Billie Jean King, John McEnroe and Tennis's Memory Industry

On June 27, 2027, inside The O2 in London, a stage will be erected where a court could have been. That night, Billie Jean King — born in 2026, by then 83 years old — will walk out from behind the curtain, sit down on a chair, and not hold a racket. Beside her will be John McEnroe, 68, also not holding a racket. The two will speak. They will tell stories. The show is titled “Champions in Sport. Champions in Life.”, with tickets released in tiers — from O2 Priority to LTA and AELTC members — starting September 22, 2026.

I keep thinking about the distance between two verbs: to play and to tell. One side is made of numbers you can count. The other is made of things you cannot count — a glance, a pause before an answer, a question no reporter dares to ask in a press room. An empty court, it turns out, has its own sound of longing.

To understand why a conversation is being sold as a major tennis event, you have to place it inside the history of this sport itself. In 2027, Wimbledon turns 150. It is a milestone that all of England — and the whole tennis industry — will use to sell everything sellable: documentaries, exhibitions, memorabilia, tours. Inside that machinery, the King and McEnroe show is scheduled for the night before the tournament opens, catching the full flow of people, sponsors and media arriving in London. It is not a tournament. It is a product. But it wears three layers of memory at once: 150 years of Wimbledon, 50 years since McEnroe first appeared at Wimbledon, and 54 years since King's 2026 triple on this very ground — singles, women's doubles and mixed doubles titles.

Three numbers combine into a storytelling engine. And The O2, in its 20th-anniversary season, has chosen this as its only spoken-word show of the year. That says a great deal about how a major venue sees this sport: as a memory vault that can be scheduled like any performance.

But if it were only memory, this show would not be worth five minutes of my writing. What makes it worth writing are the digits standing behind the two names.

Billie Jean King has 39 Grand Slam titles spread across singles, doubles and mixed doubles. Of those, 20 are at Wimbledon — a record. She finished the year as world No. 1 six times. McEnroe has 17 Grand Slam titles, and 155 combined singles and doubles titles, an Open Era men's record. Together, the two hold 56 Grand Slam titles. The organizers use these numbers as marketing material — and they are accurate, not inflated. That is a rare thing.

What is interesting lies elsewhere: the figure 155 and the figure 20 are both cross-discipline aggregates, and the way people choose to name them reveals how tennis wants its own memory to look. No one says “155 singles titles.” They say “155 titles.” No one says “20 Wimbledon singles championships.” They say “20 Wimbledon championships.” The aggregation is factually accurate, but it is also an editing technique — turning the scattered flesh and blood of a career into a round, memorable number that fits on a poster.

Based on my experience watching matches and tribute ceremonies over more than twenty years, I have noticed a rule: the harder a sport finds it to look at its present, the more carefully it tends its past.

Both King and McEnroe belong to the serve-and-volley era. It was a time when surfaces were faster, strings were tighter, and a player could end a point in two shots. King won much of her 20 Wimbledon titles in an era when grass was a weapon, not a surface for comparing speed. McEnroe was famous for his spin serve and net approaches performed like an artist onstage. When the audience at The O2 sits down to hear the two talk tactics, they will be hearing about a different sport from the one being played on the courts outside. That does not make the story less valuable. It simply makes one thing clear: the memory of tennis and the tennis of the present are two different things, and this show sells the first.

In Moscow in 2026, while working for American television at the World Cup, a male colleague laughed when I asked Luka Modrić whether he felt sad when he won. I later wrote a long piece, setting the figure of 12.5 km he ran beside the image of him herding sheep during wartime. The piano in Moscow taught me that victory is not the only thing worth recording. I bring that lesson here: 39, 20, 155 must be set beside a human being, or they are only a scoreboard.

And who is the human being here? King was not only a player. She founded the WTA — the body representing professional women players; she founded the Women's Sports Foundation and a foundation bearing her name. She was an institution-builder before she was a court legend. McEnroe is different: he is a television figure, having worked with 12 networks, and his charm lies more in his mouth than in his racket. Put the two together, and the organizers have struck a precise balance: King brings weight, history and seriousness; McEnroe brings laughter and box-office pull. The words “Champions in Life” in the title were placed there to bridge both.

Structurally, this is a value chain led by the venue, not by the tournament. The O2 places the product inside its anniversary season. The LTA — British tennis's governing body — and the AELTC — the organizer of Wimbledon — both join the presale channel. This is the most notable signal in the whole story: the show is not an independent commercial product standing outside the institutions, but one that comes with institutional blessing. There is not a drop of sweat on court, but there is a signature at the back.

What does this mean? It means tennis has learned to package memory as ticketed entertainment, with an order of sale and a tiered price. And it is doing so not while the sport is booming, but while it needs old names to keep audiences around a little longer.

There is a lazy reading of events like this: two aging legends, and a nostalgia market draining them one last time. I do not think so. King and McEnroe are not the ones being exploited. They are the lenders. Wimbledon 2027's anniversary calendar has spent all of its own novelty, so it must borrow the liquidity of two old names. The younger of the two is already 68. If anyone here needs rescuing, it is the tournament, not the two guests.

And the real blind spot of collective memory is here: we think we are remembering a court, but what we are actually buying is the feeling of walking behind the curtain. King herself said the show would take the audience “into the real world of our careers.” That phrase — behind the curtain — is the most seductive product of the spoken-word trade: it sells the sense that we know something outsiders do not. But the curtain is a tool. Without the curtain, there is no backstage feeling. You have to build it so the audience can see through it.

Before they were legends, they were children carrying rackets in search of a home. King grew up in Long Beach, California, on a public court. McEnroe grew up in Queens, New York, in a household where both parents worked. Neither was born in the corridor of a Grand Slam. They walked there on their own feet. When the show at The O2 is sold as a reunion of two legends, I want to remember the road before they became legends — because that road is what actually paid for today's ticket.

There is a worry organizers find hard to voice. A show dependent on the in-person presence of two people aged 68 and 83 is not an event with substitutes. If either cannot attend, there is no backup plan strong enough to preserve the weight of the evening. This is the structural weakness of the whole model: living memory is sold as a product, but living memory is finite. At the same time, a show 21 months away raises a demand question: whether a market already saturated with nostalgia can hold its audience until the summer of 2027.

On June 27, 2027, when the two sit down beside each other on The O2 stage, there will be a silence before the first question. That silence will not be sold, will not be entered into any record, will be measured by no one. But it may be the only real part of the entire evening. I will listen for it. And I ask myself: will this sport one day have the courage to do without the curtain — to let a player still competing sit down and tell her own story, not because she is a legend, but because she is here, right now. The pandemic froze sports, but it could not freeze what we tell each other. And the open question remains: do we want to remember tennis, or to live with it?