Whicker: Billie Jean King’s life is almost too rich for one book

Leylah Fernandez and Emma Raducanu bring the 21st period with them.

The Sept. 11 attacks happened the twelvemonth earlier they were born. They unrecorded connected a globe that, to them, is finite and manageable. Fernandez has an Ecuadorian begetter and a Canadian parent of Filipino extraction; Raducanu’s parents are from Romania and China.

Fernandez and Raducanu volition play for the U.S. Open title Saturday day successful New York. The victor volition triumph $2.5 cardinal and the runner-up $1.25 million. That’s the aforesaid money Novak Djokovic and Daniil Medvedev volition marque successful the men’s last Sunday.

In nary different sports bash women get the same-sized pie.

Fernandez and Raducanu ne'er saw Billie Jean King deed a tennis shot successful competition. But they indispensable cognize by present that King is their benefactor, the crusader who browbeat tennis into existent sex equality, the champion who became a rising tide.

They are the sum of Billie Jean’s imaginings.

King’s autobiography, “All In,” is successful the bookstores. It is large and large and thorough and, for those who really effort to visualize putting the aforesaid irons into the aforesaid fires, rather exhausting.

She learned the crippled astatine nationalist parks successful Long Beach, from benignant instructors who didn’t complaint a dime. Now the National Tennis Center successful New York is named for King, arsenic is the dazzling caller Long Beach library.

Long Beach is unveiling its caller Billie Jean King Main Library connected Saturday. City employees were engaged putting a last-minute radiance connected the caller gathering successful Long Beach connected Friday, September 20, 2019. (Photo by Brittany Murray, Press-Telegram/SCNG)

She grew up connected 36th Street successful the Wrigley section, girl of a firefighter, amid strict boundaries that near country for tremendous support. She coiled up with a Presidential Medal of Honor.

Nelson Mandela sought her out. Elton John wrote “Philadelphia Freedom” astir her.

She was 12-6 successful Grand Slam singles titles and won 39 large championships each told, including a grounds 20 astatine Wimbledon. She saved women’s tennis, and possibly adjacent feminism astatine large, erstwhile she slayed an outrageous dragon named Bobby Riggs, successful beforehand of 30,000 fans successful the Astrodome. Few players successful immoderate athletics person walked done specified precocious pressure, successful beforehand of a prime-time ABC audience, and a personage conception comparable to Ali-Frazier.

She had an termination erstwhile it was inactive a transgression successful overmuch of the U.S. She was outed by Marilyn Barnett, the person who sued her. That outgo her millions successful endorsements, adjacent from Phil Knight and Nike. Eventually the satellite was pulled by her magnetic field, arsenic it often was, and King became an LGBTQ hero.

In truthful galore ways, hers is the communicative of America.

Yet King, who gritted done rampant illnesses and injuries to decorativeness 7 antithetic years arsenic the world’s No. 1 player, was stopped successful her tracks by an eating disorder, and however it masked acold deeper issues.

At the Renfew Center adjacent Philadelphia, a counsellor asked King to visualize a harmless space. “I couldn’t find one,” she said.

Eventually she did. She and spouse Ilana Kloss brought their narration into the light. In 2014, King went to the Sochi Winter Olympics and facilitated the rescue of Vladimiar Slavskii, a 17-year-old cheery activistic who had grown up bullied and threatened successful Russia. On the wings of a question she asked often – “What tin we bash for him?” – King placed him astatine Cal State L.A., and Vladimir beamed arsenic helium saw his archetypal Pride parade.

King’s full beingness is based connected the rule that the existent information does not person to beryllium the imperishable one. She and her member Randy, who became a palmy major-league reliever for 12 years, went to a PCL crippled betwixt the L.A. Angels and the Hollywood Stars. The day was ruined erstwhile Billie Jean realized that each the players were men.

She won’t spot that obstruction travel down, but she was besides taken aback erstwhile she attended the Pacific Southwest tourney astatine L.A. Tennis Club. “I was struck by however achromatic everything was … achromatic shoes, achromatic socks, achromatic clothes,” she writes. “Even the balls were white. Everybody had achromatic skin. Where was everybody else?

“I told myself I would walk my beingness warring for adjacent rights and opportunities for everyone. I could bring radical unneurotic done tennis.”

When it came clip to mobilize women connected the tennis tours, oregon to ditch “shamateurism” successful favour of unfastened tennis, she carried those flags, ran those associations. When Dennis Murphy came up with the thought of World Team Tennis, she ran that, too.

None of the dizzying events of her beingness made her hide the well-meaning manager who had told her, “You’ll beryllium bully due to the fact that you’re ugly,” oregon having nary spot to play successful assemblage aft she had already won a doubles rubric astatine Wimbledon.

And now, with her conquests down her?

“I privation I had 9 lives,” King writes.

She lived done 2 lives Saturday.