Billie Jean King

Billie Jean King: The Player Who Built the League

In September 1970 the Pacific Southwest Open offered $12,500 to its men's champion and $1,500 to its women's. Billie Jean King, then among the best players alive, did not write a letter of complaint. She and eight other women organised a rival tournament, the Virginia Slims Invitational, and walked out of the tournament structure that had produced those numbers. Within three years women's tennis had its own professional tour, its own players' union, and equal prize money at the US Open.

An Eight-Dollar Racket

She was born Billie Jean Moffitt on 22 November 1943 in Long Beach, California, to Bill Moffitt, a firefighter, and Betty Jerman. It was a sporting household: her younger brother Randy pitched in the major leagues for the Giants, the Astros and the Blue Jays. She played softball first and switched to tennis at eleven, buying her first racket for eight dollars out of saved money and taking free lessons on Long Beach's public courts from a coach named Clyde Walker.

She was fifteen when she made her Grand Slam debut at the 1959 US Championships, and lost in the first round. She met Larry King, another tennis player, at Los Angeles State College in 1963; they became engaged as students and married in Long Beach on 17 September 1965.

The Amateur Trap

The tennis King entered was formally amateur and practically feudal. Players were paid under the table, controlled by national associations, and expected to be grateful. Her own description of the culture is the sharpest thing anyone has said about it: "In America, tennis players are not people. You work all your life to win Wimbledon and people say, 'That's nice. Now what are you going to do with your life?'"

She won Wimbledon. Repeatedly. The question kept being asked.

Nine Women

The Virginia Slims breakaway of 1970 was a genuine risk — the players involved faced suspension from the sanctioned circuit, and the alternative tour had to succeed commercially or their careers were over. It succeeded. In 1971 King became the first female athlete to earn more than $100,000 in a single year, a milestone significant enough that President Nixon telephoned to congratulate her.

In 1973 she founded the Women's Tennis Association and served as its first president, consolidating the scattered leverage of individual players into a body that could negotiate. The same year, the US Open became the first major championship to pay its women's champion the same as its men's — a change King had pressed for with the credible threat of a boycott behind it.

The Astrodome

Bobby Riggs, a Wimbledon champion of the 1930s and by 1973 a fifty-five-year-old self-appointed chauvinist showman, had beaten Margaret Court earlier that year and spent months arguing in public that the women's game was beneath the men's. On 20 September 1973, in the Houston Astrodome, King beat him 6–4, 6–3, 6–3 in front of 30,492 spectators and an estimated fifty million American television viewers — the largest audience tennis had ever had.

Riggs was a 5–2 favourite. King later became his friend. Her own account of the night's importance was resolutely practical rather than triumphalist: "The thrill was exposing a lot of new people to tennis."

The Record

The advocacy has a way of obscuring the playing, which was extraordinary. King won 39 Grand Slam titles — twelve in singles, sixteen in women's doubles, eleven in mixed. Six of the singles titles came at Wimbledon, four at the US Championships, one in Paris and one in Australia; she completed the career Grand Slam in singles in 1972 and again in mixed doubles. She was ranked world number one six times between 1966 and 1974.

At Wimbledon she took twenty titles in all, a record she shares with Martina Navratilova, and compiled a 96–15 match record there. She never lost to an unseeded player at the tournament: 65–0. Across her career she won 129 singles titles and something over 695 matches against 155 defeats, and she went on entering Grand Slam singles events until 1983, twenty-four years after her first.

Why Billie Jean Is Called a Genius

Two claims are bundled under the word, and they are not equally strong.

The athletic one rests on craft and nerve rather than physical endowment. She was an aggressive serve-and-volley player who won by getting to the net and by reading where a ball would be sent rather than reacting to where it had gone. Margaret Court, who beat her often, called her "the greatest competitor I've ever known" — a precise compliment and a limited one, about temperament under pressure rather than intellect.

The second claim is stronger, and genuinely strategic. King grasped what no player before her had acted on: that individual excellence generates no leverage, and that the one thing an athlete owns which an institution cannot take is the willingness to withhold labour collectively. The Virginia Slims walkout, the founding of the WTA and the boycott threat that forced equal prize money at the US Open are three moves in one correctly sequenced campaign — build an alternative venue, organise the workers, then negotiate from a position where refusal is credible. She did it in her twenties, while ranked number one, with her own career as collateral.

The counter-case: twelve singles majors is superb but not the highest; Court, Navratilova and Steffi Graf finished ahead. The Riggs match, culturally seismic, was an exhibition against a man twenty-six years her senior. And she left no technical innovation behind — no shot, no method, no school. Her genius was organisational and political, exercised by an athlete, and more unusual for that.

Legacy

She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1987 and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1990. She served as commissioner of World Team Tennis from 1982, became its majority owner in 1984, and sold her stake only in 2017. In 2006 the USTA's national tennis centre in New York, home of the US Open, was renamed for her — the first major American sports facility named after a woman.

She was among the first prominent female athletes to be publicly identified as gay, and she spent the decades afterwards campaigning for LGBT rights as well as women's. On 12 August 2009 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing exactly that work; she was the first female athlete to receive it. The honours have kept coming — the BBC's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018, the French Legion of Honour in 2022, the Congressional Gold Medal in 2024.

She told her mother, at five years old, that she was going to do something great with her life. It is unusual for that sentence to be borne out so literally.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom
• International Tennis Hall of Fame
• Associated Press Athlete of the Year
• Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame
• National Women's Hall of Fame
• California Hall of Fame
• Women's Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame