IN SIDE BILLIE JE AN KING’S
medicine cabinet hangs an index card. She affixed it there
with Scotch tape so that she sees it every day when she
goes to get her Listerine or face cream. In her handwrit-
ing is a quote from Coretta Scott King: “Struggle is a
never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You
earn it and win it in every generation.”
Billie Jean King has been able to see some of the progress
she’s spent her life fighting for, but she also carries the
battle scars. And on some days she feels so overwhelmed
by the amount of work left to do that she doesn’t want to
sleep, because that means one less day to get things done.
It’s with this energy that King bounds into a
New York City studio space the day after her 78th birth-
day, as eager as ever to talk about so many topics that
have little to do with her 39 Grand Slam tennis titles (12
in singles) or six years as the world No. 1. She is very
prepared, having looked up in advance the college major
of the person interviewing her. She takes the time to
explain even well-known facts, like Moffitt being her birth
name. She is always on message.
This doesn’t come across as con-
trived but rather as vestigial from
an era when the opportunities for
a female athlete to be heard were
so rare that King had to nail every
single one. Perhaps for the same
reason, when she answers a ques-
tion, the words tumble out. She
can segue from an image from
1960, when as a teenager in
Long Beach, Calif., she watched on TV as Ruby Bridges
desegregated a Louisiana elementary school, to her present
concerns, such as why the three female originators of the
Black Lives Matter movement—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors
and Opal Tometi—don’t get more attention.
“I have too much,” King says at one point,
almost sheepishly.
Too much what?
“Information. Another year you live is another year of
information, another year of history happening.”
And King feels all of it deeply. This is why her autobiog-
raphy, All In, took nearly five years to complete: 900 pages
had to be edited down to around 400. King hasn’t just lived
through history. She has driven it, from the risks she and
eight other players—aka the Original Nine—took in 1970
to start their own women’s pro circuit in pursuit of equal
pay; to being the first female athlete to earn more than
$100,000 in a single year; to becoming one of the earliest
prominent openly gay athletes after she was outed in ’81
through a palimony suit filed by a former intimate partner
who was a woman. The pain from her outing still stings.
Billie Jean King is this year’s Muhammad Ali Legacy
Award winner not only for leading the charge for gender
equality during her long tennis career, but also for how she’s
kept it up—fighting for women, but also for other causes,
such as environmentalism and LGBTQ rights—in the nearly
four decades since she retired. Her knees gave out on her,
and for a long time she barely played the sport she once
dominated, but King has never taken her eye off the ball.THE L A S T TI M E KI NG WAS
honored by this publication was in 1972. Title IX passed
that year, banning sex discrimination in educational
programs receiving federal funding, though it wasn’t yet
clear how that law would transform women’s sports. A
year later King would play Bobby Riggs in the Battle of
the Sexes match, her triumph over the self-declared male
chauvinist seared into the consciousness of 90 million
viewers worldwide.
In the article naming Sports Illustrated’s 1972
Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year—King shared theSPORTS ILLUSTRATED Q SI.COM 42“I HAVE TOO MUCH,” King says at one point,
almost sheepishly. Too much what? “Information.
Another year you live is another year of
information, another year of history happening.”SIM
ON(^) BR
UT
Y