How tennis icon Billie Jean King is driving the boom in women’s sports

A half a century after founding the Ladies’s Tennis Affiliation, which created the primary worldwide tennis tour for girls, Billie Jean King remains to be on the proverbial court docket—and rink. When the six-team Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League (PWHL) launched its inaugural season on January 1 this yr, with a sport between New York and Toronto in Toronto’s Mattamy Athletic Centre, the tennis legend and advocate for girls’s sports activities stepped to heart ice to drop the primary puck. 

The puck drop might have been ceremonial, however King’s participation within the PWHL has been something however. The league was fashioned in June 2023, after a bunch of buyers purchased out the struggling Premier Hockey Federation to create a North American professional league worthy of the world’s finest gamers. King advised athletes all through the formation of the Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League Gamers Affiliation in 2019, which advocated for the creation of the brand new league. And he or she helped safe a dedication of hundreds of millions of dollars from Mark Walters, proprietor of the LA Dodgers (of which King is a minority proprietor) to launch the league. In the present day, King serves on the PWHL’s advisory board.

Although King retired from skilled competitors 4 many years in the past, she stays energetic within the enterprise of girls’s sports activities—particularly over the previous few years, as curiosity and funding has skyrocketed. By her Ladies’s Sports activities Basis (WSF), which champions equality in sport, and her BJK Enterprises funding arm, King has touched nearly each side of the rising girls’s sports activities ecosystem. The WSF sponsors analysis on the advantages of girls’s sports activities, advocates for insurance policies equivalent to Title IX, and funds native sports activities programming. It additionally distributes journey and coaching funds to promising younger athletes, equivalent to now-famed determine skater Michelle Kwan. BJK enterprises, in the meantime, has invested in groups just like the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks and the NWSL’s Angel City FC and backed media firm Just Women’s Sports and tech startup Sports Data Labs, which makes use of body-worn sensors to investigate athletic efficiency. BJK enterprises additionally consults for a wide range of different firms on alternatives in girls’s sports activities.

Within the course of, King has constructed an incomparable private {and professional} community of girls’s sports activities enterprise leaders, sponsors, and athletes. When requested about her secret to success, King tells me that between herself and her spouse, enterprise companion, and former skilled tennis participant Ilana Kloss, they “can get to anyone on the earth, nearly, with a few telephone calls.” 

Lots of these individuals gathered on the Cipriani Wall Road in October for the WSF’s Annual Salute to Ladies in Sports activities. Everybody from boxing icon Laila Ali to soccer Olympian Julie Foudy congregated on the purple carpet to pose for images and have fun the customarily under-recognized accomplishments of girls athletes. 

There was additionally the tennis champion herself—just some weeks away from her eightieth birthday—weighing in with regards to funding in girls’s sports activities at a time when revenues are reaching report ranges. A current Deloitte report calculated that “elite” girls’s sports activities, which embody professional leagues, NCAA occasions, and competitions just like the Olympics, will generate $1.28 billion in in 2024. 

“We’re at a tipping level, and other people need to spend money on girls’s sports activities now. It’s a great funding. It’s good enterprise,” King mentioned, carrying her signature thick-framed glasses. “I’ve waited my entire life for this second.”

On the gala, presenters celebrated Stacey Allaster, chief government of america Tennis Affiliation; Rosalie Fish, indigenous long-distance runner; and Jon Patricof and Jonathan Soros, co-founders of public profit skilled sports activities league Athletes Unlimited. Then the gang sang “Comfortable Birthday” to King.

King quieted the cheering. “I’m not accomplished but,” she advised the room. 

Born to be King

King was born in Lengthy Seaside, California in 1943 to a working-class household. Her father served as a firefighter and moonlighted at a plastics manufacturing facility. Her mom labored as a receptionist and offered Avon and Tupperware merchandise to get by. King paid for her personal first tennis racket and attended free tennis classes at public parks. 

It was by means of sport that each King and her brother, former skilled baseball participant Randy Moffitt, achieved monetary mobility. Moffitt performed Main League Baseball for 12 years as a reduction pitcher for groups just like the San Francisco Giants, Houston Astros, and Toronto Blue Jays. King gained 39 singles, doubles, and blended doubles titles on the 4 main, or Grand Slam,  tournaments—together with a record-breaking 20 championships at Wimbledon. She was additionally the first girl within the historical past of sports activities to win $100,000 in a single yr and defeated Bobby Riggs through the notorious “Battle of the Sexes” match in 1973, which was seen by a record-breaking 90 million individuals worldwide. 

