at the time the game was split between the King/Rosie Casals faction and the Evert/Goolagong camp. Or, at the institutional level, between the USTA tour and Virginia Slims, which at the time were engaged in a sprited tugh-of-war for control of the women's game, with the USTA representing the vestiges of the amateur establishment and VS the emerging, pro sensibility.
The E/G camp was a group of youngsters who had just come up through the ITF pipeline. They were pretty young things, to be sure, but more relevantly, shy young things - many of them were girly-girls as well, despite their prodigious talents. And these young women weren't at all sure they wanted to be pro players. They talked about playing for a bit and having husbands and babies, which many of them went on to do. I suppose they were exactly what you would have expected of girls just coming of age at the dawn of the sexual and feminist revolution of the late Sixties and early Seventies: conservative, respectful of tradition, eager to please. For them, making a big leap into the arms of the budding pro establishment when the the ITF and USTA had "done so much" for them was pretty much unthinkable.
Also, the new girls on the tennis block were intimidated by the increasingly strident, seasoned veterans of the amateur and early tennis wars. The women's locker room was a much cattier place back then (some things really do change), and the pressure the VS pros put on the youngsters was both palpable and discomforting. Evert, the Ice Maiden, ably held her own, but others were cowed by and somewhat resentful of the pressure they were being put under by the electric, "you're either with us or against us" sensibility.
None of this was, at bedrock level, about "feminism" per se, or changing society. It was about creating a professional tour, first and foremost. And as Evert and Goolagong emerged as stars, reaping many of the benefits created by the VS pioneers, the resentment against them became even more intense. It remained so until the younger generation began to understand the material rewards generated by a pro tour, and within a few short years the battle was decisively over: Women's pro tennis emerged as an entirely independent, unchallenged entity in the form of the Virginia Slims tour.
One of the inescapable conclusions to draw here is that it was a time of such transition in the game that it was inevitable that a women's tour would happen. It was less a question of "if" than "when", and less a question of "who" than "who first"?
All of this - not to mention Billie Jean's amazing record at Wimbledon, her extraordinary competitive drive, and her longevity - simply is much more interesting that the dominant, Sociology for Dummies version that rules the day. And, if anything, it helps humanize all the principals, including Billie Jean, in a way that cliches and activist posturings do not.
At the end of the ceremony on Monday, the finally rallying cry Billie Jean issued was an exhortation to "Go for it." Okay, that's Billie's mantra, we understand and love her for that. The slogan is open-ended, of course; it's the ultimate Big Tent rallying cry. But it's something you're more likely to hear in an ad by Swoosh-Your-Daddy (you know who I'm talking about) than in any collection of inspiring quotations from the world's visionary leaders.
I don't have a problem with that, though, because - well, because it's the kind of thing a tennis player says. And Billie Jean King was one amazing, inspiring, iconic tennis player.
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