Tennis Icon Billie Jean King Reflects on Her Extraordinary Career and Legacy

Now 82, Billie Jean King maintains a daily practice of cultivating a mental “gratitude list” to honor those who shaped her fulfillment. Her current reflections frequently highlight her wife, fellow former tennis star Ilana Kloss, and Susan Williams, a childhood friend from her fifth-grade classroom in Long Beach, California. It was Williams who introduced her to the sport when King was 11, famously describing it as a game where you get to run, jump, and hit a ball—an invitation that immediately captured King’s imagination. Three of my favourite things.’”, and I went: ‘Oh.

King quickly declared her ambition to become the world’s top player, a goal she ultimately achieved. With dark brown hair immaculately coiffed, pearls around her neck and in her ears, she cuts a stately figure.

Her storied career includes 39 grand slam titles, comprising 12 singles, 16 doubles, and 11 mixed doubles victories.

Her dominance at Wimbledon, where she secured 20 titles, remains a record matched only by Martina Navratilova.

Beyond the court, King led the landmark push for equal prize money, a movement that gained momentum in 1970 when she and the “Original 9” founded the first major women’s professional tennis tour. Born Billie Jean Moffitt to a firefighter father and a housewife mother, King was “the goody-two-shoes of the family,” she says, an identity she has carried into adult life: she hates lying, doesn’t drink, and when the first women’s tennis tour was sponsored by cigarette brand Virginia Slims, she never once had a puff.

They famously signed $1 contracts with World Tennis publisher Gladys Heldman to protest pervasive gender-based pay disparities.

Her life and activism are the focus of a new documentary, Give Me the Ball!, which examines her pivotal 1973 victory over self-identified “male chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” exhibition. King describes herself as having been an emotional mess during that year, despite it marking a transformative era for the sport. During a recent video call from her home in New York, King expressed her enduring curiosity and energy, noting her recent academic milestone: graduating with a history degree after returning to the program she left in 1964. We speak via video call – King, 82, is at home in New York, while I’m in London – and she bursts on screen in a hot pink jacket and matching pink glasses, and immediately begins talking energetically. Graduating earlier this year – just one example of King’s refusal to stop pushing herself, her appetite for broadening her knowledge is so great that last year she returned to the history degree she dropped out of in 1964.

Reflecting on her personal life, King acknowledges the challenges of navigating her sexuality during the 1980s, noting that she and Kloss do not have children, which remains her one significant regret. She has previously spoken about struggles with binge-eating, a condition she attributes to discomfort regarding her identity. In recent years, she has utilized GLP-1 medication to manage intrusive thoughts, advocating for the importance of self-care and staying true to one’s own path. And her marriage to the lawyer and sports promoter Larry King was becoming increasingly strained, her internal struggle with her sexuality (she now identifies as a lesbian) was coming to a head. She tells me my name, Lucy, is a favourite of hers and Kloss’s. “We named our dog that,” she adds, which I think she means as a compliment. She is serious and authoritative, on topics such as the state of the US (we are speaking on the day of the midterm elections) and the importance of access to sport. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the way she has thrown herself into all kinds of projects over the years: from a cameo role in the cult lesbian TV show The L Word to her more recent appearance on the US edition of The Masked Singer, in which she performed Philadelphia Freedom, the song her friend Elton John wrote about her, dressed as a giant hen, but she is also enormous fun. She has started using small doses of a GLP-1 weight loss medication to help quiet the intrusive thoughts she experiences around eating. “I think it’s OK to worry about your health and your body,” King says, in recent years. At times, King makes for a difficult interviewee – not because of any lack of openness, quite the opposite, but because she is so reluctant to have a one-way conversation, and keeps batting questions back at me after she has answered them. “We’re talking about you. I have to remind her at one point. “I’m always interested in everybody else,” she says, adding that she has been told throughout her life that she asks “too many questions”.

Her trajectory toward openness was spurred by legal threats from a former partner, Marilyn Barnett, in 1981. Confronted with the potential exposure of her private life, King decided to confront the situation directly rather than yield to pressure. “I’m going to tell the truth. Screw this!” she recalled, leading to a press conference where she publicly confirmed the relationship. Though this disclosure cost her every endorsement she held at the time, she credits her parents—despite their own homophobic views—for instilling in her the value of being true to oneself. And her parents, unusually for the time, encouraged her athletic ambitions just as much as they did her brother’s (he later became a major league baseball pitcher), she had always been a sporty child. As soon as she tried it, King was hooked, and it wasn’t long before she was telling her parents she was going to be the No 1 player in the world, which indeed she became. Where her pastor was the two-time Olympic pole-vaulting champion Bob Richards, but she attended church with her family as a child. She says, is our culture’s obsession with body image. “Women have always been taught we’re supposed to look a certain way,” when most of the time “we’re just great the way we are, what isn’t healthy. “My friends just look at me like: ‘All right, stop. Which she had in 1971 because “I did not want to bring a baby into the world not knowing what was going to happen with Larry and me”, and which was made public the following year, against her will, when King, without asking her, agreed for her name to appear in a Ms magazine list of high-profile women who had had abortions, the resulting film doesn’t shy away from anything – not King’s abortion.

King’s dedication to the next generation remains steadfast. In 1988, she held a clinic that included a young Serena and Venus Williams. King vividly remembers the beauty of Serena’s serve at age six and encouraged her to protect her unique style. Today, she continues to advise young people to identify their passions and commit to them daily. She remains close with her early supporters, often reminding Susan Williams, who first introduced her to the sport seven decades ago, that her professional success is, in part, “all your fault.” Although she is “still spiritual” and continues to pray, King dislikes organised religion, because in many cases she thinks women are still treated “as second-class citizens”. According to she, She learned a lot from Richards, and it was easy to believe when she was young that there was a God looking out for her. “Look at all the unbelievable things that happened to me,” she says, pointing to the offer to play tennis from Williams, and the fact that she was able to access free tennis instruction from the professional player Clyde Walker at her city’s public courts. After she retired from professional singles tennis in 1983, King repaid that good fortune, famously instructing the then-children, Serena and Venus Williams, at a tennis clinic they attended in 1988. Even at the age of six, Serena’s serve was “so beautiful”, King says. “I told her: ‘Don’t let anyone change a thing.’”.