Philadelphia Freedoms (1974)

World Team Tennis (1974)

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Philadelphia Freedoms
Team Tennis T-Shirt

When World Team Tennis debuted in 1974, the Philadelphia Freedoms boasted the league’s biggest star in Billie Jean King, best record (35-9), biggest crowds at the Spectrum and the team even inspired a hit single by Elton John. None of that was enough to save the team. The Freedoms moved to Boston after just one season in Philly.

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Background

The Philadelphia Freedoms were the showcase franchise of World Team Tennis (WTT) when the innovative co-ed tennis promotion debuted in the spring of 1974. The team’s calling card was 31-year old Billie Jean King. The 10-time Grand Slam singles champion and league co-founder was riding a wave of notoriety following her “Battle of the Sexes” exhibition victory over Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome the previous fall, a made-for-TV spectacle that drew a U.S. broadcast audience of 50 million people.

World Team Tennis clubs in 1974 featured three male and three female players who competed in a game format of singles play, doubles and mixed doubles. King served as Player-Coach of the Freedoms. The rest of the roster included:

• Former U.S. Open (1965) and Australian Open (1966) champion Fred Stolle
• 19-year old British teenager Buster Mottram
• 26-year old Brian Fairlie of New Zealand
• Harrisburg, Pennsylvania native Tory Ann Fretz
• 26-year old Julie Anthony, Billie Jean King’s primary doubles partner in WTT play

1974 Season

The Freedoms dominated the 1974 inaugural season of World Team Tennis with a league-best 35-9 record. Philadelphia went undefeated in 22 regular season home matches at The Spectrum. King was the league’s top scoring women’s singles player and the King-Anthony pairing was WTT’s top female doubles team. King earned league MVP honors.

The Freedoms dominance faded in the WTT playoffs in August 1974. The Freedoms dropped their first home match of the year to the Pittsburgh Triangles in the semi-finals on August 23, 1974. King defeated Pittsburgh’s Evonne Goolagong in the women’s singles portion of the match. The pair would meet again just two weeks later in the women’s singles final of the 1974 U.S. Open with King coming out on top once again.  Despite the loss at home, the Freedoms advanced to the 1974 World Team Tennis championship series by virtue of total point scoring in the two-game semi-final against Pittsburgh.

In the finals, the Denver Racquets stunned the Freedoms, eliminating the Philadelphians in a two-game sweep. Buster Mottram had been the Freedoms’ most effective men’s singles player all year. In the first leg of the two-game Championship Series at Denver Auditorium Arena, Mottram sat out with a 104-degree fever. Replacement Brian Fairlie lost his set 6-2 to Denver’s Andrew Pattison to put the Freedoms in a hole.

When the series headed back to The Spectrum the next day, Mottram’s fever had broken but he complained of feeling weak and was covered in a rash. Three games into his men’s singles set against Pattison, Mottram withdrew and was replaced by Fairlie. Pattison thrashed the Mottram/Fairlie combo by a score of 6-0. The cumulative effect of crushing men’s singles losses on back-to-back games was too big a deficit for the Freedoms to climb out of.

After the match, King and Freedoms team captain Fred Stolle eviscerated the teenage Mottram in the press.

“He’s a hell of a player and he could be a great one, but he never will be,” declared Stolle (Philadelphia Daily News 8/27/1974). “We tried for 44 (regular season matches) to get him to overcome his problems … When it gets down to the crunch he doesn’t want to play.”

“This team gave Buster a lot all year,” said King (Philadelphia Daily News 8/27/1974). “It’s the intangibles that bother me. A lot of kids have ability … no attitude, no guts.”

Demise

Investors in World Team Tennis faced a reckoning after the league’s first season ended in August 1974. Playing mostly in giant NBA and NHL arenas, the league averaged under 3,000 fans per contest. 10 of the league 16 franchises either folded or relocated during the winter and spring of 1974-1975.

By January 1975 the Freedoms were a ghost ship. Team owner Richard Butera reportedly saw his investment portfolio reduced by nearly 90% in the global stock market crash of 1973-1974. The Freedoms office closed in January 1975. A month later, Butera reluctantly sold Billie Jean King’s contract to the WTT’s New York Sets franchise.

Meanwhile, the league’s original Boston Lobsters franchise folded, but new investors wanted to revive the team in Boston. The New England group, which included future New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft making his first pro sports invesment, purchased what remained of the Freedoms franchise just over a month before WTT’s second season was set to open in May 1975. The team was swiftly moved to Boston and became the second incarnation of the Boston Lobsters.

Legacy

During the summer of 1974, Billie Jean King’s good friend Elton John recorded a song in her honor and called it Philadelphia Freedom. By the time the single was released in February 1975, the Freedoms tennis team was all but dead. Philadelphia Freedom reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. that winter.

The original World Team Tennis folded after five seasons in early 1979. King remained one of the league’s top stars throughout its 1974-1978 run.

In 1981, King helped to revive a new, lower-budget version of World Team Tennis that largely eschewed the NHL and NBA palaces of the 1970’s league in favor of country clubs and other more appropriately scaled venues. That league continues in operation today and includes a re-booted version of the Philadelphia Freedoms that formed in 2001 and enters its 20th season of competition in 2020.

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All In: An Autobiography

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Selected as one of Fun While It Lasted’s Top 10 Sports Books of 2021!

In this spirited account, Billie Jean King details her life’s journey to find her true self. She recounts her groundbreaking tennis career—six years as the top-ranked woman in the world, twenty Wimbledon championships, thirty-nine grand-slam titles, and her watershed defeat of Bobby Riggs in the famous “Battle of the Sexes.” She poignantly recalls the cultural backdrop of those years and the profound impact on her worldview from the women’s movement, the assassinations and anti-war protests of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, and, eventually, the LGBTQ+ rights movement

 

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Bustin' Balls

World Team Tennis 1974-1978, Pro Sports, Pop Culture & Progressive Politics

by Steven Blush

Bustin’ Balls tells the strange but true story of World Team Tennis (1974-1978) that attempted to transform the prim and proper individual sport of tennis into a rowdy blue-collar league. Billie Jean King and her partners merged feminism and civil rights with queer lifestyle, pop culture and a progressive political agenda to create a dazzling platform for the finest tennis players of the day to become overnight stars.

 

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Links

1974-1978 World Team Tennnis Media Guides

World Team Tennis Programs 1974-1978

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