All In By Billie Jean King

Enjoy this excerpt from the tennis legend’s new memoir.

When it comes to the intersection of sports and equality, perhaps no name is more synonymous with the movement in tennis than Billie Jean King. In her new autobiography All In, the multiple Grand Slam champion and tennis legend shares her love of the game, her fight for equality, and her own story of self-discovery.

An Excerpt From

All In
by Billie Jean King

I began to get a better sense of the Southern California tennis landscape as I played more tournaments. In the spring of 1955, Jerry Cromwell, Susan Williams, and I were among five of Clyde Walker’s players from Long Beach who were chose to compete in the Southern California championships at the prestigious Los Angeles Tennis Club. I was excited to know I was leaving the novice ranks and entering my first sanctioned tournament. I’d also earn my first junior ranking.

Somehow, my mother and I were given the wrong date for the start of the thirteen-and-under bracket. We arrived a day late, but Joe Bixler, the Wilson sporting good company rep who was checking in the players that day, was sympathetic and willing to let me make up the first round. My opponent, Marilyn Hester, was generous enough to agree. That meant I’d have to play two matches in one day if I wont the first, but I didn’t care. I was thrilled to be playing on the same courts where I knew many famous players had competed, and I became more excited when Joe handed me two brand-new balls for my match. I had never played with fluffy new balls. I held them up to my nose and breathed in the new tennis-ball smell. I rolled them around in my balms and felt the scruffy texture on my skin.

I defeated Marilyn in straight sets, but that’s all I recall. I guess that seems odd, since it was my first sanctioned match, but it actually became a career-long pattern of mine. I rarely lingered on victories. I was always looking ahead. My next opponent was Ann Zavitovsky, a big strong girl with more experience than me. I remember that match more clearly because she beat me after I extended to 6-all in the third set and I wound up with so many blisters on my feet that I could hardly walk. I had never played more than two sets.

All of that paled in comparison, though, to something else that happened that day. When my mother and I arrived that morning at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, we were told all the junior players were lining up to take a photo in front of the steps. I was happily taking my place with the others when a pear-shaped man with a penguin’s waddle approached. In front of everyone he said, “You! Little girl! Out! You can’t be in the picture wearing shorts. You need a skirt or dress.”

That was my first (but hardly last) run-in with Perry T. Jones, president of the Southern California Tennis Association, whose headquarters was at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Though the club only required players to wear white, he made his own additional rules. Everyone called Jones “the Czar” because he commanded his kingdom like a tyrant. He had rigid ideas about how players should look, talk, and act. Over the years I found some of his stances infuriating and others hysterically funny. Once Susan Williams and I won an award as high schoolers, and, at the banquet, the Czar presented each of us with a new racket and… a baby doll. Seriously.

On that first day I met Jones, I was only aware that my poor mother, who had made me those beautiful shorts, was mortified. She was so upset she bought a new bolt of white fabric and began sewing me a new dress that night, suing a coffee cup to trace out the scalloped edges of the hem. It never occurred to me to be humiliated by Jones’s rebuke. I was upset for my mom – and then I got angry. I had already played plenty of other sports wearing shorts. I had already played plenty of other sports and never had an adult act like this. So why was tennis so unwelcoming?

“Don’t worry, Mom,” I told her. “I’ll show him someday.”

It only made me want to win more.

All In is currently available at your favorite bookstore – pick up your copy today!