Give Me the Ball! (documentary) ★★★

Last year it was pioneering astronaut Sally Ride, the first US woman and third woman in the world to fly to space, who received a worthy tribute at Sundance’s prestigious Premieres section with Cristina Costantini’s documentary Sally. Now it’s the turn for another fascinating female achiever to get her documentary honors at the festival. And this time she is happily alive to tell her life story herself. In fact, it’s Billie Jean King‘s vibrant presence that gives Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff‘s biographical portrait its magnetism and momentum. In about 100 minutes, the world’s top tennis player and champion, both of her sport and women’s rights, looks back on a life of many battles, not only on the tennis court. 

While the narrative follows the traditional trajectory from childhood to present, interspersed with historical and social context, Give Me the Ball!’s kinetic energy, humor, and honesty give it a galvanizing purpose not often accomplished in sports biographies. Cinematography and pacing mirror King’s own style — direct, dynamic, and unafraid of confrontation. The director-duo position their protagonist as much as a world-class athlete who led the top frame player list for five years, as a cultural insurgent whose life intersects with feminism, LGBTQ+ visibility, and the fight for social equity. Balancing personal and panoramic perspectives, present-day interviews with the 82-year old star player serve as narration for the comprehensive archive material. It cleverly, though somewhat predictably, starts by teasing the match King’s is arguably most renowned for. 

In 1973 King played against former champion Bobby Riggs who made a joke—and, in tune with his profit-focused personality, money—out of denigrating women and women’s sports in particular. After King recalls how she thought: “I have to win!”, the focus goes back to her childhood, tracing how she became an international star player and what led her to battle Riggs. TV footage allows the match to unfold with narrational and cinematic tension, transforming a well-known event into something fresh and exciting. The sexist structures in sports that denied female athletes equal payment form one keystone of the analytical account. It sees King, her public and private life, always in connection with the social expectations and structural limitations of her times. 

Racism, classism, and sexism—factors which paradoxically were instrumental in boosting tennis as a fashionable game for a white male elite—are rarely addressed in sports documentaries. Give Me the Ball! is the opposite to this blinkered approach with its clear eyed critique of the ridiculous standards and codes of a white-clad, white-skinned tennis elite. Within the broader context of King’s journey, familiar moments emerge as a signifiers of the cultural currents she swam against. Refusing to romanticize King at the expense of complexity, the empathic account reflects on her obsession with winning, her struggle with weight gain and eating, and her insecurity about her sapphic feelings. The crushing experience of her public outing against her will by a former lover in 1981 is palpable in the bitter scenes. 

It occurred two years before the famous space trip of Sally Ride who kept her own relationships with women carefully under wraps. It’s hard not to think that witnessing Billie Jean King’s cruel treatment had an influence on Ride. With all its sympathy and admiration for King, Give Me the Ball! eludes glorification. Self-reflection, doubt, and candid humor remind that her impact came also at personal cost. As an engaging depiction of sport’s intersection with social transformation, the vivid homage remains keenly aware of the price of visibility and resistance in a world predisposed to suppress both.