2 O
2 147’08 the tournament has cut its greenhouse gas emissions
by 37,000 metric tons. (In ’19, the Green Sports Alliance
recognized King as a “true Green-Sports pioneer.”) In
recent years, she has vocally backed athletes protesting
police brutality and denounced laws banning transgender
and intersex kids from participating in sports.
She often talks about an epiphany she had at age 12 at
the Los Angeles Tennis Club, where she noticed that every-
thing was white: white clothes, white balls, white people.
She wondered, where is everybody else? Decades later she
still sees so much inequity—like in the results of a recent
survey cosponsored by the Billie Jean King Leadership
Initiative, her nonprofit, showing that a majority of womenof color in the workplace feel that stereotypes have hurt
their careers, and that they are less likely to feel valued
than white women. Disparities like these are why King
still feels a daily urgency and worries, Kloss says, “that
she is running out of time.”
After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when King’s
travel schedule was necessarily halted, Kloss suggested
they return to the tennis court. King hadn’t really played
for the better part of two decades, during which she had
a double knee-joint replacement. The joy immediately
came rushing back. Kloss says she’s never seen anybody
more excited than King about the feel of a tennis ball on
her racket. That feeling set the course of her life.
The day she turned 78, that’s where King was: on a
court, doing a few extra drills, still working on that fore-
hand. As a champion, King was always trying to hit the
perfect shot, though she knew it was an elusive goal. But
she kept trying, getting better, getting closer, just as she
has in her pursuit of equality, her life’s work, her legacy.SPORTSPERSON OF THE YEAR 2021FR
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