🇺🇸Billie Jean
King

On September 20, 1973, in front of thirty thousand people at the Houston Astrodome and ninety million television viewers worldwide, Billie Jean King walked onto the court in a gold lame dress, was carried in on a feathered Egyptian litter by four men dressed as ancient servants, and then defeated Bobby Riggs — a former world number one who had been claiming for months that no woman could beat a top male player — 6–4, 6–3, 6–3 in straight sets. The match was called the Battle of the Sexes and it was, in every register available to sport, a cultural event. King was twenty-nine and ranked number one in women's tennis. Riggs was fifty-five and had defeated the world's top-ranked women's player, Margaret Court, 6–2, 6–1 earlier that same year. King dispatched him in less than two hours. The victory did not simply win a match — it functioned as a public argument, made before an audience that rarely engaged with political debates about gender equality, that women's athletic performance deserved respect, parity, and the same prize money as men's.

Billie Jean Moffitt was born in Long Beach, California, on November 22, 1943, and took up tennis at eleven, quickly displaying the aggressive, net-rushing game that would define her professional style. She reached the Wimbledon doubles final at seventeen, turned professional, and built a career that accumulated thirty-nine Grand Slam titles across singles, doubles, and mixed doubles — a total that, combined across all categories, places her among the most decorated players in the history of the sport. In singles alone, her twelve Grand Slam titles include six at Wimbledon, four at the US Open, and one each at the French Open and Australian Open. She was ranked world number one multiple times across a decade and a half, and her serve-and-volley game, built around aggressive net approaches and an exceptional volley, was ideally suited to the fast grass courts of her peak era.

Before the Battle of the Sexes made her famous beyond tennis, King had already spent years fighting for structural change within the sport. In 1970, she was among the eight players who signed a symbolic one-dollar contract with Gladys Heldman to form an independent women's circuit after the United States Lawn Tennis Association refused to equalize prize money. That circuit became the Virginia Slims Circuit and eventually the WTA Tour — the structure within which women's professional tennis has operated ever since. King's role in establishing it was foundational. She continued to push for equal prize money at the Grand Slams and was instrumental in the US Open's decision to offer equal prize money in 1973 — the first Grand Slam to do so. Wimbledon followed in 2007.

The WTA Tour, which King co-founded in 1973, is the most significant institutional legacy of any single tennis player of either gender. It created the professional framework that allowed subsequent generations of women players — from Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova through Steffi Graf and Monica Seles to Serena Williams and beyond — to build full professional careers with prize money, rankings, and global tours comparable in structure (if not, for a long time, in financial terms) to the men's game. Without King's willingness to risk her playing reputation and professional relationships by organizing the breakaway tour, the institutional scaffolding for women's professional tennis would have developed far more slowly, if at all.

Her personal life became a public matter in 1981 when she was outed in a palimony lawsuit by a former female partner. She held a press conference acknowledging her bisexuality — one of the first major public figures in American sport to do so — at significant personal cost: she lost most of her endorsement contracts within days. She continued to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights in sport and became an increasingly significant public figure on the issue through subsequent decades. She publicly came out as a lesbian in 1987 and has been with her partner Ilana Kloss since the 1980s.

King received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 — among the highest civilian honors in the United States. In 2006, the USTA National Tennis Center in New York, site of the US Open, was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. She remains active as a commentator, activist, and advocate, and the Billie Jean King Cup — the women's equivalent of the Davis Cup — was renamed in her honor in 2020. The renaming placed her in permanent institutional company with the man whose name had already been on the men's competition for over a century, which is, when considered, a precise measure of where she stands in the history of her sport and of American public life: alongside rather than behind, finally, after decades of arguing that this was where she had always belonged.