You get up every day, and hopefully you get a chance to talk to somebody, and every time that two people get engaged in discussion and dialogue, you’re influencers. And, of course, you can influence yourself—by thinking about what you want and deciding where to go every day and what to do. But we can all take it many more steps—and we can all also be afraid of going for it sometimes—but look what happens when you do it anyway: We can all influence not just our own lives, but others. I still have women coming up to me talking about the King-Riggs match and telling me how I gave them some kind of self-confidence—that they had always wanted to ask for a raise but now finally had the courage to do it. And I’ve had men come up to me with tears in their eyes, who had finally realized that their daughters deserved the same opportunities as their sons. President Obama, when I first met him at the White House, said to me, “You know, I saw that match when I was 12, and it’s amazing now that I have two daughters, how it helped shape my thought about how to raise them.”
I was also amazed to learn that Original Nine are not in tennis’s Hall of Fame?! Well—not yet, at least. We were finally nominated, and I just voted today—I voted for us. [laughs] So we’ll see what happens. I don’t think a lot of people really understood what we did, which is why I think it’s more important than ever to tell our story; because without this, I don’t know what would have happened. Would women’s tennis have been relegated to a warm-up act? Would it even exist?
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