Courtside Icons: Billie Jean King

...starting with the truly iconic Billie Jean King.

Billie Jean is a trailblazer for not only tennis but women’s sport, and her start on public courts makes her even more inspiring to us. Born on November 22nd 1944 in Long Beach, California, Billie Jean played a variety of sports from a young age before turning to tennis at 11 years old when her friend, Susan Williams, took her to play. She got the tennis bug immediately and started to play on Long Beach’s public courts with a racket she purchased herself from working odd jobs.

By 1958, Billie Jean was labelled a young player to watch, and in 1959, aged 15, she turned pro. King went onto attend California State University, Los Angeles from 1961 to 1964, where she continued her tennis career. Her career soared to new levels when she and Karen Hantze Susman became the youngest pair to win the Women’s Doubles title at Wimbledon in 1961.

Billie Jean’s Wimbledon success continued when she won her first major singles championship there in 1966. The same year she was ranked world #1 in women’s tennis. Her success continued throughout the late ‘60s winning Wimbledon again in 1967 and 1968, the US Open in 1967 and the Australian Open in 1968. By 1979, Billie Jean had won a record of 20 Wimbledon titles, 13 United States titles (including 4 singles), four French titles (one singles) for a total of 39 Grand Slam titles.

Although, her incredible success on court is only half of King’s story, she is largely known for her campaign for equal prize money in the men’s and women’s games. In 1971, King became the first women athlete to earn of $100,000 in prize money, however, the following year when she won the US Open, she received $15,000 less than the men’s champion, Ilie Năstase. This led King to lobby for equal prize money for men and women at the US Open, which subsequently became the first major tournament to offer equal prize money to both sexes. It took a further 34 years for all the remaining three major tournaments to follow suit.

In 1973, King’s search for pay equality gained a global audience of over 90 million when she battled men’s tennis player Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes”. Riggs had claimed that the women’s game was inferior to the men’s and Billie accepted the challenge to prove him wrong. King beat Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in the historic match, proving the women’s game can be equal to the men’s.

King’s search for equality in sport for women continued off the court when she leveraged her position to spearhead the formation of the Women’s Tennis Association and became its first president in doing so. In 1974, Billie Jean went on to cofound the World TeamTennis co-ed circuit and started the Women’s Sports Foundation, dedicated to creating leaders by providing girls access to sports.

Following her retirement from the sport, Billie Jean King has continued to make a difference to women’s sport around the world. She founded the Billie Jean King Foundation, a non-profit creating an equitable future through sports, activism, and education, in 2014.

Her success as an athlete and activist has also been celebrated since her retirement. In 2006, she became the first woman to have a major sports venue renamed in her honour when the USTA National Tennis Center, home of the US Open, was rededicated as the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded King the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour, for her advocacy work on behalf of women and the LGBTQ community.

Whilst we may not all go on to win 39 grand slam titles, like many of us, Billie Jean King found love for the game on her local courts, proving that to start small is better than to not start at all. 

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