Speak, Memory: Vindicated
Madame Superstar -- or Misfit?
I’ve written some posts about my time at Mark McCormack’s International Management Group in the early 1980s. I meant to write more, specifically in relation to Caitlin Clark, but I kept losing mojo. Everything is preying and weighing on me and my energy levels are no more than steady-state.
But Jennifer Sey wrote something about Billie Jean King that jogged my memory, I commented, and someone asked a question in response to my comment. So I’m here to answer that question. It’s about memory, and how it works.1
Background. Jennifer wrote two posts about Billie Jean King’s position on “trans” inclusion in women’s sports. It’s puzzling: while King acknowledges male physical superiority she continues to support “trans” inclusion. Taken to its logical conclusion, “trans” inclusion would destroy the very thing that Billie Jean has worked her entire life to create. Jennifer observes:
Anyway, Billie Jean King is also gay and was dragged kicking and screaming (to some extent) out of the closet in 1981. She was married to a guy named Larry King — not that Larry King — and he was a lawyer and sports promoter. King had an affair with her former assistant, Marilyn Barnett. Barnett then sued King for palimony.
King held a press conference in 1981 to acknowledge the affair though her management wanted her to deny it ever happened. King lost $2M in brand deals after coming out. Certainly, it wasn’t easy back then.
Ok that’s who King was.
I was going to add a comment there, but I didn’t. No worries, Jen followed that post up with something about BJK’s relationship with the transgender tennis player, Renee Richards (born Richard Raskind) who, despite his paraphilia, sensibly came to the conclusion that men have an advantage over women in sports that can’t be overlooked, so I rolled my original observation into a more expansive comment:
It’s true about BJK and Renee Richards- but the same is also true of Martina. Richards was actually Martina’s coach for some time - 1981 to 1983 - that’s not overnight. But Martina came to her senses. We should give people credit for evolving.
However, what you point out here isn’t evolution, it’s a stubborn insistence on “I’m right.”
It so happens I know a little about the real BJK, having worked for her agent (International Management Group, “IMG”) in the early 1980s, in fact, during the Marilyn Barnett crisis. I didn’t work directly for her specific agent, Bob Kain, but I was there, in the NYC office, and dealt with her because they were cranking out a book to cover up after the crisis and I was working for their in-house literary agent.
I have no bad tea to spill. BJK was always a lovely person to deal with. But like most divas, it was her way or the highway. That’s fine until it isn’t.
One little fact about yesterday’s post with respect to her denial of the Barnett affair.
You wrote: “King held a press conference in 1981 to acknowledge the affair though her management wanted her to deny it ever happened. King lost $2M in brand deals after coming out. Certainly, it wasn’t easy back then.”
I could be wrong but here’s my memory. BJK issued the denial on her own before anyone at IMG had the chance to rein her in. They wanted her to stay quiet - on the instructions of her lawyers. Larry, her husband, was himself a lawyer. But for whatever reason she decided to go maverick and speak to the press herself. That is what necessitated the stage-managed press conference. Because the court case was in motion which would prove that she had had a relationship with Barnett. (Barnett lost the lawsuit on legal grounds but the relationship was never in doubt.)
BTW the book IMG commissioned was written by Frank DeFord, published by Viking in 1982. Even the name of the book was a point of contention but I’ll leave the story at that.
Someone responded:
Here goes!
To recap, the Marilyn Barnett “palimony” lawsuit hit like a bomb2. Dates are important here. The suit was filed on April 28, 1981. BJK went ahead on her own and spoke to the press, denying it. Her then agent, Bob Kain, would never have advised her to blab to the press — and Billie Jean was known to blab to the press. She knew every tennis writer, and many others. Then the denial became untenable, the press conference was called on May 1. This is a fast turn of events.
After the press conference the esteemed writer Frank Deford was contracted to write a quickie biography of Billie Jean. Frank was chosen because he was more than a hack sportswriter; he had a literary reputation, and knew tennis well.3
Frank chose the original title: Misfit.
Billie Jean blew a gasket.
I distinctly remember my boss, Bev Norwood, telling me that. Bev was a small, witty, chain‑smoking North Carolinian who could strip a story down to minimal words and maximum punch. He was a golf specialist who didn’t take tennis all that seriously. Dan Jenkins used him as the model for the character Smokey Barwood in a few of his novels.
The name Maverick was substituted, the book was written and published, and that was that…
Until I looked around a few days ago for Maverick and couldn’t find it. The book was there, alright: as Billie Jean, by Frank Deford, but Maverick? Nowhere.
Was my memory wrong? No! I remember this distinctly and…
By accident or divine will, this popped up:
My memory was off but not by much.
Here’s what must have happened. Frank named the book. Viking entered it into the ISBN database as a working title. Billie Jean saw it and went nuts objected strenuously. Misfit was never printed. Maverick was suggested but a more direct, eponymous title was eventually chosen.
I didn’t want to go into all that in the comment, so I left it hanging. But I thank Ute for asking, because I’d wanted to write this down for a long time, and never did. But my memory was essentially vindicated!
In her later, official, “this is my legacy” bio, All In (“An inspiring and intimate self-portrait of the champion of equality that encompasses her brilliant tennis career, unwavering activism, and an ongoing commitment to fairness and social justice.”), Billie Jean dismisses the Deford bio as a quickie hack job manufactured as part of the nervewracking post-Barnett PR blitz to make her marketable again. It is that, but somehow Deford (and the circumstances) combined to bring out a more authentic Billie Jean than her current biographers do.
