The Full Biography
Billie Jean King. Champion. Organizer. The woman who turned a tennis match in the Houston Astrodome into a public argument about what a woman is worth.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a tennis dress in a baseball park, a 55-year-old hustler on the other side of the net, and a crowd that had come to see a woman lose. The date was September 20, 1973. The place was the Astrodome. Bobby Riggs had already beaten Margaret Court. Billie Jean King beat Riggs in three sets and, without meaning to make it her only monument, gave a generation a night they could point to. What the still cannot show is Billie Jean Moffitt of Long Beach, thirty-nine Grand Slam titles, the founding of a women’s tour, and a later life that is still being spent on the same argument, in boardrooms instead of on clay.
She was born on November 22, 1943, in Long Beach, California. Her brother, Randy Moffitt, became a major-league pitcher. Their father worked for the fire department. Their mother kept the house. Billie Jean played softball first, then was steered toward tennis as the more “suitable” game for a girl. She learned on public courts. The country clubs were not her weather. That fact never left the work. When she won Wimbledon for the first time in singles, in 1966, she was already tired of being told the women’s game was an exhibition that happened before the real one.
The file is enormous if you only count silver. Twelve Grand Slam singles titles. Sixteen in women’s doubles. Eleven in mixed. Six Wimbledon singles championships. She won the calendar Grand Slam in mixed doubles in 1967 with Owen Davidson. She was, for a stretch of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best player in the world and also the one willing to say the paychecks were an insult. In 1970 she was among the nine women who signed with promoter Gladys Heldman for a dollar and built what became the Virginia Slims circuit. In 1973 she was the first president of the Women’s Tennis Association. The letters WTA are now a corporation. They began as a refusal.
Riggs was a sideshow who understood television. King did not want the match and then decided she could not afford to lose it for anyone wearing a skirt. Thirty thousand people in the Dome. Ninety million watching, the figure the night has always been given. She won 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. She did not giggle. She did not let him make it a date. Title IX had been signed the year before. The match did not create the law. It gave the law a prime-time face.
Pressure is a privilege.Billie Jean King
The turn is not Houston. The turn is the decision, over and over, to treat the sport as a workplace. Equal prize money at the U.S. Open in 1973 did not fall from the sky. She pushed. She kept pushing after her own ranking fell. In 1981 a former partner, Marilyn Barnett, filed a lawsuit that outed King while she was still married to Larry King, the promoter and lawyer, not the broadcaster. Sponsors ran. She lost money. She did not retire into silence. She became, over the following decades, one of the most useful public lesbians American sports has produced — useful in the unsentimental sense: she showed up, raised money, and made institutions put their names on equality they had previously treated as a press release.
The silver is a ledger, not a montage. She won Wimbledon singles in 1966, then again in 1967 and 1968, then in 1972, 1973, and 1975 — six times on the Centre Court grass, twenty titles at the All England Club if you count doubles and mixed. The U.S. Championships and then the U.S. Open gave her singles in 1967, 1971, 1972, and 1974. Paris, 1972. Australia, 1968. That is a career Grand Slam in singles, and she holds the same career slam in women’s doubles. Mixed doubles with Owen Davidson produced the calendar slam in 1967. Thirty-nine major titles is the number the press still reaches for. Twelve of them are singles. The rest are the partnerships the highlight reels crop: Rosie Casals in doubles, Davidson at the net, a left hand that could finish a point before a baseliner had constructed one.
She was seventeen when she won her first Wimbledon, the 1961 women’s doubles with Karen Hantze. The girl from Houghton Park in Long Beach was already arguing with the amateur rules that kept prize money in the men’s locker. In 1971 she became the first woman athlete to earn one hundred thousand dollars in a season. Sports Illustrated named her Sportsperson of the Year in 1972, the first woman the magazine had put in that chair. The check and the cover did not fix the draw. In September 1970 she was one of nine players — the Original Nine — who signed one-dollar contracts with Gladys Heldman and built the Virginia Slims circuit out of a Houston hotel and a refusal. Casals, Nancy Richey, Kerry Melville, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Judy Dalton, Valerie Ziegenfuss, Julie Heldman: the list is a founding document. Without that paper the WTA is a wish.
June 1973, London: the Women’s Tennis Association is formed and she is the first president. September 1973, Forest Hills: the U.S. Open becomes the first major to pay men and women equal prize money, after she told the club the women would not dress for a lesser check. September 20 of the same year, the Astrodome: Riggs in a jacket, King in a tennis dress carried onto the court like a prizefighter, 30,472 in the seats, a television audience the night has always been given as ninety million. She won 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. She did not giggle. Title IX had been signed in 1972. The match did not invent the law. It gave the law a prime-time face a country could not look away from.
