Billie Jean King On Power, Purpose And Passing It On

Few stand as tall on the earth of girls’s sports activities as Billie Jean King. The legendary athlete and advocate leveraged her athletic dominance to construct a strong platform for equality, one which she has continued to scale, shattering limitations in sport and society. Now six many years into her profession, the 2025 Forbes Most Powerful Women In Sports listee isn’t achieved leaving her mark on the world simply but.

Billie Jean King not too long ago went again to highschool to pursue the faculty diploma she deserted on the top of her tennis profession, however on a current fall morning, King is working within the mode of instructor, not scholar.

“Cash is the one factor that everybody understands,” she says whereas recounting a second that might go down as probably the most defining within the historical past of girls’s sports activities. “I am larger on relationships personally, however cash talks.”

The yr King is referencing is 1972, and she or he has simply defeated Kerry Melville 6–3, 7–5 within the US Open closing to stroll away together with her third singles title within the event. “I am within the press convention on the US Open, 72,” says King, narrating the scene. “I am sitting there and I am simply seething inside and livid with this prize cash as a result of I would like equal for us.” Her paycheck? $10,000. Ilie Năstase, the lads’s singles champ? $25,000.

“In that media convention, I mentioned, ‘I do not suppose we’re coming again subsequent yr except we get equal cash.’ Then I am pondering, Oh, that was silly. You have not talked to the opposite ladies and gotten the okay” she says with fun, including that she “typically does issues with out getting the okay.” Afterward, she did speak to the opposite gamers, they usually have been on board. “They mentioned it was okay, after which I knew, I knew it might be large.”

King was, after all, proper—the specter of a boycott was sufficient to create change. The next yr, the US Open grew to become the primary main tennis event to supply equal prize cash, with males’s and ladies’s singles champions receiving $25,000 every. It was a second that launched ladies’s sports activities into a brand new period and would lay the groundwork for future equal pay campaigns. It was additionally the primary of numerous victories King would safe for feminine athletes, a combat she is as engaged in as ever, incomes her a spot on the 2025 Forbes Most Powerful Women In Sports list.

King’s strategies for creating change have served as a blueprint for different athletes (the collective effort by the present crop of WNBA stars involves thoughts), however her energy stems from extra than simply the instance she’s set for others. The 81-year-old stays concerned in her namesake nonprofit, the Billie Jean King Management Initiative, and the Girls’s Sports activities Basis, each of which she based. Via Billie Jean King Enterprises, King and her spouse, Ilana Kloss, are lively buyers throughout the sports activities panorama, with small possession stakes within the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Los Angeles Sparks and Angel Metropolis FC, whereas additionally backing media and innovation efforts by way of Simply Girls’s Sports activities and Trailblazer Enterprise Studio. The couple, which King says has an “I dream it, Ilana builds it” dynamic, additionally helped to fund and launch the Skilled Girls’s Hockey League (PWHL), which performed its first recreation in January of final yr.

On high of every little thing else, there’s her renewed tutorial profession. “I mentioned to Ilana and others, ‘You understand what I like? I like to complete, and I have never completed faculty, so I wish to return,’” remembers King. “So I am again.”

Maybe surprisingly for an icon who herself has made it into historical past books, King is finding out historical past. The final time she was at school, within the Nineteen Sixties, it was one among few majors out there to feminine college students. (“Are you aware what number of majors we had to select from as a girl within the 60s?” she quips. “Oh my god, it was horrible.”) Six many years later, she’s proud to introduce herself as a Cal State LA historical past main, one who’s hoping to graduate subsequent Might. As King sees it, at the moment’s athletes might additionally profit from having a firmer grasp of the previous.

“All people now thinks they’re the primary,” chuckles King. “When you return in historical past, we’re often not the primary. Caitlin Clark’s been nice. However you realize what? In 1971, it was the Chris Everett second. When Caitlin got here, I assumed, Oh, this is rather like Chris Evert in 1971. You wouldn’t see it except you realize your historical past. I do know the historical past—and I lived it too.”

