Fiend at Court Unplugged
The US Open is played at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Throughout her playing career, Billie Jean King was in frequent conflict with the USLTA (later USTA) and one of its most outspoken and colorful critics. As an organization, the USTA has a long history of an extremely insular culture that ostracizes dissenters. That makes the decision to say “Thank You” to Billie Jean by naming the National Tennis Center in her honor all the more momentous. That recognition of her enormous contributions to the sport was an act that was entirely out of character for the USTA.
Choosing to name the entire complex after Billie Jean King transcends how Grand Slam stadiums and courts are conventionally named in tennis. With the Center Court already named after Arthur Ashe, the grandstand court was the next logical feature of the facility to honor her. That pattern is apparent across other major tennis venues. The center court is named after a man, and the remaining grandstand and secondary courts are available to honor women. The USTA consciously elected to break that convention.
Naming the entire facility after Billie Jean King was also a decision to forgo potential corporate sponsorship for naming rights. A prominent example of a lucrative deal that active at that time was the Houston Astros 30 year $100 million deal with a local energy company for naming rights to their new stadium. That deal also illustrates the potential pitfalls of corporate naming sponsorship. Enron Field did not survive the length of that 30 year contract.
The USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center was formally named on August 28, 2006 on the first night of the US Open that year. Billie Jean gleefully remarked to the audience that the facility was a public tennis center. She got her start in the sport at a public park and was a strong advocate that tennis was a sport for the people. It is only fitting that a facility named in her honor is open to the public. Anybody can book a court or a lesson at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.
Naming the facility in honor of Billie Jean King might be the single most appropriate and magnanimous act ever performed by the USTA.
- USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York.
- Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports, Susan Ware, The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
- A Brief History of Stadium Naming Rights, Ethan Trex, Mental Floss, November 27, 2008.
