Billie Jean King has been causing a stir in tennis for more than 50 years. 

She’s very good at it and was at it again this week when she said on a conference call to promote the eponymous national women’s team competition, the Billie Jean King Cup, that she would be fine with combining that event with the Davis Cup, the men’s national team competition, into one big mixed World Cup event. 

“I think it’s really important to have a World Cup for tennis,” King said.

King’s comments came just weeks ahead of both competitions and typified her occasionally anti-establishment approach to achieving her goals. After all, how often does the woman for which a competition is named take an opportunity to promote that event to announce she’d be OK with effectively ending it? 

But that’s the way BJK rolls, especially when it’s hard not to see all the problems with the Billie Jean King Cup, as well as the Davis Cup, both of which have struggled to attract top players and fan interest in recent times. Big picture, though: King has long advocated men and women competing together. Years ago, I sat with her at a World Team Tennis event in Washington D.C. She was effectively the majority owner of World Team Tennis, the professional team tennis league she co-founded in the 1970s. 

There was a mixed doubles event unfolding. Their teammates lined the court, cheering them on. 

“You see what we’re trying to do here?” King said, as she nudged me with her elbow. 

She wasn’t talking about the tennis but rather sending a large message of men and women and girls and boys being teammates and supporting one another.

There are not a lot of those competitions in tennis. Men and women play together at the United Cup, a new competition that takes place at the beginning of the Australian summer of tennis, just after Christmas. The competition is still finding its footing. The United States won this year. One of the big outgrowths of that was the relationship that developed between Frances Tiafoe and Jessica Pegula, who became hitting partners, warming each other up before their matches at the Australian Open, which is exactly the kind of dynamic King has been aiming for basically her entire adult life.

As for the struggles with the existing set-up, this year, just like last year, scheduling complications and the disparate management of the sport, which is controlled by at least seven different organizations, have forced the Billie Jean King Cup to take place in Seville, Spain, almost immediately following the WTA Finals in Cancun, Mexico. Direct flights from Cancun to Seville are not a thing, which is just one reason three of the top four women in the WTA rankings — Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff and Pegula — have opted not to participate.

Exhaustion at the end of an 11-month season hopscotching the globe is another. Gauff hit the wall last year in November and doesn’t ever want to feel like that again.

King took a swipe at the management of the WTA Tour in her comments, saying this was all their fault because the organization had to scramble to find a date and a location for its season-ending event as its deal with China fell through and didn’t announce Cancun as the host until September. 

A spokesperson for the WTA, which King helped create 50 years ago, said on Thursday that officials from the Billie Jean King Cup, the International Tennis Federation and the WTA Tour met at the French Open to discuss what adjustments could be made to the calendar to accommodate both events.

“The WTA made several suggestions that the Billie Jean King Cup and the ITF are considering for future years,” the spokesperson said. “It is important to note that any change will increase the length of the season for the players. The WTA is always open to discussions on improving the calendar flow for our members, partners and fans.”

The two organizations have haggled over dates since the pandemic, but from the WTA’s perspective, the big new complication is that the Billie Jean King Cup shifted from a two-team final that took place over three days to a multiple-team event held over six days, which shrunk the time between the two competitions.

The Davis Cup has its own issues. The event lost its main corporate partner, Kosmos, earlier this year and continues to hunt for new investment.  

Whether the ITF, which controls the Billie Jean King Cup and the Davis Cup, is even interested in scrapping those events in favor of a World Cup, or staging a mixed World Cup event once every two or three or four years instead of the separate competitions, isn’t exactly clear. 

There is little doubt that a World Cup of tennis could have plenty of appeal, especially among the younger generation of players who have a more evolved view of the value of mixed competition than their predecessors, especially on the men’s side.

Stefanos Tsitsipas, for instance, was a huge fan of the United Cup because it allowed him to be on the same team as Maria Sakkari, a close friend, and cheer on compatriots. Fans have shown the most support for tennis events – through ticket sales and television ratings – when men and women are competing in the same event.

The big questions would have to involve the format. Organizers would likely want to include both singles and mixed doubles, and perhaps even regular doubles, and need to consider how long such an event would require. A true World Cup requires a lot of teams, but the more teams involved, the longer the event and the more diluted the competition.

The United Cup includes six groups of three countries competing in a round-robin format, with each tie including one men’s singles and one women’s singles match featuring the No 1 ranked singles players, followed by one mixed doubles match. The competition will take 10 days to complete. That feels a little long. Take a cue from soccer: for my money, the 16-team Euros was as good as sports got. Outside of the Grand Slams, tennis is good when it is tight and intense from the first ball.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The Davis Cup has been around in various formats for 111 years. The Billie Jean King Cup has been around for 60. They are among the main sources of revenue for the ITF. As enticing as a World Cup of tennis might be, it’s complicated.

(Top photos: Getty Images)