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“My life, since I’ve been twelve years old, is about equal rights and opportunities for both men and women, girls and boys.”

—Billie Jean King

For someone whose impact on society is huge, Billie Jean King is actually quite small.

In fact, she’s a five-feet-five dynamo who, at the same time, is wonderfully down to earth. That’s the first thing I noticed when I had the honor of interviewing her in May of 2010, in conjunction with Major League Baseball’s Civil Rights Beacon Awards. The annual event recognizes individuals whose lives are emblematic of the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement. Billie Jean King was receiving the Beacon of Change award for having an impact on society through words and actions, and I had the chance to interview her just moments before she went on the field to be honored.

Of course, her work in civil rights and equal rights has spanned her lifetime, not to mention her success on the tennis court. But for most of us, the seminal moment of Billie Jean’s career was September 20, 1973, the night of the “Battle of the Sexes” match with Bobby Riggs. That evening, on prime time television, she showed that a female athlete could win under pressure, facing a self-proclaimed “male chauvinist pig” who, just weeks before, had defeated the topranked female player, Margaret Court, in straight sets—on Mother’s Day, no less.

In her book, Pressure Is a Privilege, King talks about the Riggs match, which came a year after Title IX was passed, guaranteeing women and girls equal opportunities to play sports. Speaking about the match, she writes: “I wanted to make sure I understood every aspect of what I was getting myself into. I asked myself: Can I afford to lose this match? What are the consequences? The pros were simple: If I won, it might get the minds and hearts of Americans to begin to match up on issues of equality, and, I hoped, create real support for Title IX.”

Even famed sportswriter Frank Deford, in his Sports Illustrated article “Sometimes the Bear Eats You” (March 29, 2010) mentioned the magnitude of the King-Riggs match: “I was very fortunate to be covering tennis when Billie Jean King took the bull by the horns. Billie Jean more than anyone else raised my consciousness. Here she was, virtually running a sport, getting up at 6 a.m. after a night match to appear on Sunrise in Cincinnati or some other TV show, serving as a symbol for a whole movement, taking a lot of crap from people who didn’t appreciate her—and winning championships.

“I knew she would beat Bobby Riggs in their Battle of the Sexes in ’73,” Deford continued. “Only two or three times in my life have I been dead sure of an outcome in sport, and that time is at the top of the list. Apart from the fact that Billie Jean was simply a better player than Bobby was then, and immune to pressure, she was really a lot like him. They both knew how to work a crowd, only Bobby was in it for the con, Billie Jean for a cause.”

Billie Jean King

Frank Deford got it absolutely right. Let’s face it, both Riggs and Billie Jean had an agenda. Both were promoters: Riggs promoting himself in the twilight of his career, and Billie Jean, promoting her cause of equality. The match brought the issue of women’s rights into everyday conversation and advanced the cause. Would the progress of equal rights, especially in sports, grind to a halt if she had lost? Probably not, but progress may have been slowed. Good thing women didn’t have to find out.

That game, however, is just one event in Billie Jean King’s legacy of fighting for equal rights. She founded the Women’s Tennis Association, Women’s Sports Foundation, Women’s Sports magazine, and co-founded World TeamTennis. She won thirty-nine Grand Slam singles, doubles, and mixed doubles tennis titles, including a record twenty titles at Wimbledon.

She continues to be a champion of social change and equality, and her awards and honors are many: Received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; named one of the “100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century” by Life magazine; named Global Mentor for Gender Equality by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); received the NCAA President’s Gerald R. Ford Award in 2009, recognizing her contributions to improving higher education and intercollegiate athletics; and perhaps the most meaningful honor, in 2006, when the National Tennis Center, home of the U. S. Open, was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in honor of King’s contributions to tennis, sports, and society both on and off the court.

She has carried the cause of equal rights for decades, and because of her efforts, she received the Beacon Award from Major League Baseball in 2010, along with baseball Hall of Famer Willie Mays and entertainer Harry Belafonte. Before the on-field ceremonies, I had the opportunity to interview her for Fox 19 Sports in Cincinnati. We talked about her work, her legacy, and her future, and I started by asking her about the Beacon Award from MLB:

“What it does for me is it reminds me of the responsibility I still have and also, it keeps that fire in the belly going, to focus on it and to thank the people before me and try to get the younger ones to carry the baton. I think those are the important things to do to keep all the generations working together, being very thankful for the people who sacrificed for us, before us, and for us to keep working.

“My life, since I’ve been twelve years old, is about equal rights and opportunities for both men and women, girls and boys. And I still have the same exact fire at sixty-six. So I’m going to keep going until my last breath, if I can help in any way to make a difference.

“I knew at twelve years old, when I had this epiphany about wanting to make a difference for equal rights and opportunities. I knew if I didn’t become number one, particularly as a woman, as a girl, that no one would ever listen to me. So that was a driving force to be number one, because it created an opportunity for me to be able to speak out and people might listen.

“It’s much harder for women, though. People don’t tend to listen to us as much as men. There are a lot of assumptions, so I knew I had to be at least number one, and then also, I knew that we had to make tennis professional. I even knew, at twelve years old, I wanted to be in a professional sport, and I really wanted to be in a team sport, which is what I do now.

“I’m a small-business woman. I have been since 1968, which most people don’t realize. I’ve either owned tournaments, and now I own the majority of the World TeamTennis league, and our league has men and women with equal contribution to the team effort, on a level playing field. So if you ever see a World TeamTennis match, you see my philosophy on life.”

On the “Battle of the Sexes” matchup with Bobby Riggs: “I actually realized the magnitude of the event when I said yes to him, for two months before we played. So I understood it was about history, it was about men and women, their own emotions about themselves, about the opposite gender. Title IX had just been passed, June 23, 1972, and I played Bobby in ’73, and I really wanted to win that match to change people’s hearts and minds to actually match the legislation of Title IX.”

On advice she gives to young people, especially young women: “I want young people to know history. Because the more you know about history, the more you know about yourself, and how you fit into this universe. And then from having that knowledge, it will help you and direct you to know where you can make a difference in this world. And also know your strengths and weaknesses.

“So you must have self-awareness, but you must understand history if you want to be leader. If you want to make a difference, it really helps to understand history and then how you’re going to shape the future. When I talk to the young tennis players on the WTA Tour, I say, ‘You have to shape the future for the next five to ten years. How do you want to do that?’

“And they’re stunned, because they’ve never thought of themselves shaping anything. But they are shaping the future. Every generation shapes the next five to ten years, twenty years. So it’s very important to kind of wake up young people to start thinking about their legacy.”

Then when the interview was over and I was shaking hands to thank her for her time, she said to me, “And how about you, are they treating you well here?” In all my years of covering sports, I’d never been asked that. So I gave her a quick synopsis of my sports work, my experience in the market, and said, yes, I’d worked with many of these people for some twenty years, and they do treat me well, thanks to the work that Billie Jean and many other women had done.

“So pay it forward,” she said. “Make sure that the next generation has those opportunities as well.”

It’s a responsibility that Billie Jean, and all the women featured in this book, take seriously. Here are some of the women, especially in sports media, who have paid it forward to allow this generation to pursue their dreams of working in sports:

Sadie Kneller Miller

While Midy Morgan is considered the first female sportswriter for her coverage of horse racing (and livestock news—let’s hope the subjects were not related) for the New York Times in 1869, women in media have Sadie Kneller Miller to thank for giving them a regular sports beat. Sadie graduated from Western Maryland College in 1885 with a penchant for journalism, and caught on with the Westminster Democratic Advocate. Later, she moved to Baltimore with her parents and began writing for the Baltimore Telegram.

Her work at the Telegram included covering the Baltimore Orioles, and she became known as “the only woman baseball reporter in the country.” Her interest in writing led her to take up photography, and she translated that skill to some landmark assignments, including a notable one with Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. She turned in photos of Spanish-American War activities at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and they were so good she got a permanent position at Leslie’s.

She stayed there for sixteen years, and during that time had such assignments as the Baltimore fire of 1904, the Taft inauguration, five Democratic conventions, and portraits of Teddy Roosevelt and Susan B. Anthony, the last formal photo taken of the suffragist.

She may have been a pioneer in sports, but she also broke down barriers in overseas reporting. She became known as the only female war correspondent in the world when she covered fighting in Morocco; she described the gold rush in the Yukon; she did interviews from Cuba to leper colonies and Czarist Russia, and interviewed Pancho Villa at his base in the Mexican mountains.

The ironic thing about Sadie’s sports coverage—many readers probably didn’t even know they were reading the work of a female sportswriter. Her stories carried the byline “SKM,” probably to hide her gender.

Women who covered sports in the 1920s include Mary Bostwick, covering the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Indianapolis Star; Dorothy Bough, sportswriter for the Philadelphia Inquirer; Nettie George Speedy, sports reporter for the Chicago Defender; Nan O’Reilly, golf editor of the New York Evening News; Cecile Ladu, sports editor of the Albany Times Union.

Lorena Hickok

Lorena might be best known as one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s closest friends, but she first was a journalist. Growing up in Wisconsin, she entered Lawrence College in Appleton in 1912 but left after a year to take a job with the Battle Creek Evening News for seven dollars a week.

She eventually got a job at the Milwaukee Sentinel as a society editor, later went to the Minneapolis Tribune, then went to New York to try to get a job covering World War I. When that didn’t work out, she returned to the Tribune and eventually was assigned to cover the University of Minnesota football team during the glory days of Big Ten football. Here’s a sample from the 1924 game between Minnesota and the University of Illinois and its star running back, Red Grange: “Again and again, ‘Red’ Grange hugged the ball to his ribs and started one of his famous runs,” she wrote. “Again and again he started and dropped, with three or four Gophers on top of him.”

She eventually joined the Associated Press to write features for the national wire service, covering politics and major stories such as the Lindbergh kidnapping. But her assignment with the University of Minnesota made her the first female beat writer to cover a men’s sports team.

Margaret Goss

Although she wrote the column for only a year and a half, Margaret Goss was able to make history during her time as a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. In 1924 and ’25, Goss described herself as the first American female journalist to cover women’s sports for a daily newspaper, and also was the first woman with a regular, bylined sports column.

That column, “Women in Sport,” gave Goss an opportunity to talk about women athletes and their accomplishments at a time when they were just making strides in the world of sports. Goss’s timing was perfect, as the 1920s often are described as the “Golden Age” of sports journalism, spawning such legendary sportswriters as Grantland Rice (whose column often shared space with Goss).

Mary Garber

When the sports editor at the Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, went off to war during World War II, another staffer (and sports fan), Mary Garber, took his place. When he returned, he got his old job back, and Mary moved back to her pre-war assignment on the paper’s society pages. It didn’t take long for the editors to figure out Mary knew more about sports than society, so she returned to the sports pages, where she stayed for four decades.

If these earlier women sportswriters were pioneers, then Mary is the godmother. Mary Ellen Garber was born in New York in 1916. Her father was a contractor who moved the family to Winston-Salem in the 1920s. Mary graduated from Hollins College in 1938 and eventually found her way to the newspaper and sportswriting.

Though in her early days she mainly covered high school sports in the area, she went on to assignments involving all types of sports, including football, basketball, baseball, track, tennis, softball, you name it, at all levels from rec leagues to college. She also covered minor league baseball, international track and field, and Davis Cup tennis.

Perhaps more groundbreaking, she reported on black high schools and the historically black colleges in the area—schools that often were ignored by the daily newspapers—during the segregation years of the 1950s and 1960s.

“Nobody cared much about black players forty years ago,” Clarence “Big House” Gaines, the Hall of Fame basketball coach at Winston-Salem State University told Sports Illustrated in 2000. “But Miss Mary covered a lot of things that weren’t too popular. She went out of her way to see that everybody got a fair shake.”

To Miss Mary, it was all just part of the job. “When I started working in sports full time, it seemed to me that black parents were as interested in what their kids were doing as white parents were,” she said in a 1990 interview.

She also had to fight for equal access to do her job, especially since in the early years she was barred from locker rooms and press boxes because she was a woman. In 1946, even though she had the right credentials, she had to cover a Duke football game while she was sitting in the stands with the coaches’ wives.

Her managing editor protested the move and told the Athletic Coast Conference athletic directors to get used to it—the paper wouldn’t cover their games with any other reporter but Miss Mary. They relented and let her in the press box, but the ACC Sportswriters Association and Football Writers Association denied her membership for many years. When she eventually was granted membership, she ended up as the association’s president and served on its board of directors.

She worked as a full-time sportswriter at the Sentinel and Winston-Salem Journal until 1986, when she retired at age seventy. She then worked part-time until 2002. Along the way she picked up numerous awards, including sports journalism’s highest honor, the Red Smith Award, given annually by the Associated Press for major contributions to sports journalism.

Other honors include election to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 1996, and induction into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association and Hall of Fame. The Association of Women in Sports Media (AWSM) renamed its annual pioneer award in her honor in 2006.

Mary Garber died in 2008 in a retirement home in Winston-Salem at the age of ninety-two, but she lived long enough to see a generation of women follow her footsteps in the field of sports reporting. Her quote as she received the Red Smith Award reflects her legacy: “I hope I have helped. I hope some little girl out there knows now that she can be a sportswriter if she wants to be.” In fact, the first winner of the AWSM Pioneer Award was Lesley Visser, the NFL’s first female beat writer.

Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink

Say what you will about the administration of Richard Nixon, but one of the landmark pieces of legislation that came out of that tumultuous time was the Educational Amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, known as Title IX. The amendment, prohibiting gender discrimination by federally funded institutions, was written by Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, mainly from an outgrowth of the adversities Mink faced through college. In fact, the amendment itself was renamed in 2002 the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.

The amendment itself hardly sounds controversial: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal assistance.” But what was supposed to jump-start women’s participation in sports has often turned into a battle of the sexes for athletic access.

This isn’t intended to be an argument of the pros and cons of Title IX. What is clear, though, is that the amendment has opened doors for many young girls and women who might otherwise not have had the opportunity to participate in organized sports.

The following women contributed some early “firsts” for women in sports.

 Jane Gross, when at Newsday, was the first woman reporter in an NBA locker room.

 Betty Cuniberti, San Francisco Chronicle, covered the Oakland Raiders and became the first woman to cover an NFL team from training camp through the Super Bowl. In 1981 at the Washington Star she became the first woman to receive the National Headliner Award for Consistently Outstanding Sports Writing.

 Lesley Visser, Boston Globe, covered the New England Patriots.

 Melissa Ludke of Sports Illustrated was famously barred from interviewing players in the clubhouse during the World Series. SI’s publisher, Time, Inc., filed suit, and the next year a federal court judge ruled that male and female reporters should have equal access to locker rooms.

 Michele Himmelberg at the Fort Myers News-Press needed her newspaper to threaten a lawsuit against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to win equal access for her to the team’s locker room. Two years later, Himmelberg was at the Sacramento Bee where a lawsuit was filed to let her into the 49ers’ locker room.