Speak Your Own Truth, on Your Own Terms
Published to The New York Times on June 27, 2014
Billie Jean King loves to connect. The 70-year-old tennis legend — winner of 39 Grand Slam titles, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and, most famously, the “Battle of the Sexes” match against Bobby Riggs in 1973 — peppers questions like forehand volleys. Within three minutes of walking into Boulud Sud, near Lincoln Center, Ms. King had learned that the restaurant manager’s mother rowed crew for Syracuse University; asked her interviewer’s partner’s name (and tossed it off casually through the afternoon); and compared notes on the French Open with the waiter.