Billie banter

Richard Dunn

Call a press conference and sometimes the wolves come out. But

Billie Jean King, like most of her playing and administrative career,

stood firm on the baseline and returned every hard shot from the

media Thursday. King came to the net when necessary and served beyond

capacity as the Newport Beach Breakers were unveiled at the Hyatt

Newporter.

As owner of the new Newport Beach franchise in her league, World

TeamTennis, King has much at stake as she enters this unique coastal

Orange County marketplace once again, following a five-year stint

with the Dukes under former owner Fred Lieberman -- a tennis tycoon

and business bulldog who didn’t always agree with the way King and

her WTT colleagues conducting affairs in Chicago.

But King, co-founder and director of WTT, has long been a champion

for social change and equality, creating new inroads for women in and

out of sports. And with Title IX in the headlines recently and the

Women’s Tennis Association Tour struggling with leadership, following

the Jan. 16 resignation of CEO Kevin Wulff, King fired back. She said

what’s happening with the women’s tour is “distressful because it

can’t get any continuity.”

King said Thursday she has been offered the WTA Tour’s top

executive position before, but turned them down, because she’s

committed to World TeamTennis, a year-round endeavor. She would like

to bring the tours together.

King said the WTA Tour embraces World TeamTennis more than the

men’s tour, the Association of Tennis Professional Tour, and that she

would never take the CEO job of the women’s tour unless tournaments

were equal -- and not everything’s equal. “They (men) have 10 days at

a tournament and we have seven days. It’s absolutely not fair,” she

said. “We’re the warmup show.”

She said tennis could be this country’s fifth largest sport if

there was continuity among the tours, the Davis Cup, the Fed Cup and

WTT. But there has been plenty of resistance to change.

Further, King said Title IX efforts have fallen way short among

the nation’s colleges and that, in essence, our tax dollars help fund

a free farm system for the NFL, by way of college football

scholarships.

“Any time a men’s team gets dropped, the media makes it a big

deal, yet women have lost hundreds of gymnastics programs and that’s

always buried at the end of the story,” she said. “Men were used to

having the sandbox to themselves (before) 1972, and people don’t like

to share.

“When a men’s program gets dropped, don’t blame the girls. It’s

football. Football takes 50 to 85 scholarships. Why they need 85

scholarships, when an NFL team only needs 53 players, I don’t know.”