The documentary film festival in the nation’s capital opened Thursday night with the Billie Jean King film Give Me the Ball!, exploring the career and cultural impact of the tennis legend. King, 82, took part in a discussion after the screening, where she was joined by members of the filmmaking team including Elizabeth Wolff, who co-directed the film with Liz Garbus, and producers Dan Cogan and Chris James.
Unlike many sports or celebrity-oriented documentaries, King did not approach the project as an opportunity to burnish her reputation.
“I did not want what a lot of people do. I did not want to be a producer or a director in it because what happens, a person always just shows basically the best side of them. And I did not want that,” King explained during the Q&A. “I wanted the truth as much as we could get to the truth. And I knew it was going to hurt. I knew it was going to be not fun, but I thought we’re going to do this. You have to be truthful to the people that are watching it. And so I had to really go through a lot of prayer and thought before I said yes, actually.”
She added, “You have to leave it to the experts. That’s when you get out of the way because they’re the best in what they do.”
It’s not as if Billie Jean had zero input, Wolff revealed. “One of my favorite things was like when we went to film Billie playing tennis — Tony Hardmon was the DP that was filming — and then Billie was like, ‘No, you want to be down here.’ She knew the exact shots.”
“I love film. I always have. My mom and I would just watch everything,” King shared. “I’m fascinated and I always thought I’d want to work behind the camera, not in front of it. I love what they do. I would look at the photographer, I would look at the director, I’d ask this. I’d drive them crazy. But it’s fun.”
Billie Jean King is one of only a handful of athletes whose impact on society has gone well beyond the strict parameters of their sport, a shortlist that includes Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe and Jim Brown. In the Q&A, she described her moment of realization about the potential to change the culture.
“I was 12… I remember I was at the LA Tennis Club when I was looking around. Everybody played with white balls, they had white clothes and everybody who played was white,” she recalled. “When I was 12, that was the epiphany of epiphanies for me. And I knew I’d found my calling, kind of like, ‘This is it. Maybe I can make the world a better place.’ …And I thought, ‘God, just maybe, maybe we can do it.’”
King became not only one of the greatest tennis champions ever – winning 39 Grand Slams in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles — but she used her public platform to advocate for social justice, women’s liberation, and LGBTQ rights. As the documentary recounts, in the 1970s King led efforts to create the first women’s professional tennis tour and achieved the unthinkable – convincing the powers that be (meaning white men who oversaw tennis) to grant equal pay to women, matching what men earned in the big tournaments. The film builds toward a pivotal moment – King’s 1973 match against avowed sexist Bobby Riggs, a former no. 1 men’s player, who had publicly dismissed the capacity of women to come anywhere close to the athletic ability of men. They squared off in what became known as “the battle of the sexes,” a televised spectacle that was viewed by 93 million people.
Restoring that footage would become one of the filmmaking team’s biggest challenges.
“One of the things about that is that the match wasn’t considered historic enough — even though it was giant at the time,” Cogan commented. “Since then, there isn’t one place that controls all that footage and that is responsible for keeping it. And so we were actually working off a copy of a copy of a copy, and it was the best that we could possibly get.”
Wolff noted, “Liz [Garbus] and Dan were like, ‘We can get this cleaned up.’ And you guys sent it to not one restoration house, but a second and a third and a fourth and all the way to New Zealand.” Added Cogan, “We had to clean that footage up in a way it had never been cleaned up since people saw it originally.”
The documentary explores King’s personal life and the evolution of her understanding about her sexuality. She was married to Larry King from 1969-1987, an attorney who became a key ally in her attempts to promote women’s tennis (he died just two weeks ago at the age of 81). The film gets into the most painful moment in King’s life after a woman with whom she had an affair, Marilyn Barnett, sued King for palimony in 1981. King doesn’t avoid that topic, and she’s equally open about sharing her joy now with wife Ilana Kloss, a former no. 1-ranked doubles player from South Africa. They married in 2018.
Give Me the Ball!, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is a production of Story Syndicate and ESPN Films for its acclaimed 30 For 30 series. Producers of the documentary are Elizabeth Wolff, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Chris James, Carolyn Hepburn, Natalie Fiennes, Gentry Kirby, Scott Siebers, and Dominic Crossley-Holland.
Disney and ESPN “made this film possible,” Cogan said. “They gave us the budget that we needed to make this film, which was not inconsiderable. There’s a ton of archival material up there, there’s a ton of music. There’s all of that. It was not an inexpensive film and we have to give all the credit to Disney and ESPN who really stepped up and are who are going to do a fantastic release in the fall.”
The Q&A was capped by King taking out a tennis racket to hit some autographed tennis balls into the audience. A few lucky fans departed with that souvenir, but all who attended left with words of encouragement and inspiration from King.
“I really do love people. I do. Everyone matters. Everyone matters. I don’t care who you are, what gender. I don’t care. Everybody matters,” she told the audience. “And I always feel that. And I felt that with the players, I felt that with everybody. And don’t take things personally. Can you imagine what they used to say to us? But I used to say to myself, ‘You know what? They’re doing the best they can.’ Did you see all those guys that were the bosses [in professional tennis]? Did you see one other person, but a white man? I didn’t. They controlled our lives, but I knew they were trying to do the best they could. They just couldn’t get it sometimes.”
King added, “So I used to say, ‘Okay, they don’t get it. It’s all right. We’re going to keep coming.’ You just have to believe that things are going to shift.”
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