Billie Jean King

Hillary

The date was September 20, 1973. My friends and I were crowded around a television set, and I was nervous. We were a handful of the ninety million people around the world tuned in to “The Battle of the Sexes,” the most watched tennis match in history. On the screen, Billie Jean King was carried by burly-looking men into Houston’s Astrodome like Cleopatra on her throne. Her opponent, Bobby Riggs, rolled in on a rickshaw, accompanied by a pack of scantily clad women he called “Bobby’s bosom buddies.” Riggs, ever the showman, seemed to revel in the circus-like atmosphere. But from the steely glint in Billie Jean’s eyes, it was clear: She had come to play tennis.

We were rooting for her as though she were a friend we had known all our lives. I was on the edge of my seat, reminding myself to breathe in and out. I knew, and Billie Jean definitely knew, that she had a lot riding on her shoulders. Riggs was a self-described male chauvinist who said: “The male is supreme. The male is king.” If she lost to him, Billie Jean worried, she would undermine the newly passed Title IX, bring shame to women’s tennis, and set the women’s movement back fifty years. But if she won, she would send a resounding message to women and men everywhere that everyone deserved a level playing field. We really, really, really wanted her to win.

And win she did, trouncing Riggs decisively: 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. The audience in Houston rushed onto the court. Riggs leaped over the net to shake her hand and admitted: “I underestimated you.” As in so many other hard-fought victories in her life, Billie Jean didn’t win this one just for herself—she won it for all of us. It may have been a symbolic match, but it had a very real effect on how people saw themselves, women in particular.

Billie Jean King first captured my attention over a decade earlier, in the early 1960s. As an aspiring (and mediocre) tennis player myself, I thought: “Here is an American woman, not that much older than I am, and she’s doing something I know is really hard, and doing it well.” Most of all, she really seemed to love what she did.

She grew up in a family of athletes. One day, a friend brought her along to play tennis at the country club. She loved the physical aspect of the sport—jumping, running, hitting the ball. But she knew playing a country club sport was out of the question for a kid like her, who came from the “wrong side of the tracks.” It wasn’t until someone told her there were free lessons at her local public park that she thought: “That’s more like it.” She worked odd jobs for her neighbors until she finally managed to save up the eight or nine dollars a racket cost. She had high standards for herself from the beginning. One day, she calmly told her mother: “I am going to be number one in the world.”

Growing up, Billie Jean always knew things were different for her than they were for her brother. “Girls didn’t have the power,” she said. “People wouldn’t listen to us the way they listened to boys. I couldn’t articulate it then. I felt all these things bubbling up inside me.” Her first experience with outright gender discrimination came at age eleven, when she was barred from a group photo of junior tennis players because she had decided to wear a shirt and tennis shorts that day rather than a skirt.

Before long, the tennis world started to take notice of Billie Jean. By 1966, she was ranked number one in the world. Between 1961 and 1979, she won twenty Wimbledon titles, thirteen United States titles, four French titles, and two Australian titles—a total of thirty-nine Grand Slam titles. She was sure-footed and fast, with a strong backhand and a competitive spirit. The sport had never seen anyone quite like Billie Jean, on the court or off.

Billie Jean’s ascent in tennis coincided with social upheaval in America. President John F. Kennedy had signed the Equal Pay Act into law in 1963, but that didn’t change the glaring disparities in tennis. When Billie Jean King won the Italian Open in 1970, she was awarded six hundred dollars. The male winner took home nearly six times as much. The discrepancy in prize money was sometimes as much as eight to one. Along with eight other brave women players, “The Original Nine” broke away from the tennis establishment and launched their own tour in 1970, signing contracts for one dollar with publisher Gladys Heldman. They were risking their careers and their standing in the sport by taking this stand. But they did it anyway, because they knew how much it mattered. Three years later, the newly created Women’s Tennis Association would absorb the tour.

“Everyone thinks women should be thrilled when we get crumbs, and I want women to have the cake, the icing, and the cherry on top, too.”

—BILLIE JEAN KING

The Battle of the Sexes was one of the most visible wins in the struggle for equality, but it was far from Billie Jean’s only one. After she threatened to boycott the 1973 U.S. Open, it became the first major tournament to award equal prize money to men and women. She became the first woman to be chosen Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsperson of the Year.” Meanwhile, she founded World TeamTennis, a coed league, and started the Women’s Sports Foundation.

After she was publicly outed as a lesbian in the 1980s, Billie Jean lost her endorsement deals. Even this unwelcome invasion into her private life she took in stride. She squared her shoulders, kept her head high, and decided she wasn’t going to back away from who she was. “This is important to me, to tell the truth,” she later said. True to form, she not only came out, she became a fierce advocate for LGBTQ equality. Once again, when it would have been far easier to stay quiet, Billie Jean spoke out.

For Billie Jean, it was never enough to fight for herself; she was in it for the generations of athletes who have come after her. When a group of champion soccer players was struggling with the low pay and lack of attention for women players, they looked to Billie Jean. Soccer star Julie Foudy remembered going up to the icon and asking her what could be done. Billie Jean immediately turned the question back on the questioner, demanding: “What are you doing, Foudy? Like you, as players—what are you doing?… You have the leverage! You change it!” Thanks in part to her encouragement, Julie and her teammates took up the fight for equal pay for women’s soccer—a fight that continues to this day despite the fact, in 2019, U.S. women’s soccer games have for the past three years generated more revenue than U.S. men’s games.

Billie Jean King is even more inspiring to me today than she was the day of the Battle of the Sexes in September 1973—because of the life she’s lived, the fights she’s waged, and the integrity she brings to everything she does. She is a constant reminder that none of us can rest for very long. In the fight for equality—on the court and off—there is always more to do.