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BILLIE JEAN KING LED A REVOLUTION IN WOMEN’S SPORTS AND LGBTQ
HISTORY  
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Peter Dreier
October 18, 2024
Teen Vogue
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_ Tennis star Billie Jean King challenged America to create more
opportunities for women and LGBTQ people. Her advocacy for women’s
sports in the 1960s and 1970s revolutionized school, amateur, and
professional athletics. _

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Every year I ask my female students at Occidental College if they
played sports in high school. About half of them raise their hands. In
fact, they take it for granted. They view women’s participation in
sports as a normal part of their education. They believe that if they
have the interest and the talent, there should be no obstacles to
playing basketball, tennis, swimming and diving, track and field,
softball, even baseball, and other inter-scholastic sports. When they
arrive at college, they feel the same way.

But when I ask those same students if they recognize the name Billie
Jean King, only a handful can do so. That’s unfortunate, because
King was more responsible for the revolution in women’s sports than
any other figure.

Over the past century, struggles for equality and justice – for
workers’ rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, civil rights,
environmental justice, and other causes – have made America a more
humane and inclusive country. It is important that we know about the
activists who helped tear down barriers and expand our rights, because
it demonstrates that change is possible if we organize movements and
have the persistence to keep going, even if there are setbacks. We all
stand on the shoulders of these pioneers.

So I was pleased to learn that the iconic annual Pasadena Tournament
of Roses had recently selected King to be the Grand Marshal of the
2025 Rose Parade in January, which garners a live audience of more
than 700,000 spectators and a broadcast audience of more than 50
million viewers in over 170 countries.

It has always bothered me that Jackie Robinson – the great athlete
and civil rights leader who grew up in Pasadena – was never asked to
serve as the Grand Marshal during his lifetime. The racism of the
city’s establishment was clearly to blame for that oversight. But
now – 52 years after Robinson’s death in 1972 – the Tournament
of Roses is a different institution, reflecting a more open-minded
city.

Like Robinson, King was a trailblazer. They both broke barriers in
sports and then used their celebrity to break barriers in society.
Like Robinson, she was a radical who made difficult sacrifices in her
life and career. Like Robinson, she is often identified as a someone
who, by the force of her personality and athletic talent, challenged
America to create more opportunities for women and LGBTQ people in
sports and other aspects of society. But, in fact, like Robinson, she
was part of a larger movement. There had been great women athletes
before King – including Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Mary D’Souza
Sequeira, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, and Margaret Court. But just
as Robinson was on the cutting edge of the civil rights movement, King
emerged at a time when a new wave of feminism were burgeoning. They
both gave voice to millions of others who were angry and frustrated by
the limits our society placed on people because of their race, gender,
or sexual orientation.

King is one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Her advocacy
for women’s sports in the 1960s and 1970s revolutionized school,
amateur, and professional athletics. She helped make it more
acceptable for girls and women to be athletes. In
1975 _Seventeen_ magazine polled its readers and found that King was
the most admired woman in the world.

Later in her life, after she retired from competitive play, King also
became an iconic figure in the LGBTQ community.

Perhaps no athletic contest in American history is more famous, and
was more consequential, than King’s tennis match against Bobby Riggs
on September 20, 1973. At the time Riggs, the 1939 Wimbledon champion
and a top-ranked player through the late 1940s, was 55 years old. King
was 29, a star in the growing sport of women’s tennis. The media
dubbed the contest the “Battle of the Sexes.” King was seen as
playing for the honor of all women.

After months of advance hoopla, King entered the Houston Astrodome
like Cleopatra, carried aloft in a chair held by four bare-chested
musclemen dressed like ancient slaves. Riggs then entered in a
rickshaw drawn by scantily clad women. Riggs gave King a giant
lollypop; she handed Riggs a piglet, a symbol of male chauvinism. By
the end of the day, King had defeated Riggs in three straight sets,
6–4, 6–3, 6–3.

Though clearly a publicity stunt, and a moneymaker for both athletes,
it had enormous symbolic value, coming during the early years of
second wave of the women’s movement. It was viewed by an estimated
50 million people around the world, and 30,000 attended at the
Astrodome. King’s solid victory significantly boosted the
credibility of women’s participation in major sports.

King lent her name and celebrity to the battle to pass Title IX, the
federal antidiscrimination provision in the Education Amendments of
1972. Thanks to the activism of King and other women athletes, the
number of females involved in sports was already starting to grow.
Since Title IX, it has skyrocketed, including Little League baseball
and youth soccer.

Between 1972 and 2024, the number of boys participating in high
school sports
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from 3.6 million to 4.6 million, a 25% increase, while girls’
participation grew from 294,000 to 3.4 million, a spike of over
1,000%. The number of women participating in intercollegiate sports
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from 74,239 in 1982 to 236,315 in 2024 — from 30% to 43% of all
intercollegiate athletes.

King laid the groundwork for Serena Williams, Mary Lou Retton, Jackie
Joyner-Kersee, Katie Ledecky, Nancy Lopez, Tracy Caulkins, Lisa
Leslie, Ila Borders, Megan Rapinoe, Caitlin Clark, and other great
female athletes. Professional women’s sports – including tennis,
soccer, and basketball -- is more popular today than ever. There are
also now women playing on otherwise all-male college and professional
baseball teams.

Born in Long Beach, California, Billie Jean Moffitt’s father was a
fireman and her mother a homemaker. Her brother, Randy Moffitt, had a
successful career in baseball as a major-league pitcher. At 10 years
old she played shortstop on a softball team with girls four and five
years older than she, one that won the Long Beach championship. She
also enjoyed playing football. But her parents decided that she should
pursue a more “ladylike” sport. Her father suggested tennis.

