BILLIE JEAN KING

"I have often been asked if I am a woman or an athlete. The question is absurd. Men are not asked that. I am an athlete. I am a woman."

---

In the 1950s, an 11-year-old girl wasn’t allowed in a tennis tournament group photo, simply because she wasn't wearing a tennis skirt. As a talented amateur tennis player, she was denied access to a college scholarship simply because she was female. This injustice caused her undeniable infuriation, which is perhaps what lead to the evolution of equality in the sport!

Billie Jean King was a formidable tennis champion, who won all the most important tennis tournaments of her day. However, at that time, female players earned only a small fraction of the prize money that male players made, which she found profoundly bothersome.

So, she protested, and when the stubborn tournament organizers refused to make the necessary amendments she threatened to boycott the game. She got together with 9 other female players and they created their own circuit with 19 tournaments and many big sponsors.

The battle of equality in tennis had just begun when Bobby Riggs, a sexist male tennis player who strongly believed that women were worth less than men proclaimed, "Women play about 25 percent as good as men, so they should get about 25 percent of the money men get." And also: “A woman’s place is in the bedroom or kitchen, not on the tennis court”.

At the age of 29, Billie fearlessly proposed a challenge to 55-year-old Riggs, another former number-one ranked tennis player. Their 1973 historic match was called the "Battle of the Sexes." 30,000 people in the stadium and 50 million television viewers watched Billie Jean beat Riggs in straight sets.

Organizers of the US Open finally met her demand, making it the first major tournament to offer equal prize money to men and women. She started a non-profit, the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, which advocates for more diversity and inclusivity in the workplace: one of BJK's other career accomplishments. She also became the first president of the Women’s Tennis Association and started the Women’s Sports Foundation. She was one of the first female athletes to openly embrace her homosexuality, and she became a champion for LGBTQ rights. In 2017, a movie about her powerful impact on the world was released, titled “Battle of the Sexes”, starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell.

Thanks to Billie Jean King, today tennis is one of the few sports where female and male athletes have achieved equal pay. She proved that a woman’s place is wherever she wants to be!