‘Give Me the Ball!’ Review: Ferociously Entertaining Portrait of Billie Jean King as Athletic Superstar and Culture Hero

“Give Me the Ball!,” the title of Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff’s ferociously inspirational and entertaining documentary about Billie Jean King, refers to something that the fabled tennis superstar would say repeatedly when she was growing up. King, born in Long Beach, California, in 1943, was raised in a 1950s world where girls weren’t supposed to want to play sports. But King was such a natural-born athlete that she wanted to play all of them. Football, baseball — whatever the game, she’d say, “Give me the ball!” When a friend of hers told her that she should try tennis, King had never even heard of it. She asked what the sport involved, and when the answer was running, jumping, and hitting a ball, her response was: I’m in.

None of this may sound like a big deal. But what it captures is that from the very beginning, Billie Jean King’s relationship to sports was primal. She wanted — needed — the ball, to throw it and hit it, to throw her whole body into the action (even as her mother was telling her that that’s not what a “lady” does). And that’s the kind of tennis player she became. She was all over the court, charging at the ball from every corner, but fundamentally she was a power hitter who would come up close to the net, smashing the ball, then doing it again, wearing her opponent down with the relentlessness of her attack. In the ’60s and early ’70s, when King wasn’t just playing tennis but blazing trails (athletic, financial, cultural), she was thought of as a woman who played tennis “like a man.” Her aggression was in every way a game-changer.

What “Give Me the Ball!” shows you is that Billie Jean King turned what she wanted into a mission. That’s how she became so much more than a tennis superstar; she became a culture hero as important as Muhammad Ali. Almost singlehandedly, she planted the idea on the map that women, like men, should be paid for playing tennis (when she started, they were not), and also — radical notion! — that they should make the same amount of money that men did. The world has changed so much since then that it’s hard to describe how heretical that idea seemed at the time. King fought for it not because she set out to be an “activist,” but because it simply made no sense to her that star female athletes wouldn’t be compensated for doing the same thing that star male athletes did. This wasn’t about box office. (In tennis, the women were sometimes bigger draws than the men.) It was about second-class citizenship. And her attack on that system played out the same way that her game did on the court: She was relentless. She smashed the opposition. She was going to win the fight — and did — because she was hard-wired to win it.

The movie is built around a freewheeling interview with King today, who unfurls the saga of her life. She’s 82 now, and the filmmakers frame her in a single head-on shot. She’s wearing fuchsia horn-rims and a teal athletic jacket, and what gives the documentary its unique pulse is that King has the energized articulation of a woman decades younger than her years. She’s warm and laceratingly honest, with a ripe sense of humor, and she speaks in rich percussive sound bites, which the filmmakers employ in a nearly musical way, cutting back and forth, often rapidly, between King’s words and clips of the story she’s telling. We feel like we’re inside her head, and the footage itself is extraordinary.

“Give Me the Ball!” tells King’s whole story, opening with a kaleidoscopic blast ahead to 1973, when she was at the height of her powers but everything in her existence — her athletic genius, her war for equal pay, her messy personal life — was coming to a head. The footage of her in action on the court looks more astonishing than ever. The sheer force of her playing was embodied in moves of extraordinary elegance; she was like a dancer. And that quality of hers was abetted by something that most tennis champions don’t have: a charisma on the level of a movie star. She was beautiful, like Diane Keaton’s jock sister, and that thick shag haircut of hers was singular — it made her look as iconic and electrifying as David Bowie in his “Aladdin Sane” days.

Garbus and Wolff take us through her life in a way that’s both propulsive and reflective, mirroring King’s energy on the court. The drama never lets up, from her days as a girl named Billie Jean Moffitt who couldn’t afford tennis lessons but attended the free youth clinics available in Long Beach, even as she was competing with the rich kids who populated the sport; to the way that she declared early on — she simply decided — that she was going to be the number-one female tennis player in the world; to her rise in the ’60s, when she became a champion yet still couldn’t make a living at it; to her heroic, exhausting, no-holds-barred fight for the establishment of prize money, which meant going out and finding sponsors; to her voluminous tournament wins; to her marriage to a man named Larry King, who became her loving supporter and business partner, even as they fell apart when she began to discover her sexual identity; to the quiet turmoil of her closeted existence, which ultimately led to a serious eating disorder and to a nasty court fight with her first female partner, Marilyn Barnett, a battle that wound up outing her sexually; and to the way that cataclysm proved to be both agonizing and liberating.

It all comes to a climax in the legendary “Battle of the Sexes” exhibition match that she fought against Bobby Riggs on Sept. 20, 1973, the two facing off in the Houston Astrodome before a live television audience of 90 million. King was 29. Riggs, a former tennis champion, was a 55-year-old carny-barker hustler who truly believed that women should stay “in their place.” As we see from footage of the time, he was hardly alone. This tennis match was a symbolic feminist civil war. It was publicized like one of those only-in-the-’70s freak media events, but it had as large on impact on gender politics as Jesse Owens’ triumph at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin had on racial politics.

The filmmakers devote a lot of time to the match, letting it play out as King narrates her inner state, and the result is one of the most thrilling sequences I’ve seen in a documentary in years. The strategy that King decided on at the last minute was to hang back, lobbing softballs to create long volleys that would tire Riggs out. (It was almost a tennis version of the rope-a-dope.) Yet it took her a while to get her bearings. The pressure King felt was unreal. She believed that if she lost to this joker in front of the entire world, in a contest he had set up to be a measure of women’s “inferiority,” it would set the women’s movement back years. But then she calms herself and settles into playing in the moment, and the spectacle of her doing that is intensely moving.

“Give Me the Ball!” captures how the victories of Billie Jean King did nothing less than help change the trajectories of women’s lives. For too long, though, she couldn’t be who she was. The film shows us how her close friendship with Elton John, who wrote “Philadelphia Freedom” for her, was rooted in that shared predicament (though he says it was harder for her, because many in the entertainment industry knew he was gay). Yet even as we glimpse the torment behind her cool façade, we also see that she handles it the same way she did everything else: with a quality that can only be called grace. She still has that (in a feisty way). Maybe that’s why the ball stayed in her court.