“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…
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