The 1982 book is a hoot. She dishes on her colleagues, tells all sorts of nasty funny gossip, calls one famous lady tennis player a “fraud” (I forget which), belabors her old doubles partner Rosie Casals as lazy and dumb (if memory serves she divulges that Rosie went to amusement parks rather than train), and gives Margaret Smith Court her full due as a tennis champion, something she doesn’t in the later bio.
Another thing I remember: the early Billie Jean despised the tennis tour and wanted to destroy it. She thought the reverence for the Grand Slams was ludicrous and even wanted to present a competing tournament to the US Open in the Jersey Meadowlands. She and Larry (who really were a matched pair in their ambitions for tennis; they had deep emotional bond over this) were serious about that. In fact, this idea might well have been Larry’s, and not hers.4
It never got off the ground. Now she presents herself as the Grand Old Lady of Tennis, weeping over the tradition of Wimbledon, and so on. It wasn’t always so. In those days she wanted to dethrone Wimbledon and replace it with a radical, revolutionary men’s and women’s tour - combined. But I digress.
This is glanced on in the Deford bio but not fully fleshed out. That Billie Jean is lost to history, although if anyone is fanatic enough, I think that Peter Bodo’s writing has it - if you can find any of his books.
What gives? Why does Billie Jean King support “trans inclusion” while acknowledging men’s physical superiority in athletics? The following is a jumble of overlapping conjectures with no pretense to being a systematic explanation.
After abandoning her and Larry’s plans to disrupt the tour, she became a staunch organization loyalist. She is also by nature a consensus-builder — that is her most attractive quality. She believes in reaching out and communicating, not ex-communicating.
For this reason she favored tournaments in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States, while Martina (and Martina’s lap dog Chris Evert) opposed them on feminist grounds. BJK is also opposed to penalizing individual athletes for their country’s politics. Also smart - imagine what would happen if Gaza had become a bone of contention on the tour.
This is the smart, pragmatic, Protestant American in Billie Jean coming to the fore. Achieve radical results with moderate steps. You can’t say it hasn’t worked.
But, while she was unfailingly kind to staff and avoided being entitled or overtly egomaniacal, she craves adoration. BJK frequently and unironically uses the nickname Teddy Tinling gave her—”Madame Superstar”—in All In. Far from arrogance, this reflected the plain girl from Long Beach flattered by the attention lavished on her persona. However, she failed to perceive the underlying irony and acidity in the title, eventually embracing “Madame Superstar” as her virtual alter ego.
BJK is trapped by her past. In 2020, many mistakenly viewed the trans agenda as a natural extension of civil rights. While public opinion has since shifted, she remains committed. Despite the election of a Republican president now applying the force of law, the trans agenda remains dominant across much of elite, rules-making America, a conflict Jennifer Sey tirelessly documents. Billie Jean is no outsider: she is part of this rules-making elite and changing on this issue jeopardizes her place in it.
Mentally anchored to her 1970s liberal Democrat roots, she views her support for the trans agenda as consistent with her identity. Furthermore, as a self-styled consensus-builder, she is unwilling to break from the allies and circles that have secured her status and lifestyle since the Barnett era.
What about Martina then? She is far more left wing than King, but this is one instance in which being an egomaniac is an advantage. It makes her independent. She’s no consensus builder. She’s Martina, the one and only. Yeah, it puts her in a tough position with her leftist allies, but she doesn’t care. Martina does Martina.
Billie Jean craves connection; Martina is a lone wolf and proud of it.
And paradoxically this has put Martina on this one issue on the same side as her bitter opponent — the Reverend Margaret Court.
“And you know with that LGBT, they’ll wish they never put the T on the end of it because, particularly in women’s sports, they’re going to have so many problems.
“You have got young people taking hormones and having changes, by the time they are 17 they are thinking, ‘Now I’m a boy and really I was a girl.’”
To someone like Billie Jean, being on the same side of anything with Margaret Court would be intolerable. So she supports something that could, if put into practice, destroy the very institution she worked her whole life to create: a women’s tennis tour that’s created millionaire celebrity athletes.
Life’s got no shortage of ironies, doesn’t it?
IMG Postscript. IMG went from strength to strength until it reached an apogee in the 1990s when Hughes Norton signed Tiger Woods right after he turned pro in 1996. (Hughes had discovered Tiger as a kid.)
Tiger notoriously fired Hughes in 1998. Norton was cut loose shortly thereafter by Mark McCormack. He disappeared from sports and resurfaced later with a tell-some book, Rainmaker.
The “Tiger Woods Era” (in golf, not the culture) ran from 1997 to 2008. Woods stayed with IMG, repped by Mark Steinberg and “babysat” by Bev Norwood. Hughes and Steinberg might have been Tiger’s agents but Bev was Tiger’s gatekeeper.
After Mark McCormack died, IMG went through a series of takeovers and reinventions, finally dying as a sports management agency in 2011, when Steinberg walked out the door — to found Excel Sports Management.
His first client was Tiger Woods.5
Bev worked at IMG until his death in 2013.
Frank died in 2022.
I remember them both fondly.
Jennifer has survived not one, but two, attempts at cancelling. As an exec at Levis, she stood up courageously against Covid madness, which cost her her job. Then she stood up for the right of women to play in sex-segregated sports leagues, incurring the wrath of nutcases. Bravo Jennifer.
The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed by a Los Angeles judge on November 19, 1982, on narrow legal grounds, but the damage was done.
Frank was one of Sports Illustrated’s marquee names back when SI was a legit part of the intellectual fabric of America, not chicks in bikinis. SI was where you went for muscular, literary sports journalism. He wasn’t covering sports so much as using sports to explain the country. IMG’s agents were friends with all the top writers.
With Billie Jean and Larry it was hard to figure out where one left off and the other began.
Excel now manages, among many other athletes, Caitlin Clark.