Tennis legend and activist Billie Jean King honored at Harvard Kennedy School

She refused to play that Pacific Southwest Open and protested with eight other players—“the original nine” to sign with Gladys Heldman, owner of World Tennis Magazine, and run their own tournament. They advocated for sponsors, built relationships, and helped launch the Virginia Slims Tournament in 1970. This later became the Virginia Slims Series.  

“That is the birth of women’s professional tennis the way you know it today,” King explained.  

Now, these top female players were no longer reliant on the tournament that didn’t pay them fairly.  

“I’m an inferno”  

After the “original nine” took their stand and began playing the Virginia Slims Series, King herself became the first female athlete to earn $100,000 in prize money a year—a feat for which President Nixon called to congratulate her. But there was still a long way to go.  

King now took the forum to the U.S. Open in 1972.  

“I made $10,000 and Ilie Năstase from Romania made $25,000. And we had the same crowds, by the way. We had just as many people watching,” she explains. “I am so ticked. I am just beside myself…internally I’m an inferno, because I can’t take this much longer. This has been going on for years now.”

So when she had the chance to talk to the press, she took action.  

“I said, you know, you guys, ‘I don't think the women are coming back next year.’”  

Eventually, King would help encourage a sponsor to make up the remaining prize money for the year ahead, so that men and women were paid equally at the 1973 US open.  

“Battle of the Sexes”

As King was playing and advocating, the United States was changing—the landmark legislation Title IX was passed in 1972, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational programs or activities that receive federal assistance.  

“That’s why you see all these great women athletes. Title IX is responsible. Don’t ever forget it,” King explained.

This law was on King’s mind when she agreed to play Bobby Riggs, a fellow tennis star who had challenged her to a public match. She hadn’t initially wanted to play him, but when another female player accepted his challenge and lost, she felt she couldn’t turn away.

“Here’s what I was thinking,” she explained, “this is about changing the hearts and minds of people.”

So she agreed.  

“Just can’t lose to this guy”  

“Title IX was passed June 23rd, ’72. I'm playing Bobby Riggs September 20th, ’73. And I know how important this is psychologically. I know this is huge. I have to beat him. I can’t lose to this guy.”

King knew the stakes.  

“And so I play him and I win,” she explained. “We had 90 million people watch—nine zero. The Super Bowl that year had 53 million, to give you some idea. And it was worldwide.”  

King says that this moment captured the public imagination, and that, following the event, she’d hear women share a common experience.  

“They had self-confidence to change,” King explained. “They asked for raises. I said, ‘More importantly, did you get it?’ and they did. Ask for what you want and need.”

It wasn’t only women who told King that the match had changed them.

“A lot of guys came up and said, ‘I have a daughter, and it made me stop and think that I want as much for her as my son.’”

Gratitude from President Obama  

That message has resonated far beyond 1972. Years later, President Barack Obama thanked King for her work on the court playing Riggs.  

“When I first met President Obama in his office, he said to me, ‘I saw that match when I was 12 years old, and now I have two girls—we do, Michelle and I—and it helped me raise my children,” she recalled.  

King was deeply moved by this moment. She’s clear the win against Riggs had impact far beyond the court.  

“It did puncture and permeate people’s hearts and minds. That was my goal, to culturally change it. And I knew it would help Title IX to really move forward. I was so happy for that,” she said.  

King’s still making impact through decades of continued activism. She helped inspire the U.S. National Women’s Soccer League to negotiate for better conditions and helped launch the Professional Women’s Hockey League in recent years. Generations of athletes have looked to her for advice, and through all of it, the “cultural change” she hoped for in the “Battle of the Sexes” persists. Over 50 years later, people still talk to her about the day she beat Bobby Riggs.  

“I have people still coming up to me,” she says, “the grandkids, or the children talking about their parents or their grandparents, telling the story of how it affected them.”

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Photography: Susan Young and Bettmann / Getty Images