Background

Billie Jean Moffitt was born on November 22, 1943, in Long Beach, California, into a conservative Methodist family, the daughter of Betty (née Jerman), a housewife, and Bill Moffitt, a firefighter. Her family was athletic; her mother excelled at swimming, her father played basketball, baseball, and ran track. Her younger brother, Randy Moffitt, became a Major League Baseball pitcher, pitching for 12 years in the major leagues for the San Francisco Giants, Houston Astros, and Toronto Blue Jays.

Education

Billie attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School. She also excelled at baseball and softball as a child, playing shortstop at 10 years old on a team with girls 4–5 years older than her. The team went on to win the Long Beach softball championship. She switched from softball to tennis at age 11, because her parents suggested she should find a more ladylike sport. She saved her own money – $8 – to buy her first racket. She learned tennis on the many free public courts in Long Beach, taking advantage of the free lessons tennis professional Clyde Walker offered at those courts. One of the city's tennis facilities has subsequently been named the Billie Jean Moffitt King Tennis Center. As a kid playing in her first tennis tournaments, she was often hindered by her aggressive playing style.

After graduating, she attended Los Angeles State College now California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA). She did not graduate, leaving school in 1964 to focus on tennis. While attending Cal State, she met Larry King in a library.

Career

King first attracted international attention in 1961 by winning the Wimbledon doubles championship with Karen Hantz; theirs was the youngest team to win. She went on to capture a record 20 Wimbledon titles (singles 1966–68, 1972–73, and 1975; women’s doubles 1961–62, 1965, 1967–68, 1970–73, and 1979; mixed doubles 1967, 1971, and 1973–74), in addition to U.S. singles (1967, 1971–72, and 1974), French singles (1972), and the Australian title (1968); her Wimbledon record was tied by Martina Navratilova in 2003. She was perhaps one of the greatest doubles players in the history of tennis, winning 27 major titles. With her victories in 1967, she was the first woman since 1938 to sweep the U.S. and British singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles in a single year.

King turned professional after 1968 and became the first female athlete to win more than $100,000 in one season (1971). In 1973, she beat the aging Bobby Riggs in a much-publicized "Battle of the Sexes" match. The match set a record for the largest tennis audience and the largest purse awarded up to that time. She pushed relentlessly for the rights of women players, helped to form a separate women’s tour, and obtained financial backing from commercial sponsors. She was one of the founders and the first president (1974) of the Women’s Tennis Association.

King and her husband, Larry King, were part of a group that founded World TeamTennis (WTT) in 1974. King served as the player-coach of the Philadelphia Freedoms, thus becoming one of the first women to coach professional male athletes. The WTT folded after 1978 because of financial losses, but King revived the competition in 1981. In that same year, King admitted to having had a homosexual affair with her former secretary, who was suing King for material support. (Her secretary lost the lawsuit.) In so doing, King became the most prominent female athlete to have come out as a lesbian at that time, but she subsequently lost all her endorsement contracts as a result.

King retired from competitive tennis in 1984 and the same year became the first woman commissioner in professional sports in her position with the World TeamTennis League. King remained active in tennis and since the mid-1990s served as a coach for several Olympic and Federation Cup teams. She published two autobiographies, Billie Jean (1974; with Kim Chapin) and The Autobiography of Billie Jean King (1982; with Frank Deford), as well as We Have Come a Long Way: The Story of Women’s Tennis (1988; with Cynthia Starr) and Pressure Is a Privilege: Lessons I’ve Learned from Life and the Battle of the Sexes (2008; with Christine Brennan).

King and Kloss became minority owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team in September 2018.

Achievements

• 

  Billie Jean King is a former world No. 1 professional tennis player. She dominated women’s tennis with 39 Grand Slam -12 singles, 12 doubles, and 11 mixed doubles titles. In non-Grand Slam events, she recorded 129 wins in 183 finals. She let go a golden opportunity to win all four Grand Slam events in a single year.
  
  She was inducted into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1980, the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1987, and the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990. The United States Tennis Association honored King in August 2006, when it renamed the National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open, the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. In 2009 King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Works

More photos

• book

  • How to play mixed doubles

    (For already adequate players, a hearty introduction to th...)

    1980
  • Tennis Love: A Parents' Guide to the Sport

    (Instructions on teaching tennis skills, strategy, and eti...)

    1978
  • We Have Come a Long Way: The Story of Women's Tennis

    (A legend of women's tennis describes the early personalit...)

    1988
  • Pressure is a Privilege: Lessons I've Learned from Life and the Battle of the Sexes

    (The tennis star recounts her life and athletic career, fr...)

    2008
  • Vision: An Autobiography

    (An intimate self-portrait encompassing the life, times, a...)

    2021
  • Billie Jean

    (The author recounts her life and career in tennis, commen...)

    1974
  • Billie Jean King's secrets of winning tennis

    (An enjoyable question and answer session on all things te...)

    1974
  • Tennis to Win

    (Tennis instructional by the all-time great Bille Jean King.)

    1970
  • Play Better Tennis With Billie Jean King

    (Tennis instructional by the all-time great Bille Jean Kin...)

    1981

Religion

Raised in a conservative Methodist family, Billie Jean was very religious as a child and originally expressed desires to become a preacher.

Politics

After retiring from tennis, King continued to fight for women’s pay equality, women’s rights within sports, and the protection of LGBTQA+ rights. From her days bringing visibility to equal pay in the 1970s up through to more recently, when she videoed herself voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Election, you’d be hard-pressed to find a woman more in tune with the needs and rights of women than King.

Views

Billie Jean’s ascension in the ranks of her sport corresponded with the early years of the women’s movement, and the rising star soon learned she could leverage her success and influence to demand change. She said, "Unless I was number 1, I wouldn’t be listened to." She began to campaign relentlessly for equal prize money in the men’s and women’s games. Joining eight other women tennis players, Billie Jean signed a $1 contract and joined the Virginia Slims Circuit founded by Gladys Heldman in 1970 to protest against the inequity in prize money. This group of brave women, known as the "Original 9," backed Billie Jean as she formed the Women’s Tennis Association and became its first president. Once the tour took off, King worked tirelessly to promote it. In 1973, she lobbied for equal prize money for men and women at the U.S. Open, and as a result of her efforts, a sponsor was found to level the playing field. As a result of her advocacy, the U.S. Open became the first major tournament to offer equal prize money to both sexes. All four Grand Slams now offer equal prize money to women and men.

King was among the few famous women openly confirming her abortion while supporting a woman’s right to choose to have a safe and legal one.

As of 2012 King was involved in the Women's Sports Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. She also served on the President's Council for Fitness, Sports and Nutrition as a way to encourage young people to stay active. In 2014, she founded the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to addressing the critical issues required to achieve diverse, inclusive leadership in the workforce.

Quotations: "Champions keep playing until they get it right."

"Sports teaches you character, it teaches you to play by the rules, it teaches you to know what it feels like to win and lose-it teaches you about life."

"Tennis is a perfect combination of violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquillity."

"I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards being a champion."

"Be bold. If you're going to make an error, make a doozy, and don't be afraid to hit the ball."

"Sports are a microcosm of society."

"I wanted to use sports for social change."

"Everyone has people in their lives that are gay, lesbian or transgender or bisexual. They may not want to admit it, but I guarantee they know somebody."

"Women get the attention when we get into the men's arena, and that's sad."

"When they take surveys of women in business, of the Fortune 500, the successful women, 80% of them, say they were in sports as a young woman."

Membership

Billie founded the Women’s Tennis Association and the Women’s Sports Foundation.

• 

  Women's Sports Foundation

• 

  Elton John AIDS Foundation

• 

  Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative

• 

  Women’s Tennis Association

Personality

By 1968, King realized that she was attracted to women. While detailing her how she came out and why she came out publicly after being outed, King made it clear that being revealed as a gay woman had a shocking and immediate effect on her life. "This is the biggest struggle I’ve had in my entire life,” she detailed. “I told my PR person and I told my lawyer, ‘I want to have a press conference and I’m going to tell the truth.’ They said ‘You cannot do that. No one’s ever done that.’ I said, ‘I don’t care what people have done before me.'"

