BILLIE JEAN KING
* 22. November 1943 in Long Beach, Kalifornien
Billie Jean King is a former American tennis player and was the first professional athlete to come out as homosexual.
As a child, Billie Jean was ambitious enough to earn the money for her first tennis racket through small jobs. By the age of 16, after several tournament successes, she was able to take one-to-one tennis lessons. She married Lawrence King in 1965, but in 1981 she became the first professional athlete ever to come out as homosexual.
Her tennis career soared, and she won a total of 20 titles across various competitions. She topped the world rankings in 1966, 1967, 1968, and 1972. Despite (or perhaps because of) her sporting achievements, she was continually subjected to misogynistic hostility and discriminatory structures within professional sport. In 1973, she threatened to boycott the Grand Slam tournament of the US Open if the women’s champion did not receive the same prize money of 10,000 US dollars as the men. At the time, women received on average 1,500 dollars in prize money, while the men earned 12,000 dollars. King prevailed — and not only that: she went on to found the Women’s Tennis Association together with more than 60 players. The organisation still exists today and ensures that women in professional tennis receive equal marketing opportunities and equal prize money to men.
It is thanks to King and her fellow campaigners that nine of the ten highest-paid female athletes in the world are tennis players.
King is also well known for the exhibition match Battle of the Sexes, which was later made into a film. In it, King defeats the ageing professional tennis player Bobby Riggs, who had loudly and flamboyantly claimed that no woman could ever beat him at tennis.
In her autobiography, published in 1974, Billie Jean King wrote:
“Every woman should be able to pursue any career and lifestyle as a fully developed, consenting member of society without fear of sexual discrimination. That’s a fairly basic and simple statement, but sometimes it’s really hard to get people to accept it. And because of the way other people think, it’s even harder to reach a point in your own life where you can live it.”
It is a sentence worth taking some time to let sink in.
