Tennis Legends: Billie Jean King - The most influential figure in tennis history with impact wider than 39 Grand Slams

Billie Jean King is the most influential figure in tennis history. Her impact goes far beyond the American’s mightily impressive haul of 39 Grand Slams. The tenacity and drive she's displayed in championing women's tennis makes her a gamechanger. No player before or since has shook up the tennis landscape in the way King has over many decades.

Born Bille Jean Moffit , on November 27th 1943, to parents Betty and Bill. Her brother Randy became a successful pitcher in Major League baseball. She initially commenced her sporting journey by playing softball before turning her attention to tennis.

King's success in tennis straddled the amateur and Open eras. Her tally of 129 singles titles features 78 won on the WTA circuit that she helped to create. The Grand Slams total read as 12 in singles, 16 in women's doubles and a further eleven in mixed. King has often claimed she derived her greatest pleasure from the mixed doubles triumphs. Eight of her 11 triumphs in that discipline came with fellow American Owen Davidson.

Her tally of 12 Grand Slam singles titles include six triumphs at Wimbledon. She achieved a treble (66-68) before losing to Britain's Ann Jones in the 1969 final. Then, in 1970, Margaret Court defeated her 14-12, 11-9 in a final featuring the most games in any women's singles final at SW19. King would regain the title in 1972 and then add further triumphs in 1973 and 1975. King dominated women's doubles at the grass court major. On ten occasions she took the title, A litany of success that stretched from 1961-1979. Five of them were won alongside her most frequent doubles partner Rosie Casals. Two were with Karen Susman, and solitary triumphs in alliance with Maria Bueno, Betty Stove and Martina Navratilova. Four mixed doubles titles see her total rise to 20 Wimbledon titles, matched only by Navratilova. In 1967 and 1973, King achieved the incredibly rare feat of the Wimbledon Triple Crown - all three titles in the same year.

The six Grand Slam singles titles accrued outside London were four US Opens (67, 71, 72 and 74) an Australian Open win in 1968 and a French Open championship in 1972. Her participation in Melbourne and Paris was considerably less than the other two Slams. She appeared in 51 singles Slams but only 12 of those came in Australia or France. King was the fifth woman to complete a career Grand Slam.

In addition to ten Wimbledon women's doubles titles, King claimed five US Open doubles titles (64,67,74,78 and 80) and the French Open in 1972. The Australian Open women's doubles title was the only one to elude her in singles, doubles or mixed Grand Slam competition.

King supplemented her four mixed doubles Wimbledon crowns with four in New York (67,71,73 and 76), two in Paris (67 and 70) and the Australian Open in 1968 which gave her a Career Slam in mixed.

The legendary Statesider reached an astonishing 183 singles finals, winning 129. Her first title came in August 1960, at the Philadelphia District and Women's Grass Court Championships. King's last title was 23 years later, again on grass, in the UK’s second city of Birmingham. Victory, at the age of 39, in the Birmingham Classic makes her the oldest winner of a WTA title. King's best year was arguably the 1971 season where she won 112 out of 125 singles matches. These remain records for the most wins and matches played in a single campaign. She also set a record that year for most singles and doubles titles combined in a season, at 38. The following year saw her become the first woman to be named Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year. 

As a player, King was part of seven victorious American Fed Cup teams. She would later captain the US team to a quarter of successes. Her tenure as a skipper would later end in mild acrimony when she divided opinion by dropping Jenifer Capriati for a tie in 2002 when King took umbrage to Capriati bringing her own personal coaches. A number of players disagreed with the decision and America would go on to subsequently lose the tie. King's stint as captain was brought to an end at the finish of the 2002 season. In honour of King's outstanding and unprecedented record in the competition; it was decided to rename the event, starting in 2022, the Billie Jean King Cup. King had spells ranked world number one but much of this was when the rankings weren't official. She first reached the top ten in 1960 and was last ranked in that bracket during 1982.

King's activism has fostered huge growth in women's tennis and paved the way for equal prize money at the Grand Slams. Unhappy with the meagre remuneration women were receiving at the height of her career, King resolved to change things and with the help of founder Gladys Heldman and funding through Joseph Cullman to create the first professional women's tour. It was originally called the Virginia Slims tour and is now a multi-million behemoth called the WTA Tour. Some players were initially resistant but King's tenacity and vision won them over and now readily acknowledge the seismic impact King has had in reshaping the perception and rewards for the women's game.

In the same year this tour was created King embarked on a match that would define her more than any of the 18 Grand Slam singles finals she contested. Bobby Riggs, a chauvinist retired ex-pro, made provocative remarks about how he could easily defeat any current female player. Now 55, Riggs had previously been a Grand Slam champion, and had defeated King’s great rival Margaret Court earlier in 1973 for a loss of just a few games. With wanting acceptance for her new tour needed a win to provide extra validation for the women's game.

The match was held in September 1973, at the Houston Astrodome. They opted for a best of 5 format. King, playing smartly and exposing Riggs’ conditioning, defeated him in straight sets 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. An audience of 90 million worldwide tuned in to see a moment that placed King at the vanguard of change in not just tennis but women's sport at large. It helped to diminish the sniffiness and cynicism around women playing sports. The match established an attendance record of 30,472 that remains the highest for a tennis match in the United States.

She became married to Larry King in 1965 but was wrestling with her affections for women. She eventually became outed as gay in 1981 after she had an affair with Marilyn Barrett. The affair began in 1971 when Barrett was residing with Billie and Larry. They asked her to move out in 1979 and Barrett refused, threatening to leak records and receipts given to her by Billie Jean over the years. Events took a dramatic twist when sadly Barrett tried to commit suicide by jumping off the balcony of their house. She was left paraplegic. Barrett would then attempt to sue the King's for their income and the house. This led to King revealing her romantic relationship with Barrett and became the first openly gay athlete. The court case hurt King to the tune of 2 million dollars and was a factor in extending her tennis career throughout the 1980s on a sporadic basis. Barrett was eventually found guilty of extortion. While ironically the house they were contesting was eventually damaged irreparably in storms during 1983. The King's later divorced in 1987 but remained on good terms with Billie taking on godmother status to one of Larry's children with another wife. King herself later found love with Ilana Kloss and they became married in 2018. They can often be seen together at tournaments.

King has been recognised in many different ways since her retirement. This includes The USTA National Tennis Center, home of the US Open, is called the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1987. In 1999, she received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. While the BBC gave her a lifetime achievement award at the 2016 BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Her hometown of Long Beach named their library after her in 2019. The Laureus Sports Awards, a kind of sporting Oscars, gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award. The highest French civilian honour came her way in 2022 when French President Emnanuel Macron awarded her the Legion of Honour to mark the 50th anniversary of her French Open Singles triumph.

King has never been too involved consistently with broadcasting but has appeared for many years on the BBC's Wimbledon coverage offering analysis in the lead-up and aftermath of games. She is a part-owner of the LA Dodgers baseball team. They've triumphed in two World Series since King invested.  King is a figure that transcends the sport. A sign of this came in a BBC TV series called Icons in which a number of different categories were created where four individuals would feature and it was up to the public to decide which one was regarded the most important. The sport category nominations included King alongside boxing titan Muhammad Ali, Brazilian footballing superstar Pele and 11-time Paralympic champion Tanni Grey-Thompson. Ali won but it underlined how King's impact went far beyond the sport of tennis.