Billie Jean King is losing patience.
Maybe that’s what happens when you’re 80 years old and the actuarial tables say time is running short. King has been advocating for equality for women for more than a half-century now. There has been progress, but not nearly enough, she believes — in life as in tennis.
King has pushed into every room she could and tried to work all of them. She has tried to build all kinds of bridges, believing that if she could just talk to people, one-on-one, she could bend their world view a little closer to hers. Sometimes they bend. Others can break. Yet she’s still at it, trying to check the emotions and frustrations that simmer just beneath. The impatience that reveals itself once she gets through some of the happy and vacant baseline exchanges that go with living inside the sport’s establishment as she tries to disrupt it, little by little, again and again.
Long ago, King made a cold calculation. She didn’t want to be someone who was “just going out talking, standing on a soapbox,” as she said during an interview last week, conducted over video since she and her partner, Ilana Kloss, have been nursing a respiratory illness.
“It’s what you do that matters.”
That, she said, required practicality. Practicality comes with a price —…
