A tennis and diversity champion. Billie Jean King’s memoirs: All In
She broke the glass ceilings, she fought for equal pay for women in sports, she became a figurehead for gay rights and between 1961 and 1979 she won six Wimbledon singles titles and 14 in doubles in one of the 20th century’s great sporting careers.
American tennis star and diversity activist Billie Jean King has written her memoirs together with Johnette Howard and Maryanne Vollers: “All In”.
Today’s tennis star Serena Williams called King “A constant role model in my life, Billie Jean King is a leading example of integrity in the face of adversity.”
King tells the story on how she worked to find her true self. She recounts her ground breaking tennis career — six years as the top-ranked woman in the world – but also recalls the impacts of the assassinations and the anti-war protests of the 1960s, the civil rights movements and later the LGBTQ+ rights movement. She organised the Women’s Tennis Association in 1973 and became its first president. Later that summer she won Wimbledon in singles, doubles and mixed doubles.
She tells the story about when she played male tennis star Bobby Riggs who challenged her thinking a woman would be an easy win as he earlier had beaten another woman tennis star. King accepted the challenge, worked seriously on it, studied Riggs’ style on the court and decided that he, older than she, should run.
On a September day in 1973 she played him in Houston with an audience of 30 000 and 90 million watching it on TV. Riggs ran, as planned, and King won in three sets: 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. The match was called “Battle of the Sexes”, seen by approx. 50 million in the US and 90 million worldwide. King’s win was seen as a breakthrough in acceptance of women’s tennis. She says countless admirers later told her what her win meant to them, including Barack Obama, who saw her practise in Hawaii in the 1970s.
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