Billie Jean King turns 75 on Thursday. To this day, the Wimbledon record winner fights tirelessly for equal rights for women.
Billie Jean King likes to wear blazers and glasses in bright colours so that nobody really overlooks her. Red for example, sometimes a rich yellow or a bright green. After all, with its 1.64 m it is not necessarily the longest, not only in tennis history but undisputedly one of the biggest. On Thursday the Wimbledon record winner and tireless fighter for women’s rights will be 75 years old.
Billie likes to and often tells Jean King about her father. Bill Moffitt served in the US Navy during the Second World War and later worked as a firefighter in Long Beach, California. His fighting spirit, his assertiveness and his sense of justice shaped his daughter. The family was sports enthusiasts: Bill played basketball, mother Betty was an excellent swimmer, and brother Randy made a name for himself in Major League baseball as a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, Houston Astros and Toronto Blue Jays.
Billie Jean played tennis, she played incredibly fast and aggressive, and soon many girls of the same age didn’t want to play against her anymore. No one could stop them. Billie Jean King won a total of 20 singles, doubles and mixed titles at Wimbledon, which nobody but her has managed to date. She won 129 tournaments and seven times the Federation Cup with the US team.
In 1965, Billie Jean married Larry King, one year younger. With him, she developed the idea of founding a tennis tour for women, which she launched in 1970 together with eight female comrades-in-arms (The Original 9) as the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA). The marriage was divorced in 1987, by which time Billie Jean had long since made her bisexuality public. For almost 40 years the little woman with the weighty voice has been an icon of the lesbian and gay movement in the USA.
If you think of Billie Jean King, you can’t get past the Mother’s Day massacre of 1973. Back then, her good friend Margaret Court had lost a show match against three-time Wimbledon winner Bobby Riggs. The chauvinist Riggs was of the opinion that women belong in the kitchen, not in the big sport – a found food for Billie Jean King.
In the “Battle of the Sexes” in September 1973 in front of 30,472 spectators in the Astrodome of Houston, all clichés were deliberately served. Billie Jean let half naked men carry her to the court in an Egyptian sedan and then chased the 26 years older Riggs out of the hall with 6:4, 6:3, 6:3. For the committed women’s rights activist, an ideal platform for bringing her tireless fight for equal rights to the attention of a broad public.
The association of “her” WTA with the players’ association ATP is still Billie Jean King’s goal in life, but she has given up hope a little bit in the meantime. “Maybe,” she told the New York Times recently, “I won’t see it again. But at some point, everyone will realize it’s for the best.”
It is likely that Drama Queen will also congratulate Serena Williams on Thursday as she has benefited the most from the Billie Jean King fight in recent years. It is thanks to their initiative that women now play for the same prize money as men in Grand Slam tournaments. And with almost 90 million dollars that Serena Williams has collected in prize money alone so far, there will probably be a lush bouquet of flowers in it.