Billie Jean King

Billie Jean Moffitt was born on November 22, 1943, in Long Beach, California, into a family devoted to sport. Her father, Bill Moffitt, worked as a firefighter, and her mother, Betty, ran the household; her younger brother Randy Moffitt later pitched for more than a decade in Major League Baseball, mostly with the San Francisco Giants ^[1]. The Moffitts were a working-class family, and money for equipment and travel was scarce. Billie Jean saved coins from odd jobs to buy her first racket, which cost eight dollars, and began taking free instruction on Long Beach's public courts from coach Clyde Walker ^[2].

Softball had been her first love, but her parents steered her toward tennis as a sport thought more suitable for girls at the time. She took to it quickly. At age eleven she reportedly told her mother she intended to become the best player in the world, an ambition she pursued through Southern California's crowded junior circuit ^[1]. An early sting shaped her outlook: at a junior event at the Los Angeles Tennis Club in 1955, she was excluded from a group photograph because she wore shorts her mother had sewn rather than a tennis dress. King later described the episode as an awakening to the class snobbery of country-club tennis ^[2].

She attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School and then California State University, Los Angeles, where she studied while continuing to compete. Because tennis was still nominally amateur and offered women almost no scholarships, she supported herself with part-time work, an experience that sharpened her later arguments about pay in the sport ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Billie Jean King before she became a household name would find the answer at Wimbledon in 1961. That summer, at seventeen, Billie Jean Moffitt and Karen Hantze won the women's doubles title, at the time the youngest pairing to do so, announcing her arrival on the international stage ^[1]. Her aggressive serve-and-volley game, unusual among women of her generation, suited grass courts, and Wimbledon became the setting for many of her greatest days.

A turning point came in 1965, when she trained in Australia under coach Mervyn Rose, who rebuilt her serve and forehand. That same year she married Larry King, a law student she had met at college, and began competing as Billie Jean King ^[2]. The changes paid off almost immediately. In 1966 she won her first Wimbledon singles championship, defeating Maria Bueno in the final, and she successfully defended the title in 1967 and 1968 ^[1].

When tennis opened to professionals in 1968, King was among the first women to sign a professional contract, joining the National Tennis League. The move cost her amateur privileges but reflected her conviction that players deserved to earn a living from the sport. In 1968 she also won the first open-era Wimbledon singles title, and her stature grew as the game entered its modern commercial age ^[3].

The list of Billie Jean King achievements in competition is long by any standard. She won 39 Grand Slam titles across singles, doubles, and mixed doubles: 12 in singles, 16 in women's doubles, and 11 in mixed doubles ^[1]. Her 12 singles majors included six Wimbledon championships (1966, 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1975), four US Open titles (1967, 1971, 1972, 1974), the 1968 Australian Championships, and the 1972 French Open, which completed her career Grand Slam in singles ^[4]. Her 20 combined Wimbledon titles stood as a record until Martina Navratilova matched the mark in 2003 ^[1].

Her influence off the court rivaled her play on it. In 1970, angered by prize funds that paid men many times what women received, King and eight other players, remembered as the Original Nine, signed symbolic one-dollar contracts with promoter Gladys Heldman to launch the Virginia Slims circuit, the first professional tour for women ^[3]. In 1971 King became the first female athlete in any sport to earn more than 100,000 dollars in prize money in a single season ^[2]. Two years later she founded the Women's Tennis Association, unifying the women's game under a single players' organization, and served as its first president. That same year, 1973, the US Open became the first major to offer equal prize money to men and women, a change King had campaigned for directly ^[4].

The most watched moment of her career was not a championship at all. On September 20, 1973, in the Houston Astrodome, King faced Bobby Riggs, a 55-year-old former Wimbledon champion who had loudly proclaimed that even an aging man could beat the best women. Riggs had already defeated Margaret Court that May. King beat him in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, before a crowd of over 30,000 and an enormous television audience ^[5]. The Battle of the Sexes became a cultural landmark, and King always maintained that losing it would have set back both women's tennis and the broader argument for women's equality ^[5].

King married Larry King in 1965, and the two remained partners in business as well as marriage for many years, together founding ventures including World TeamTennis, the mixed-gender league launched in 1974, and the magazine womenSports ^[2]. The marriage ended in divorce in 1987.

In 1981 King was outed as gay when a former partner, Marilyn Barnett, filed a lawsuit against her. King acknowledged the relationship at a press conference, becoming one of the first prominent American athletes to be publicly identified as homosexual. The disclosure cost her most of her endorsement income almost overnight, by her own estimate millions of dollars ^[6]. She later spoke openly about the years it took to accept her sexuality, describing the process in interviews and in her 2021 autobiography, All In ^[6].

Her longtime partner is Ilana Kloss, a former South African tennis professional and doubles champion who later served as commissioner of World TeamTennis. The couple married in 2018 after decades together ^[7]. King has also spoken publicly about her struggles with an eating disorder and about the pressures of living a closeted life during her playing career, subjects she addressed at length in her memoir ^[6].

King retired from singles competition in 1983, the year she reached the Wimbledon semifinals at age 39, and played her last doubles matches in 1990 ^[1]. Retirement did not slow her public life. She captained the United States Fed Cup team to victories in the 1990s and coached the American women's tennis contingent at the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games ^[4].

Recognition accumulated steadily. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1987. In 2006 the United States Tennis Association renamed its flagship facility in Flushing Meadows, New York, the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, making her one of the few athletes honored with a major venue in their lifetime ^[4]. In 2009 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing her work for women and for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights; she was the first female athlete to receive the honor ^[7]. In 2020 the Fed Cup, the premier international team competition in women's tennis, was renamed the Billie Jean King Cup ^[4].

She has remained active in business and sport into her ninth decade, holding ownership stakes in teams including the Los Angeles Dodgers and, with Kloss, investing in women's professional soccer and hockey. She founded the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative in 2014 to promote equality in the workplace, and her 2021 memoir All In became a bestseller ^[7]. Her life has repeatedly drawn filmmakers: the 2017 feature Battle of the Sexes, with Emma Stone as King, dramatized the Riggs match for a new generation ^[5].

Any honest Billie Jean King biography has to weigh two intertwined legacies: the champion and the organizer. As a player she ranks among the greatest of any era, a relentless attacker whose 39 major titles and six years at or near the top of the rankings would alone secure her place in the sport's history ^[1]. Yet her larger achievement was structural. The tour she helped build in 1970 grew into today's WTA, on which thousands of women have made professional careers, and the principle of equal prize money she fought for at the US Open eventually spread to all four Grand Slam tournaments, with Wimbledon the last to comply in 2007 ^[3].

Her defeat of Riggs is often cited as a moment when American attitudes about women in sport visibly shifted. Coming a year after the passage of Title IX, the 1972 federal law barring sex discrimination in educational programs, the match gave the era's arguments about women's capability a vivid public demonstration. King became one of Title IX's most persistent champions, founding the Women's Sports Foundation in 1974 to advocate for girls' access to athletics ^[5].

Among Billie Jean King facts that surprise newcomers, perhaps the most telling is how much of her influence came after her playing days ended: the stadium bearing her name, the international team cup renamed in her honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Congressional Gold Medal awarded in 2024, the first given to an individual female athlete ^[7]. Players from Venus Williams to Coco Gauff have credited her openly for the conditions of the modern game. Her own summary of her philosophy, pressure is a privilege, became the title of one of her books and a phrase repeated across sport ^[6].