She kept building rooms the tour did not have. In 1974 she and Larry King launched World TeamTennis, a mixed-team league that treated women as headliners and cities as franchises; she played for the Philadelphia Freedoms and then ran the thing when playing was no longer the job. The same year she helped start womenSports magazine and the Women’s Sports Foundation, a paper trail for girls who were still being told the real sport was the boys’ draw. She played Fed Cup for the United States and, in time, captained it. She took doubles deep into the 1980s after the singles body had begun to argue. She retired from singles in 1983. The International Tennis Hall of Fame took her in 1987. The résumé at that point would have been enough for anyone who only wanted a plaque. She was not finished with the workplace.
Ilana Kloss, a South African player and then an executive, became the companion the papers would not name cleanly for years. They had been a household since the 1980s. The 1981 Barnett suit had already taught King what a secret costs when someone else files it. She lost endorsements in real dollars — some estimates put the figure in the millions — and kept showing up at clinics, at board tables, at the Open. She divorced Larry in 1987. She did not divorce the tour. The Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, the naming of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in 2006, the Presidential Medal of Freedom Barack Obama hung on her in 2009, the 2020 renaming of Fed Cup as the Billie Jean King Cup, the French federation’s court name in 2024: institutions like to catch up in concrete once the argument is no longer dangerous. She accepted the concrete. She kept asking for the paycheck.
Six things most people never knew
- The public courts came first. Long Beach recreation, not a country-club pedigree. The politics have an address in that fact.
- She is one of the few players with a career Grand Slam in singles and in doubles. The Houston night is the folk memory. The ledger is larger.
- The Original Nine signed for a dollar. 1970. Heldman’s circuit. Without that paper the WTA is a wish.
- She did not want to play Riggs, then decided she had to. Court’s loss made the exhibition a referendum. King treated it as a job.
- The 1981 outing cost her endorsements in real dollars. The public advocate was not born comfortable. She was born after a lawsuit.
- She married Ilana Kloss in 2018, after decades together. Those decades are a marriage, a foundation, and a calendar that still includes locker rooms.
Larry King, the husband, had been part of the business machinery of her prime. They divorced years after the outing. She remained close to tennis the way a founder remains close to a company she can no longer play for. The Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, the naming of the USTA National Tennis Center in her honor in 2006, the French Open’s court name in 2024 — institutions like to catch up in concrete once the argument is no longer dangerous.
The later years
She is in her eighties. The years after the last singles match are still a calendar, not a plaque. She has kept an office life in New York and in Florida, a founder’s commute between the USTA’s Flushing campus and the Leadership Initiative’s board table. Home, for a long stretch, has been with Ilana Kloss — player, World TeamTennis executive, the person who was in the room when the papers still treated the household as a rumor. They married in 2018, in New York, after decades together. The ceremony was a filing the 1981 lawsuit had made expensive. It was also a kitchen fact the sport had finally learned how to print. Kloss remains the companion, the business partner, the person who knows which boards are work and which are furniture.
She sits on those boards. She walks young players through the politics they are about to inherit: equal prize money that looks finished on a press release and unfinished in a first-round locker, a tour that still needs someone to say the unsentimental sentence. She appears at the Slams as living memory that can still correct a grammar. The Billie Jean King Cup is now the name on the team competition she used to play and captain. The National Tennis Center in Flushing still carries her name on the gate. Roland Garros put her on a court in 2024. She has been honest, in interviews of the last two decades, about the cost of being the symbol — the knees, the marriage that could not hold the secret, the years she could not say the true thing about her own life. She has not asked to be pitied. She has asked that the next woman be paid.
World TeamTennis, which she and Larry invented in 1974, kept her in the booking business long after the ranking died. Some seasons lasted. Some franchises did not. The habit of building the next structure is the second career. So is the simple fact of remaining visible as an old champion who is still, in the useful sense, at work. She has written books, including the memoir All In (2021), which does not sand the outing or the sponsors who ran. She has fronted the Leadership Initiative for workplace equality that is not tennis. She has shown up in Washington and in locker rooms and on ESPN when a sentence needed a person who had already paid for it. In 2024 she was still walking the grounds at Melbourne, Paris, London, and New York as a living brief. The body is an old athlete’s body. The knees have been surgical facts for decades. The voice is not retired. Long Beach still claims the girl on public asphalt. Houston still claims the night in the Dome. Flushing claims the gate. She claims the next paycheck that is not a favor. Randy Moffitt, the brother who pitched in the majors, remains the other athlete from that Long Beach kitchen. The fire-department father remains the first public job she watched. The Houghton Park asphalt remains the first court. She has not traded any of those facts for the Dome.
After the spotlight moved
It has not fully moved. Every equal-pay press conference in tennis still has her grammar in it. Every girl on a public court who is told the real sport is the boys’ draw is living inside a problem King named before that girl was born. The Astrodome night will be the clip. The WTA, the Open’s equal purses, and a National Tennis Center with her name on the gate are the file.
She came out of Long Beach on public asphalt, collected a résumé that would have been enough, then spent the rest of a long life turning a workplace into a union, a sideshow into a referendum, and an outing into a second career. If you only remember Riggs, you have the night. If you remember the dollar contracts, the lost sponsors, and the name on the National Tennis Center, you have her.
Portrait: Associated Press · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons