Give Me the Ball!

‘I had to sacrifice a lot for the greater good. Aren’t you glad I did?’ There aren’t many people who could stare down the barrel of a camera and say this without coming across as cocky or unlikeable. Billie Jean King is an exception.

Liz Garbus (Love, Marilyn) and Elizabeth Wolff's exhilarating documentary, part of ESPN’s acclaimed 30 for 30 series, pulls apart the complicated relationship between sporting greatness and social responsibility.

King never set out to become a trailblazer. Give Me The Ball! takes its title from the phrase a young Billie Jean King would shout whenever there was a ball to be caught, chased or hit. 

That desire to compete would later manifest in activism. Despite dominating the tennis circuit from the outset, King didn’t receive the financial rewards enjoyed by her male counterparts, routinely paying for her own travel to tournaments and working side hustles to get by. With the support of her then-husband Larry, she took matters into her own hands to secure sponsorship and create the foundation for what would become women's professional tennis.

The focus of the documentary is 1973, the year of ‘the Battle of the Sexes’, when she took on chauvinist Bobby Riggs in a highly-publicised match to prove that women could compete with men on the court. Rather than rehash the film of the same name, the lens is widened to show everything else the year demanded of King. ‘Everything else’ amounted to the collapse of her 20-year relationship, the pressures of carrying a movement and grappling with her identity. These attempts to understand her sexuality would eventually lead to a public fallout with Marilyn Barnett, whose blackmail plot exposed King as a lesbian and forced a deeply personal part of her life into the public eye.

During her playing days, King’s adversaries knew not to poke the bear. Decades later, Garbus and Wolff had to do exactly that, spending nine months revisiting difficult questions from different angles, to force King to reconnect with wounds she has already healed from.

Allowing the 82-year-old King, as switched-on as ever, to become the documentary's narrator proves a masterstroke. Where documentaries can become sanitised when their subjects are too closely involved, King shirks the role of infallible icon, candidly reflecting on the role she played in her marriage ending and her battles with an eating disorder.

There’s a wonderful blend between archival footage and present-day interviews, with grainy clips of pummelling forehands rallying for screentime alongside sit-down interviews with King’s nearest and dearest: including ex-husband Larry King, wife Ilana Kloss, Serena Williams and Elton John, who help illuminate different chapters of her life. 

The current policy climate hangs over the documentary, evident when King quotes Coretta Scott King: ‘Freedom is never really won; you earn it and win it in every generation.’ In that regard, Give Me The Ball!’s release feels like a powerful weapon in today’s battle for those same rights.

On ESPN in the US Nov 22.