The tennis superstar and first openly lesbian professional writes candidly about a career that led the way for women’s sports as we know them
In the first tennis tournament Billie Jean Moffitt played, aged 10, the organiser refused to include her in a girls’ group photograph because she wore shorts rather than a skirt. Nineteen years later, when she defeated former Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs in the famous “Battle of the Sexes” match, she remembered that childhood slight as the first moment she had felt the need to “change the game around”. “Now,” she said, having won $100,000 by beating Riggs in straight sets, “it’s here.” In fact, as this memoir of a long life of success and struggle shows, in 1973 when she beat Riggs and put the women’s professional tour in the headlines, change was only just beginning.
Tennis, with its ingrained formalities, and its potential for setting individual single-mindedness against tradition, has always been a good arena for sporting revolutionaries. In the 1970s, Billie Jean King – as she became after her marriage to her tennis promoter husband, Larry, in 1965 – fought first for parity between the men’s and women’s games, and then became a vocal champion of gay rights as the first openly lesbian professional sportswoman.