Today we were given the “historic” news that Billie Jean King has become The First Female Athlete to Be Honored With A Star On The Hollywood Walk of Fame!!!! That’s funny…I always thought the Hollywood landmark and tourist attraction was designed to honor entertainers, and not athletes. But for some reason—in fact, the reasons will become obvious shortly—the Walk of Fame added a Sports Entertainment category in 2021. Few noticed.

The Walk is a fake honor anyway. Its approximately 2,800 five-pointed terrazzo-and-brass stars are embedded in the sidewalks along 15 blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and three blocks of Vine Street. The star began being installed in 1960 and are supposed to be are monuments to achievement in the particular categories in the entertainment industry. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce chooses who gets a star based on mysterious criteria when a celebrity or his or her sponsors will fund the creation, installation and maintenance of a star. Currently, the price for the honor is $75,000. The Chamber obviously calculated that sports stars are rich and have big egos and fan bases. That means that they deserve to be considered “entertainers.”

How long before the Hollywood Chamber decides to install stars for TV news pundits on the Walk? Politicians! Murderers! O.J. could have three stars: athlete, movie actor, and for being the most entertaining defendant in a murder trial ever.

So far, no white male athletes have been deemed sufficiently entertaining to rate a star. The current ranks of starred athletes number three: Billie Jean, Carl Weathers (Apollo Creed in “Rocky” and an actor whose accomplishments as an athlete amount to an undistinguished career in professional football), and Michael Strahan, a better NFL player (he made the NFL Hall of Fame) and successful TV host.