{"id":434889,"date":"2026-01-28T14:01:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T14:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/434889\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T14:01:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T14:01:10","slug":"ferocious-portrait-of-billie-jean-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/434889\/","title":{"rendered":"Ferocious Portrait of Billie Jean King"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cGive Me the Ball!<\/a>,\u201d the title of Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff\u2019s ferociously inspirational and entertaining documentary about Billie Jean King<\/a>, refers to something that the fabled tennis superstar would say repeatedly when she was growing up. King, born in Long Beach, California, in 1943, was raised in a 1950s world where girls weren\u2019t supposed to want to play sports. But King was such a natural-born athlete that she wanted to play all of them. Football, baseball \u2014 whatever the game, she\u2019d say, \u201cGive me the ball!\u201d When a friend of hers told her that she should try tennis, King had never even heard of it. She asked what the sport involved, and when the answer was running, jumping, and hitting a ball, her response was: I\u2019m in.<\/p>\n

\n\tNone of this may sound like a big deal. But what it captures is that from the very beginning, Billie Jean King\u2019s relationship to sports was primal. She wanted \u2014 needed \u2014 the ball, to throw it and hit it, to throw her whole body into the action (even as her mother was telling her that that\u2019s not what a \u201clady\u201d does). And that\u2019s the kind of tennis player she became. She was all over the court, charging at the ball from every corner, but fundamentally she was a power hitter who would come up close to the net, smashing the ball, then doing it again, wearing her opponent down with the relentlessness of her attack. In the \u201960s and early \u201970s, when King wasn\u2019t just playing tennis but blazing trails (athletic, financial, cultural), she was thought of as a woman who played tennis \u201clike a man.\u201d Her aggression was in every way a game-changer.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat \u201cGive Me the Ball!\u201d shows you is that Billie Jean King turned what she wanted into a mission. That\u2019s how she became so much more than a tennis superstar; she became a culture hero as important as Muhammad Ali. Almost singlehandedly, she planted the idea on the map that women, like men, should be paid for playing tennis (when she started, they were not), and also \u2014\u00a0radical notion! \u2014 that they should make the same amount of money that men did. The world has changed so much since then that it\u2019s hard to describe how heretical that idea seemed at the time. King fought for it not because she set out to be an \u201cactivist,\u201d but because it simply made no sense to her that star female athletes wouldn\u2019t be compensated for doing the same thing that star male athletes did. This wasn\u2019t about box office. (In tennis, the women were sometimes bigger draws than the men.) It was about second-class citizenship. And her attack on that system played out the same way that her game did on the court: She was relentless. She smashed the opposition. She was going to win the fight \u2014 and did \u2014 because she was hard-wired to win it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie is built around a freewheeling interview with King today, who unfurls the saga of her life. She\u2019s 82 now, and the filmmakers frame her in a single head-on shot. She\u2019s wearing fuchsia horn-rims and a teal athletic jacket, and what gives the documentary its unique pulse is that King has the energized articulation of a woman decades younger than her years. She\u2019s warm and laceratingly honest, with a ripe sense of humor, and she speaks in rich percussive sound bites, which the filmmakers employ in a nearly musical way, cutting back and forth, often rapidly, between King\u2019s words and clips of the story she\u2019s telling. We feel like we\u2019re inside her head, and the footage itself is extraordinary.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGive Me the Ball!\u201d tells King\u2019s whole story, opening with a kaleidoscopic blast ahead to 1973, when she was at the height of her powers but everything in her existence \u2014 her athletic genius, her war for equal pay, her messy personal life \u2014 was coming to a head. The footage of her in action on the court looks more astonishing than ever. The sheer force of her playing was embodied in moves of extraordinary elegance; she was like a dancer. And that quality of hers was abetted by something that most tennis champions don\u2019t have: a charisma on the level of a movie star. She was beautiful, like Diane Keaton\u2019s jock sister, and that thick shag haircut of hers was singular \u2014 it made her look as iconic and electrifying as David Bowie in his \u201cAladdin Sane\u201d days.<\/p>\n

\n\tGarbus and Wolff take us through her life in a way that\u2019s both propulsive and reflective, mirroring King\u2019s energy on the court. The drama never lets up, from her days as a girl named Billie Jean Moffitt who couldn\u2019t afford tennis lessons but attended the free youth clinics available in Long Beach, even as she was competing with the rich kids who populated the sport; to the way that she declared early on \u2014 she simply decided \u2014 that she was going to be the number-one female tennis player in the world; to her rise in the \u201960s, when she became a champion yet still couldn\u2019t make a living at it; to her heroic, exhausting, no-holds-barred fight for the establishment of prize money, which meant going out and finding sponsors; to her voluminous tournament wins; to her marriage to a man named Larry King, who became her loving supporter and business partner, even as they fell apart when she began to discover her sexual identity; to the quiet turmoil of her closeted existence, which ultimately led to a serious eating disorder and to a nasty court fight with her first female partner, Marilyn Barnett, a battle that wound up outing her sexually; and to the way that cataclysm proved to be both agonizing and liberating.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt all comes to a climax in the legendary \u201cBattle of the Sexes\u201d exhibition match that she fought against Bobby Riggs on Sept. 20, 1973, the two facing off in the Houston Astrodome before a live television audience of 90 million. King was 29. Riggs, a former tennis champion, was a 55-year-old carny-barker hustler who truly believed that women should stay \u201cin their place.\u201d As we see from footage of the time, he was hardly alone. This tennis match was a symbolic feminist civil war. It was publicized like one of those only-in-the-\u201970s freak media events, but it had as large on impact on gender politics as Jesse Owens\u2019 triumph at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin had on racial politics.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe filmmakers devote a lot of time to the match, letting it play out as King narrates her inner state, and the result is one of the most thrilling sequences I\u2019ve seen in a documentary in years. The strategy that King decided on at the last minute was to hang back, lobbing softballs to create long volleys that would tire Riggs out. (It was almost a tennis version of the rope-a-dope.) Yet it took her a while to get her bearings. The pressure King felt was unreal. She believed that if she lost to this joker in front of the entire world, in a contest he had set up to be a measure of women\u2019s \u201cinferiority,\u201d it would set the women\u2019s movement back years. But then she calms herself and settles into playing in the moment, and the spectacle of her doing that is intensely moving.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGive Me the Ball!\u201d captures how the victories of Billie Jean King did nothing less than help change the trajectories of women\u2019s lives. For too long, though, she couldn\u2019t be who she was. The film shows us how her close friendship with Elton John, who wrote \u201cPhiladelphia Freedom\u201d for her, was rooted in that shared predicament (though he says it was harder for her, because many in the entertainment industry knew he was gay). Yet even as we glimpse the torment behind her cool fa\u00e7ade, we also see that she handles it the same way she did everything else: with a quality that can only be called grace. She still has that (in a feisty way). Maybe that\u2019s why the ball stayed in her court.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cGive Me the Ball!,\u201d the title of Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff\u2019s ferociously inspirational and entertaining documentary about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434890,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[5367,88,205876,206,98265],"class_list":["post-434889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-billie-jean-king","tag-entertainment","tag-give-me-the-ball","tag-movies","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}