Watch: Aussie TV debates Margaret Court legacy, views

"If I were playing today, I wouldn't play on it."

Billie Jean King said that in January 2018, now nearly two years ago, in then the latest wake of controversy over Margaret Court and her eponymous arena at the Australian Open.

Australia has a program called The Today Show to call its own, and its hosts took again to the subject with vigor in the past week after Court threatened to sit out during her Grand Slam achievement's milestone anniversary.

That wasn't the sole program to take on the news, with a range of Aussie-based media reporting on the development.

Say what you will about Court, but in retirement, she plays a masterful hand at getting the news coverage she craves. (Written sans irony.) At the same time, as one Aussie writer notes, one in seven people in that country identify as LGBTQ. With modern Australia seemingly free of her Hall of Fame touch, Court appears to hit one unforced error of words after another.

Largely pilloried in the Aussie media, the 24-time major singles champion—winner of a record 64 Grand Slams overall, including women's and mixed doubles wins—remains a polarizing figure in the tennis world.

The sport's global community has itself made inclusive inroads in past months and years after decades of checkered history when it came to treatment of out LGBTQ pros. Among them: King, Martina Navratilova, Amelie Mauresmo, Renee Richards and more.

It bears noting that Court does also have her defenders, some of them famous or otherwise prominent in Australia. Her brand of biblically-based exclusion has similar keepers at the highest levels of Australia's politics, including a prime minister in Scott Morrison.

While detractors pile on about Court's history of hateful comments, she has appeared to remain unscathed to date insofar as her titular stadium.

That may change—or we'll get business as usual, and a fanciful, if begrudging, fete of Court come January Down Under.

We should know in two months' time, or less, if Court will become a no-show or a made-for-TV moment taker in Melbourne. One can hardly argue with the occasion: It's to be heralded as the 50th anniversary of her 1970 Grand Slam, the first by a female player in the Open era.

Let it be. Let the organizers put on a program for her. And let the cheers and boos alike rain down in that arena. The charmed career deserves the former; the harmful words, delivered in spades over the years, call for the latter.