Billie Jean King at 82: the monument who still asks for the ball

In a black gown and a gold stole stitched with the letters G.O.A.T., Billie Jean King crossed the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles to collect a history degree she had walked away from as a teenager. She was 82, one of thousands of Cal State LA graduates that day. Her name was already on the women’s World Cup of tennis, on the grounds of the US Open and on a Congressional Gold Medal. She could have settled for an honorary title; she went back to class instead. That is the pattern of her life: institutions keep trying to turn King into a monument, and she keeps behaving like the girl in Long Beach who shouted “Give me the ball!” whenever there was one in play, the phrase that now gives an ESPN documentary about her its title.

The girl was Billie Jean Moffitt, born on November 22, 1943, in Long Beach, California, to Bill Moffitt, a firefighter, and Betty, a homemaker who had been a strong swimmer. She started as a shortstop on a softball team of older girls, and at 11 her parents steered her toward something they considered more ladylike. She saved eight dollars for her first racket and took the free lessons the city offered on its public courts from Clyde Walker. The tennis establishment noticed her quickly, and not kindly: at one junior event she was left out of the group photograph because she was wearing shorts her mother had sewn rather than a tennis dress.

She enrolled at Los Angeles State College, met a fellow student named Larry King in the library, and married him in 1965. By then she had already won the first of her Wimbledon titles, in doubles in 1961. Between 1966 and 1975 she finished the year as world No. 1 six times, trading the top of the game with Margaret Court. Her twelve Grand Slam singles titles include six at Wimbledon, four in New York and the 1972 French Open, which completed a career Grand Slam. Add 16 women’s doubles and 11 mixed doubles titles and the total reaches 39. Twenty came at Wimbledon, a record she would later share with Martina Navratilova.

The numbers were never the whole job. In 1967 she attacked “shamateurism”, the under-the-table payments that kept tennis amateur in name and elitist in fact. When Virginia Slims bankrolled a separate women’s circuit, King became its most tireless salesperson, and in 1971 she was the first woman athlete to earn more than $100,000 in prize money in a season. A year later the US Open paid her $15,000 less than Ilie Năstase for winning the same title. She said she would not come back unless that changed, and in 1973 it became the first major to offer equal prize money. That same year she became the first president of the Women’s Tennis Association, and in 1974 she started the Women’s Sports Foundation.

Most people picture something else: the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973. Bobby Riggs, a former Wimbledon champion turned 55-year-old hustler, had just beaten Margaret Court and was claiming that no woman could handle him. King, 29, had turned him down before. After Court lost, she accepted a winner-take-all purse of $100,000, convinced that a defeat would set the tour back years. In front of 30,492 people and an estimated 50 million American television viewers, she won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. Holly Hunter played her in the television film When Billie Beat Bobby, and Emma Stone did so in Battle of the Sexes.

The public story of those years is far tidier than the private one. King had realised by 1968 that she was attracted to women, and in 1971 she began a relationship with her secretary, Marilyn Barnett. A decade later Barnett filed a palimony suit, and King became the first prominent female professional athlete to come out, though she had not chosen the moment. Her first public statement called the relationship a mistake. The suit, thrown out in 1982, cost her an estimated $2 million in endorsements and kept her on court to pay the lawyers. She has since described an eating disorder born of that concealment, and said she could only speak honestly with her parents at 51.

Her admirers mention the other complications less often. The women’s tour she fought for was financed by a cigarette brand, and in 1999 she joined the board of Philip Morris, drawing criticism from anti-tobacco groups. As Fed Cup captain she was as uncompromising with players as with officials, and her 2002 dismissal of Jennifer Capriati for bringing a personal coach split American tennis.

She also played far longer than the legend allows. Her 39th and final major came in 1980, in doubles with Navratilova at the US Open. In 1983, at 39 years and seven months, she won the grass-court event in Birmingham, still the oldest singles champion in WTA history, and she reached the Wimbledon semi-finals that year and the one before. Her marriage to Larry King ended in 1987 after she fell in love with her doubles partner Ilana Kloss; the two married in 2018 in a ceremony performed by former New York mayor David Dinkins.

Retirement turned her into an owner. With Kloss she took minority stakes in the Los Angeles Dodgers and the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks in 2018, then joined the founding group of Angel City FC. In 2023 her company, BJK Enterprises, and Mark Walter’s group bought out the Premier Hockey Federation, clearing the way for the Professional Women’s Hockey League, which played its first game on New Year’s Day 2024. The tributes kept arriving: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, the Fed Cup renamed the Billie Jean King Cup in 2020, the first Congressional Gold Medal awarded to a female athlete in 2024. In 2025 Chicago Shakespeare Theater staged Lauren Gunderson’s play Billie Jean.

This year has been crowded for someone with nothing left to win. Give Me the Ball!, the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary directed by Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff, premiered at Sundance in January. In May she collected her Cal State LA degree, 65 years after first enrolling. In June the University of Oxford awarded her an honorary degree at its Encaenia ceremony.

The documentary reaches ESPN on November 22, her 83rd birthday, with an awards-qualifying theatrical release the same month. It centres on 1973, the year everything happened at once. The film it cannot finish is the one still running: a woman whose name is already engraved on the trophy, still asking to be handed the ball.

Tags: sports, athletes, tennis players, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Battle of the Sexes