to SI’s 2019 Sportsperson honoree, World Cup champion
Megan Rapinoe, the fourth stand-alone woman winner
and an out gay athlete. King finds both validation and
irony in being recognized again by SI a half century later.
“She’s very fortunate that she has actually gotten to
experience that cycle,” Kloss says. “She’s said that when
you read history, it feels so quick, but when you live it,
it’s so much slower and harder. And boy, has she lived it.”
I N THE S PRI NG O F 2 0 1 9 ,
Kendall Coyne Schofield and her fellow professional hock-
ey players were fed up. The Canadian Women’s Hockey
League had just folded, and the other women’s circuit in
North America, then called the National Women’s Hockey
League, didn’t pay a living wage. Coyne Schofield, a two-
time U.S. Olympic medalist, earned $7,000 in the NWHL
that season, and she was the highest-paid player on her team.
“We knew we couldn’t sit back and think that the land-
scape of women’s professional hockey was just going to
change itself,” the 29-year-old forward says. “But we
didn’t know how to create the change, because this is a
daunting task. I thought, Who can help us create what
this game deserves? It’s Billie Jean King.”
One phone call has turned into more than two years of
King and Kloss’s advising the players as they launched
the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association. It’s
the same fight King led five decades ago in tennis, when
fewer tournaments were being offered for women than
for men, with a small fraction of their purses.
Looking back at her tennis career, King wonders how
much better she could have been had she just been able to
devote herself to playing. When she attended Los Angeles
State College in the early 1960s, before Title IX, she worked
multiple part-time jobs to cover expenses. As she folded
towels for minimum wage she was aware that, across town,
Arthur Ashe (UCLA) and Stan Smith (USC) were on full
scholarships. Later, in the prime of her career, King’s fight
for herself and her peers meant she couldn’t focus solely on
winning matches. King risked being banned from major
competitions by the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association when she
and the rest of the Original Nine boycotted a 1970 tourna-
ment that planned to offer women a 10th of the men’s prize
money. In ’72, King won the French Open, Wimbledon and
the U.S. Open, but she skipped the Australian Open and
her chance at the Grand Slam. She didn’t want to miss any
events on the Virginia Slims circuit, which had been built
out of the Original Nine’s stand two years earlier.
“I don’t know how good I could have been,” says King,
who retired from the game in ’83. “But I really cared about
the other stuff because it’s lasting. Performance is fleet-
ing. This can be lasting, and you pass it down to all these
different generations.”
She actively works to make sure it does get passed down.
The Women’s Sports Foundation, which King started shortly
after the passage of Title IX, has invested around $100 million
into ensuring girls have access to sports, conducting research
about girls’ sports participation and serving as what King
calls “guardian angels” for the landmark law. And she has
helped others do for their sports what she did for tennis.
In the mid-1990s, Julie Foudy, then cocaptain of the U.S.
national soccer team, crossed paths with King at an event
that brought together women leaders from different sports.
As she heard King talk about the Original Nine and their
fight for equal prize money, Foudy remembers thinking, This
is our story! She and her teammates were frustrated: Even
after winning the ’91 World Cup, the U.S. Soccer Federation
was paying them $10 a day. So King challenged Foudy:
What are you doing about it? You have the power!
Foudy was f lying straight from the event to meet herSPORTS ILLUSTRATED Q SI.COM 44MUHAMMAD ALI LEGACY AWARDFR
OM(^) LE
FT
: (^) JE
RR
Y (^) C
OO
KE
; (^) S
AR
AH
(^) ST
IER
/GE
TT
Y (^) IM
AG
ES
DOWN THE LINE
King, who fought for
women in tennis—and
against Bobby Riggs
( below)—has recently
taken up the cause of
women’s hockey (right).