Title IX: Women Athletes Speak Out

Both her social consciousness, and ability to laugh at herself, make King engaging. She is as knowledgeable about the political climate of the 1970s as she is about today’s. King reflected on how she had worn an Afro for part of the 1970s to express solidarity with African-Americans, and express her belief that “black is beautiful.” She spoke at length about the current presidential administration’s attempts to “correct” Title IX by issuing surveys to gage women’s interest in sports, with non-response to the e-mails surveys counted as lack of interest in athletics, something that’s frustratingly irrational.

Wearing a bright red blazer, pearls, and black Nike tennis shoes, King recalled asking neighbors in Long Beach for odd jobs so that she could earn $8.29 to buy her first racquet. She said she’ll never stop wearing glasses and laughed about wearing a rhinestone pair held together with a safety pin in her first major tennis tournament.

King recalled how friends Arthur Ashe and Jimmy Connors received full scholarships to play tennis at ULCA—where she worked two jobs to put herself through college—while ranked one of the top players in the US. When asked how much she received to play at the college level, King flung her arms out and sang, “Zippity-do-da!” When she started the first professional women’s tennis tour, she and other players estimated that $10,000 was a fair amount of prize money based on what they were being paid under the table. Yet they played for one dollar in their first tournament, which was sponsored by Virginia Slims. The tagline, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” seems ahead of its time, considering that King earned only a forty-five dollar gift voucher for clothing after winning three Wimbledon titles. All the while, her male counterparts were making hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money.

King had no shortage of difficult experiences. There was an ex-husband who told the media about an abortion she had before the topic was widely discussed, revelation of her lesbianism, and subsequent abandonment by endorsers. But, even after sixteen knee operations, she still plays half-court tennis.

One of King’s biggest frustrations is the $135 million more that male college athletes receive than their female counterparts do. According to the National Women’s Law Center, female athletes earn ten percent fewer scholarship dollars than their male peers, despite Title IX’s insistence that all athletes have fair access to athletic scholarship money. Only sixty-six out of the 309 schools with the largest athletic programs currently run profit-making athletic programs. The others depend on university support, state and federal money, and student activities fees.

Less than 43 percent of women’s teams, and fewer than 2 percent of men’s teams, have a female head coach.