Commentary: Williams sisters grand dames of sport

? On the surface, they would seem to be the yin-yang couple of women’s tennis. Billie Jean King is short and feisty and crackles with an irrepressible energy. When 6-1 Venus Williams is really, really upset, she’s liable to frown slightly on the court. But that’s it.

The two of them are separated by 37 years and you might think they have little in common, but you’d be wrong. They’re fast friends and text messagers, for one thing. Both of them grew up with siblings in pro sports. As a girl, King idolized her older brother Randy Moffitt, who became a big-league pitcher. Venus has always been breaking new ground a couple of steps ahead of her youngest sister, Serena, whom she’ll face tonight in the U.S Open quarterfinals, easily the most hotly anticipated showdown at this year’s tournament thus far.

King was the first to argue that women’s tennis was entertainment. The Williams sisters’ rise had a lot to do with the U.S. Open women’s final moving to its prime-time slot on Saturday night. King, who has had a hand in nearly every other monumental change in tennis, turns 65 in November, an age normally associated with retirement. Yet she remains as busy and in demand as ever with a couple of new endorsement deals, a new environmental initiative she created called Green Slam. She still runs World Team Tennis and just published her eighth book (but first in 20 years) called “Pressure is a Privilege.”

Sept. 23 will mark the 35th anniversary of King’s groundbreaking “Battle of the Sexes” match against Bobby Riggs. But just to show you how much, yet how little things change, retired Australian star Pat Cash wrote a column for The Times of London just last week in which he griped about how ill-considered it is for major tournaments to give equal prize money to men and women.

All of a sudden, the Williams sisters have re-emerged as the bellwether players of the women’s game. Which is funny. You could’ve gotten long odds – perhaps even from Venus herself – that she’d still be around professional tennis at age 28.

When asked the other day if she planned to bring back the hair beads she wore after her tour debut in 1994, Venus laughed and scoffed, “That was sooo last millennium.”

“I just love her , I love her sisters, I love her whole family,” King said Tuesday between appearances at the Open. “Venus just gets it.”

Venus has five Wimbledon singles titles, just one fewer than King. They share this too: “I’m a public parks kid, she’s a public parks kid,” King brags. King was also thrilled when Venus was by far the biggest women’s star who kept pushing Wimbledon until the tournament finally agreed to pay equal prize money in 2007, a crusade King began in 1973.

Venus went on to win that year’s tournament. When she was presented with a winner’s check of $1.5 million, same as eventual men’s champion Roger Federer, Williams looked to King in the stands and said: “Billie Jean, I love you. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

King has been a far more transformative figure than Venus. But both of them are groundbreakers.

“The more I grow as a professional and as a woman,” Venus said more recently, “the more I appreciate the importance of Billie Jean King.”