Concerning the personal cost of concealing her sexuality for so many years, Billie Jean said: "I wanted to tell the truth but my parents were homophobic and I was in the closet. As well as that, I had people tell me that if I talked about what I was going through, it would be the end of the women's tour. I couldn't get a closet deep enough. One of my big goals was always to be honest with my parents and I couldn't be for a long time. I tried to bring up the subject but felt I couldn't. My mother would say, "We're not talking about things like that," and I was pretty easily stopped because I was reluctant anyway. I ended up with an eating disorder that came from trying to numb myself from my feelings. I needed to surrender far sooner than I did. At the age of 51, I was finally able to talk about it properly with my parents, and no longer did I have to measure my words with them. That was a turning point for me as it meant I didn't have regrets anymore."

Concerning her motivations in life and tennis, King said: "I'm a perfectionist much more than I'm a super competitor, and there's a big difference there. I've been painted as a person who only competes. But most of all, I get off on hitting a shot correctly. Any woman who wants to achieve anything has to be aggressive and tough, but the press never sees us as multidimensional. They don't see the emotions."

Physical Characteristics: Height - 5ft 4 ¼ (163.2 cm)

Weight - 61 kg (134.48 lbs)

Hair color - brown

Eyes color - blue

Quotes from others about the person

• "One of the reasons I've never gotten close to Billie Jean is that I've never felt strong enough to survive against that overwhelming personality of hers. She talks about me being the smart one. Let me tell you, Billie Jean's the smartest one, the cleverest one you'll ever see. She was the one who was able to channel everything into winning, into being the most consummate tennis player." - Julie Heldman
  
  "For a time, I think I was as close to Billie Jean as anyone ever was. But as soon as I got to the point where I could read her too well, she tried to dissociate the relationship. She doesn't want to risk appearing weak in front of anybody. She told me once that if you want to be the best, you must never let anyone, anyone, know what you really feel. You see, she told me, they can't hurt you if they don't know." - Kristien Shaw

Interests

• Politicians

  Hillary Rodham Clinton

• Sport & Clubs

  Tennis, hockey

• Athletes

  Chicago Blackhawks

• Music & Bands

  Elton John

Connections

Billie Jean and Larry King were engaged in the fall of 1964 and married in Long Beach, California, on September 17, 1965. Billie Jean credited Larry with introducing her to feminism and for pushing her to pursue tennis as a career. Billie Jean later said she "was totally in love with Larry" when they married.

By 1968, King realized that she was attracted to women, and in 1971, began an intimate relationship with her secretary, Marilyn Barnett (born Marilyn Kathryn McRae on January 28, 1948). Billie Jean acknowledged the relationship when it became public in a May 1981 palimony lawsuit filed by Barnett, making Billie Jean the first prominent professional female to come out. Feeling she could not admit to the extent of the relationship, Billie Jean publicly called it a fling and a mistake. She remained married to Larry. The lawsuit caused Billie Jean to lose an estimated $2 million in endorsements and forced her to prolong her tennis career to pay attorneys.

Also in 1971, she had an abortion that was made public in a Ms. magazine article. Larry had revealed Billie Jean's abortion without consulting her.

Billie Jean and Larry remained married through the palimony suit fallout. The marriage ended in 1987 after Billie Jean fell in love with her doubles partner, Ilana Kloss. Billie Jean and Larry remained on good terms, with Billie Jean serving as godmother to Larry's son from his subsequent marriage.

Father:

Bill Moffitt

Mother:

Betty Moffitt

Spouse:

Larry King

(born January 30, 1945)

Larry King is an American attorney, real estate broker, promoter, bridge player, one of the founders of World Team Tennis, and the ex-husband of former World No. 1 professional tennis player Billie Jean King.

Brother:

Randy Moffitt

(born October 13, 1948)

Randy Moffitt is an American athlete. He was a baseball pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, Houston Astros and Toronto Blue Jays. Born in Long Beach, California, he is the younger brother of tennis star Billie Jean Moffitt King.

Partner:

Ilana Kloss

(born 22 March 1956)

Ilana Kloss is a former professional tennis player, tennis coach, and commissioner of World TeamTennis, since 2001. She was the World's No. 1 ranked doubles player in 1976, World No. 19 in singles in 1979.

Friend:

Elton John

(25 March 1947)

Elton John is an English singer, songwriter, pianist, and composer.

References

• Billie Jean King: Women of Wisdom
• Billie Jean King : Tennis Trailblazer
• Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports
• Billie Jean King: Tennis Star & Social Activist
• Billie Jean King: The Battle of the Sexes and Title IX