King, Billie Jean (1943—) Biography

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King, Billie Jean (1943—)

Intensely competitive and outspoken in her demand for equality for women athletes, Billie Jean King changed the face of women's sports, paving the way for today's professional women athletes. Holder of a record 20 Wimbledon titles and winner of all four Grand Slam tournaments, King is perhaps best remembered for her defeat of Bobby Riggs during the epic Battle of the Sexes in 1973. Passionately dedicated to tennis, to women's rights, and to being one of the best athletes, male or female, of her day, Billie Jean King's heroic actions redefined what was possible for women, making her a role model for generations to come.

Billie Jean Moffitt was born in Long Beach, California, on November 22, 1943. The daughter of a fireman and a homemaker, and the sister of future San Francisco Giants relief pitcher, Randy Moffitt, Billie Jean was an athletic girl who excelled at softball. At a very young age, she announced to her mother that she planned to do something special with her life, and when she discovered tennis a few years later, she dedicated herself to the sport. Because the Moffitts could not afford a membership at the local country club, Billie Jean learned her sport on the public courts. By the time she was 12, she was good enough to play in sanctioned tournaments, and her father started moonlighting, while her mother sold Avon and Tupperware, so that their daughter could compete. As a teenager, Billie Jean not only fought the elitism of tennis, but she was also aware that girls' sports were valued differently than boys', when the boys' team received funding and the girls had to fend for themselves.

In 1961, 17-year-old Billie Jean qualified to play doubles at Wimbledon and she and her partner, Karen Hantze, funded by a local businessman, flew to England to compete. They won, becoming Wimbeldon's youngest women's doubles winners ever. But in theearly 1960s, winning Wimbledon was not enough to start a career in tennis. In fact, there were no real careers in tennis for women. Tennis was an amateur sport, and the only money to be made was a few hundred dollars under the table for showing up at a tournament. So Billie Jean returned home and enrolled at Los Angeles State College, where she fell in love with a fellow student named Larry King.

Billie Jean King

Billie Jean and Larry married in 1965, and Billie Jean put her husband through law school by playing tennis, which she continued to do with great success, winning all the big tournaments. In 1968, the major championships were finally opened up to professionals as well as amateurs. But the prize money for the women was dramatically unequal to that awarded to the men—women sometimes earned as little as one tenth of what men did. This infuriated King, who conceived of the idea of starting a women's tour.

In 1970, King and a group of women players refused to play an important tournament where the prize money was eight to one in favor of the men. Instead, with the aid of Gladys Heldman, the founder of World Tennis magazine, they put together a competing tournament in Houston, with $5,000 in prize money. The powers-that-be in the tennis world threatened to suspend the defecting players, but the women held fast. When Heldman solicited $2,500 more in prize money from Philip Morris, who was marketing a new cigarette for women, the tournament was named the Virginia Slims International, and the first professional women's tournament was held.

By 1971, with Billie Jean King as the spokeswoman, the Virginia Slims women's tour was founded. Although some of the players, most notably Chris Evert, refused to sign on, the tour was a success in its first year. And so was King, who continued to do well inthe major tournaments, beating Chris Evert in the United States Open final that same year, becoming the first woman athlete to win $100,000 in prize money in a single year.

Within two years, all the women players would join the tour and tennis would never be the same. Billie Jean King, however, still had more causes for which to fight. Holding her ground against all dissenters, she pushed through the Women's Tennis Association, their own union. Women's sports, buoyed by Title IX, which prevented discrimination against women athletes, had begun to change. Then came the event that would transform King into a feminist heroine beyond the boundaries of tennis.

In 1973, 55-year-old former Wimbledon champion, Bobby Riggs, played the number two woman in the world, Margaret Court, in a tennis match that would prove, Riggs hoped, that men were better athletes than women. In what has been referred to as the Mother's Day Massacre, Riggs beat Court in straight sets. As Billie Jean King later wrote, "My first reaction was, 'Oh no, now I'm going to have to play him."' Indeed, a match was soon arranged between Riggs and the number one woman on the tour.

On September 20, 1973, 30,000 fans filled the Houston Astro-dome and 50 million viewers tuned in on television to watch Billie Jean King take on the self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig, Bobby Riggs, in the Battle of the Sexes. Fit, tanned, and ready to play, King won the $100,000 winner-take-all match in three straight sets. More than a sports event, the King-Riggs match became a defining moment in American popular culture and feminist history, one of the few events that elicits an exact response to the question, "Where were you when… ?"

At the end of her career, King was outed as a lesbian, becoming the first woman in professional sports to bear the brunt of a nation's homophobia. Although her admission of her sexuality was clouded by her stated discomfort with being a lesbian and her continued marriage to Larry King, Billie Jean laid the groundwork for women such as Martina Navratilova, Melissa Etheridge, and Ellen DeGeneres to come out of the closet. Now openly lesbian, King lends her outspoken advocacy to gay causes.

One of Life magazines 100 Most Important Americans of the twentieth century, Billie Jean King is a heroine to countless women who saw, in her defeat of Riggs and her unqualified success as one of the first professional women athletes, hope for their own dreams. A dedicated activist and coach, King continues to lobby on behalf of the causes in which she fervently believes, from Team Tennis to Elton John's AIDS Foundation, remaining a powerful force for change and a monument to passionate persistence; indeed, she is an icon for the ages.