Equal-Opportunity Icon Turns the Other Cheek

So I’m talking Thursday afternoon to Billie Jean King, and she’s telling me, “I just want equality for boys and girls; that’s the essence of who I am,” when a female reporter from another local newspaper interrupts to bid King farewell, the two leaning forward to smooch each other on the cheek.

“How come you never kiss me when I say goodbye?” I ask the female reporter, and she yells back, “Because you’re T.J. Simers.”

I get the same thing from the wife, of course, but looking for the same equal treatment that Billie Jean King gets, it would appear I was at a competitive disadvantage Thursday, King so friendly with one reporter that she’d smooch her while just treating me like a man.

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I KNOW it’ll come as a surprise, but I’m biased. I’ve been a huge admirer of King’s for some time. I said King ... not the Kings.

I didn’t go to Newport Beach on Thursday to learn more about some silly World TeamTennis league that will cater to a select group of rich folk in Orange County this summer. No, I went there to listen to King speak and find out if she still has the same fight and fire in her that had Life magazine at one time calling her one of the “100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century.”

I threw questions at her about Augusta National and Tiger Woods, Anna Kournikova, Annika Sorenstam and Title IX, and I left disappointed.

She answered the questions, all right: “I’ve talked with Tiger and he says he’s going to work toward gender equity, and we’ll see.... Anna is good for the teenage boys, and you should see the look on the faces of the old men in the crowd who are watching her.... I think Annika is sick of not getting her due, and she knows men will pay attention and write about her if she enters a men’s tournament.... Don’t blame the girls for Title IX; blame the football programs that are taking all the scholarships. We’re talking about federal funds, and that’s our tax money; I just want it to be divided equally between the boys and the girls.”

But the passionate pitch that separated her from the pack for so many years just wasn’t there, replaced now by a sales pitch for a tennis project that ranks a peg lower than the Long Beach Ice Dogs.

What a waste of all that crusading experience, I told her, that made her an icon for decades in the fight for gender equity. “If I would have been a man,” she said, “I would have gotten a lot more respect over the years.”

That’s more like it, I said, a little spunk and the old female song-and-dance routine that invites columnist debate. But in response, I got everything but a nice curtsy: “People have been very kind to me.... I don’t care if my voice is heard.... It’s hard to take the heat all the time.... My dream now is to make this team tennis work.”

Come on, don’t you consider all men pigs? I said, and she laughed. “Several of my friends are pigs, and they make no bones about it -- they’re big pigs, and I love it,” Billie Jean King, the feminist, said.

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ON THE way home I called each of my adult-age daughters, and while one of them knew all about Billie Jean jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge, neither had heard of Bobby Riggs, the role he played in King’s life or the attention gender equity received one September night almost 30 years ago. (They can tell you everything you want to know about Joe Millionaire, though.)

The “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, shown on national TV and drawing a crowd of 30,472 to Houston’s Astrodome to watch the 55-year-old Riggs take on a woman almost half his age, was a major sporting event. I remember even letting the wife watch it.

Five guys dressed in togas carried King on a Cleopatra-like chariot into the arena (this is how Georgia Frontiere gets to work every day in St. Louis). King then gave Riggs a pig, and whipped him with more than 40 million people watching on TV.

“I gave him the pig on the condition they didn’t kill it,” she said.

“That’s funny,” I said, because I was told the pig had been slaughtered a short time later, and asked if she recalled a particularly tasty order of bacon shortly after her win over Riggs. (It’s a guy thing -- I wanted to see if I could get her to cry.)

But she laughed. She laughed a lot, and while she suggested I was on the “attack” while interviewing her, she came off as Miss Congeniality.

She will be 60 this year, and although she played tennis four times this week, she said, “I probably couldn’t beat [Times Sports Editor Bill] Dwyre.” That would make her the worst tennis player in the world right now,

a huge falloff from the late ‘60s and early

‘70s when she dominated the women’s game.

“I’m a business person now with the vision to make the world a better place,” she said. “That’s what team tennis is about, a place for youngsters to see men and women competing together on a level playing field and working in cooperation.”

Maybe you can see men and women competing on a level playing field, but not me. That would mean going to a tennis match, and let me tell you something about tennis -- all sports are not equal when it comes to getting attention.

I urged her to fight for something more worthwhile. She said she had her dream. We parted without smooching. It wasn’t fair.

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TODAY’S LAST word comes in e-mail from Robert Scott, USC Class of ‘74:

“Maybe if there was one thing in your pitiful life worth being proud of you would understand SC’s remarkable accomplishments on the athletic field.”

I’m pretty proud of the way I can push the buttons of USC fans.

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T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com.