She picked up a racket at age 12, played on public courts, and was
soon identified as a tennis prodigy. Unlike today’s promising young
athletes, King did not have an elaborate network of coaches and
clinics to nurture her talent. At fifteen, she made her debut at the
US Championships. In 1961, at seventeen, she and Karen Hantze won the
women’s doubles championship at Wimbledon. In 1966 King won her
first Wimbledon singles title and was ranked number one.

King was ranked in the top ten in the world for seventeen years,
beginning in 1960, and ranked number one five times between 1966 and
1972. She won a record twenty Wimbledon titles, six of them in singles
(1966, 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973, and 1975), won the US Open four times
(1967, 1971, 1972, and 1974), and won the Australian Open in 1968. In
1972 she won Wimbledon, the French Open and the US Open. In total, she
won 67 singles titles, 101 doubles titles, and 11 mixed doubles
titles, amassing almost $2 million in prize money after turning
professional in 1968 and before retiring in 1983.

In 1974 she founded World Team Tennis and served as the player-coach
of the Philadelphia Freedoms, becoming one of the first women to coach
professional male athletes. She coached the US Olympic women’s
tennis team in 1996 and 2000.

In the late 1960s professional women’s tennis was widely dismissed
as a frilly sideshow. Male “amateur” tennis stars would get paid
under the table, a practice that King denounced as "shamateurism,”
while women athletes were not taken as seriously. For winning her
first two Wimbledons, she received nothing except the $14 daily
allowance.

In 1970, when King and eight other female players defied the tennis
establishment to form their own professional circuit, many experts
doubted that they could attract big enough crowds to generate prize
money. Women’s tennis is now as popular as men’s.

In addition to her dominance on the courts, King made significant
contributions to feminism. In 1972 she signed a controversial
statement, published in _Ms_. magazine, that she had had an abortion,
putting her on the front lines of the battle for reproductive rights
– a struggle that continues today. Also in 1972, she became the
first woman to be named _Sports Illustrated_’s “Sportsperson of
the Year.”

King pushed for higher fees for women athletes, which led firms like
Philip Morris and Virginia Slims to sponsor women’s tournaments.
When she won the US Open in 1972, she received $15,000 less than did
the men’s winner, Ilie Nastase. She threatened to boycott the 1973
US Open if it did not equalize prize money between women and men
athletes. The tournament agreed to do so, setting a precedent.

In 1974 she was one of the founders and the first president of the
Women’s Tennis Association. That year, with support from feminist
Gloria Steinem and _Ms._ magazine, King also
founded _womenSports_ magazine and the Women’s Sports Foundation.
With King’s backing, the magazine and foundation became powerful
voices for women in sports.

The foundation has filed friend of the court briefs in support of
women high school students seeking equity with male sports programs
and advocates for greater sports participation by women of color and
by those with disabilities.

King was also an LGBTQ pioneer. By 1968 she realized she was attracted
to women but could not bring herself to admit it to her husband or her
parents. “The whole world was in tumult, and so was I,” she said.
“I was so ashamed.”

“I couldn’t get a closet deep enough. I’ve got a homophobic
family, a tour that will die if I come out, the world is homophobic
and, yeah, I was homophobic,” King told a _Sunday Times of
London_ interviewer in December 2007.

In 1981 King was forced out of the closet by a former girlfriend who
sued her, unsuccessfully, for palimony, while she was still married.
She soon embraced her new role as the first openly lesbian major
sports star. (She divorced her husband, Larry, in 1987.)

Elton John wrote “Philadelphia Freedom” to honor King and her
World Team Tennis franchise. She serves on the Elton John AIDS
Foundation and has received numerous honors for her work with the
LGBTQ community. King’s foundation developed and promotes _It Takes
a Team!,_ an educational program to end homophobia in school sports.

In 2006, the US Tennis Association named its main facility in New York
City the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. In 2009, President
Barack Obama awarded King the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
Five years later, Obama appointed King and openly gay ice hockey
player Caitlin Cahow to represent the U.S. at the 2014 Winter Olympics
in Russia – a symbol of growing acceptance of gay athletes.

On October 18, 2018, King and her doubles partner Illana Kloss were
married by former New York City Mayor David Dinkins. That year, King
and Kloss became minority owners of both the Los Angeles Dodgers and
the Los Angeles Sparks of the WNBA. Two years later, King joined the
ownership group of Angel City FC, a Los-Angeles based team in the
National Women’s Soccer League. In 2022, she helped jumpstart a new
professional ice hockey league in North America, in partnership with
the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association. She has also
backed Grassroots Baseball, serving as executive producer for the
upcoming documentary “See Her Be Her,”
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baseball around the world.

Writing in _Sports Illustrated_ in 1975, legendary sports
commentator Frank Deford observed, “[King] has prominently affected
the way 50% of society thinks and feels about itself in the vast area
of physical exercise. Moreover, like [what Arnold] Palmer [did for
golf], she has made a whole sports boom because of the singular force
of her presence.”

_Peter Dreier is professor of politics at Occidental College and a
long-time resident of Pasadena. Among his books are The 100 Greatest
Americans Of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of
Fame and Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements
That Shook Up the Game and Changed America._

_Teen Vogue [[link removed]] is the young
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* Billie Jean King
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* Sports Activism
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* women's sports
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* LGBTQ History
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