Billie Jean King was a champ — she had 20 Wimbledon titles — and a leader who urged fair treatment and pay for female players. She told Fresh Air about the problems before there was a women's league.
Billie Jean King, seen here in 1977, learned to play tennis on the public courts near her Long Beach, Calif., home.Billie Jean King, seen here in 1977, learned to play tennis on the public courts near her Long Beach, Calif., home.Editor's note: This interview and story were originally aired and published in 2013.
Those subjects, as well as King's being painfully outed as gay in 1981, are the subjects of an American Masters documentary that aired this week on PBS stations and is also available toAt 69, King is still active in the game as both a recreational player and an owner in World Team Tennis. She tellsInterview HighlightsI used to think about everything that could go wrong and then try to picture myself, or how I would react to it or how I would respond to it. ...
and then we had this [pay] disparity. But more importantly, the men who owned the tournaments, who ran the tournaments, started to drop the women's events entirely. Most of the places, when they did have us play [and] included us, they gave us about a 12- or 11-to-1 ratio of prize money.I declined [to play Bobby Riggs] for a couple of years because we had just started [the Women's Tennis Association] and I was getting no sleep, working so hard.
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