Portside

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 grew 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 increased 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,”  about women’s 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 20^th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame and Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America.

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