King, who herself achieved many firsts—the primary feminine athlete to earn over $100,000 in prize cash in a single season, the primary lady to teach knowledgeable co-ed staff, the primary lady commissioner in skilled sports activities, to call just a few—is fast to credit score those that she believes paved the best way for her.

“I’ve met each champion from the Twenties up till now,” says King proudly, like a collector of legends as an alternative of trophies, keen to indicate off each. “All of them gave me a lot. Alice Marble (who gained 18 Grand Slam titles and held the world No. 1 rating in 1939) taught me for a month.” She continues, working her method by way of the many years: “Margaret duPont, (who gained 37 Grand Slam titles and held the world No. 1 rating within the Nineteen Forties and early Fifties) taught me to place my racket in my left hand to relaxation my proper hand for the subsequent level. You don’t see that fairly often now. You see them shaking their racket of their proper hand. I’m at all times telling individuals to relaxation for that subsequent level!”

The impulse to speculate sooner or later is embedded in how King has at all times moved by way of the world. It’s what compels her to supply tips to gamers from her spot on the sidelines and in addition what initially gave her the braveness to make her sport higher for the ladies who would come after her.

“I knew I would not win as many titles if I did this work,” remembers King. “I used to be prepared to surrender titles. That was very simple for me. When you can change the game, if you can also make it higher, not simply on your personal technology, however for future generations, it’s value it. Making issues higher, that’s all we talked about again then.”

It’s additionally what athletes in different sports activities are saying now. In 2019, hockey participant Kendall Coyne Schofield approached King and Kloss with the concept of beginning knowledgeable ladies’s hockey league. “Kendall Coyne got here to us saying, ‘We want a correct professional league for us, the place we’re handled properly, and now we have a future for us and future generations.’ She was speaking just like the previous days, like us. We thought, okay, we get what she’s speaking about.”

The couple helped Coyne Schofield and the longer term Skilled Girls’s Hockey Gamers Affiliation arrange a checking account and develop a marketing strategy. From there, they organized conferences with buyers, together with Mark Walter, the chief govt of Guggenheim Companions and a fellow proprietor of the Los Angeles Dodgers—now the only proprietor of the PWHL.

“I now understand that I achieved extra in a single random cellphone name to Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss than I had in my lifetime of dreaming and dealing to ascertain a sustainable professional league for ladies’s hockey,” Coyne Schofield confirmed over e-mail to Forbes. “It was this one cellphone name resulting in one million cellphone calls, which in the end put the PWHL in movement.”

Only a few individuals can provide real-world steerage on launching a sustainable league, however King can—and did. It, after all, begins with a dream, however solely lasts if it’s constructed like a enterprise. “If an athlete comes as much as me and says, ‘What ought to I do?’ I say, be taught the enterprise you are in,” King says, with a practiced tone that hints at simply what number of instances she’s given this recommendation.

The PWHL isn’t the one new ladies’s league to enter the sports activities ecosystem in current months. Unmatched, a 3-on-3 ladies’s basketball league, tipped off for the primary time in January of this yr and a brand new Girls’s Skilled Baseball League is scheduled to launch in 2026. As somebody who’s spent a lifetime pushing for actual progress, King is cautious to not conflate recognition with energy. However like many visionaries, she has at all times managed to see what doesn’t but exist, and for now, she likes to suppose we’re certainly at a tipping level, with change nonetheless to return on the opposite facet.

“That’s what I like to make use of [‘tipping point’]. I feel we’re in a single, however I am not at all times positive,” she muses. “Does it simply really feel prefer it? Or is it actual?”

Her life’s work has been about ensuring that the momentum is actual, and for all she’s achieved—39 Grand Slam victories, an unforgettable “Battle of the Sexes” win, a profitable stand for pay fairness, the institution of the WTA, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Medal of Freedom—King nonetheless wonders whether or not there’s extra she will be doing. Identified for having all of the solutions, she nonetheless finds herself looking for steerage, too.

“I’ve, I hope, just a few years left right here,” King says. “What do you suppose I ought to attempt to do?”

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