Racket Science

So here is King at 47. She has been the consummate athlete at 135 pounds, and she has weighed 190. She has been called a model champion and a poor sport. She is interested in just about everything. She was once celebrated, occasionally reviled, and now she is venerated. And somehow she has regained that glow-in-the-dark generosity that makes people teach.

"I'm an idealist," King says. "I lost it for a while and then I got it back. I do understand that everything's not all as black-and-white as I thought."

Carillo has viewed King from various perspectives, first as a youngster growing up in the 1960s and '70s—when, if you were a woman tennis player, King's influence was impossible to avoid—then as a fellow player, and now as a 34-year-old wife and mother and a gainfully employed observer of tennis. Carillo's most enduring image of King dates to their playing days. One evening she invited King to the family home in Douglaston for dinner. King stood on the lawn at twilight, watching Carillo's father, Anthony, do his gardening. "Want to see my worms?" he said playfully, turning over several shovelsful of rich brown dirt. King leaned over to look, genuinely absorbed.

What does King want next? Here are just a few things. She wants to produce a mystery film. She wants to open a tennis academy with Kardon. She wants to keep passing her knowledge on to younger players and learning about how to develop and preserve athletic potential in children. She wants to see Navratilova and Mayotte win their Wimbledons with a searing sense of the moment. She wants them to be smarter at 40 than they are now.

"There is so much magic on that stage," says King. "I tell Tim and Martina that this is their stage and these are their moments. They should wake up every morning like they've been shot from a cannon."

"I think great people are great dreamers," says Mayotte. "They have this feeling, this expectation. I had it, just a little. I knew I was going to be a tennis player. But for her, the scheme has been so much grander."

Billie Jean, five years old, ran into her mother's kitchen and made an announcement. "I'm going to do something wonderful," she said.

"Really, dear," Betty Moffitt said. "I wonder what it will be."