In her memoir, All In, King describes the troublesome—and arguably irrational—guess that her household made on her athletic profession. When she started enjoying youth tennis within the Fifties, there have been no faculty sports activities scholarships nor skilled sports activities leagues (moreover the Girls Skilled Golf Affiliation) for girls. Even with these restricted prospects, King’s household invested their finite assets into their daughter’s sports activities.

King has spent her profession trying to alter the calculus for households like hers, calling for elevated funding in girls’s sports activities to decrease the barrier to entry, and rallying for equal pay amongst men and women athletes. In 1972, for instance, King obtained $10,000 for her U.S. Open championship win—$15,000 lower than what Ilie Năstase obtained for his that very same yr. In response, she and her rivals threatened to boycott the event if the prize cash was not degree set. A yr later, King helped discovered the WTA, serving as its first president, and secured equal prize cash for girls on the U.S. Open. That very same yr, she beat Riggs.

When talking with younger girls athletes at this time, King stresses the significance of understanding the monetary fundamentals of the game they play. “You have to know what you are promoting,” she says. “Take tennis, as an example. Gamers will come as much as me and complain, and I’m going, ‘Yeah, however whenever you play in a event, have you ever ever [thought about] the promoter who owns the event and took the chance? Do you ever ask them how they did?’”

She continues, “In sports activities, you’re completed very early in life. So it’s essential have one thing else. That’s why it’s so essential to know the enterprise.”

King is aware of everybody

If King’s profession will be marked by accomplishments equivalent to serving to set up the WTA, profitable a record 20 championships at Wimbledon, and being awarded the presidential medal of freedom in 2009, King’s empire can finest be outlined by her private {and professional} community. 

“I’ve lived a very long time. In order that helps,” King says, with amusing, when requested how she’s constructed this community. “However I actually do love individuals. I all the time suppose when it comes to ‘we’ as a substitute of ‘me.’” She continues, “‘Me’ is not any enjoyable for me. Enjoyable is getting individuals organized to make progress,” for her sport and others, together with girls’s hockey. 

Meghan Duggan, three-time hockey Olympian and eight-time girls’s world hockey champion, recollects assembly King in 2017. “The U.S. girls’s hockey staff was going by means of our huge gender fairness battle towards our governing physique. We have been within the thick of it,” she remembers. 

Regardless of being the top-ranked staff on the earth and having gained three world championships, the U.S. girls’s hockey staff received significantly different treatment from the nationwide governing physique for the game, USA Hockey. The ladies, for instance, traveled by coach whereas the lads flew enterprise class; girls gamers have been pressured to share lodge rooms whereas every man bought his personal room. 

So in 2017, Duggan and her U.S. nationwide teammates boycotted the Worldwide Ice Hockey Federation world championship, in hopes of securing equal remedy—not even equal pay—in comparison with the U.S. males’s hockey staff. King gave the gamers the encouragement they wanted to stay to the boycott. 

“We have been at a extremely robust stage, and I bear in mind I picked up my telephone someday, as one of many leaders of the group, and I had a textual content from this quantity. It mentioned ‘We’re following you. We’re supporting you. We’re right here in case you want us. We’re happy with you—Billie Jean and Ilana.’ I confirmed the staff, and I used to be like, ‘Guys, I believe we’ve made it.’”

Duggan has served on the WSF’s board of administrators for the previous six years. “The truth that [King] has a lot happening, however she’s nonetheless in tune, and in-the-know, is superb,” she says. 

Amongst tennis gamers, King has been identified to supply technical recommendation and training, as she’s accomplished for Tunisian tennis star Ons Jabeur and Belgium’s Kim Clijsters. And ladies throughout the sports activities ecosystem say they’re nonetheless utilizing King’s 1972 playbook for breaking gender—and pay—boundaries. 

Olivia Pichardo, the primary girl to play NCAA Division I baseball, says that King paved the way in which for her: “She performed towards a person and she or he beat him—and I’m a girl in a males’s sport.” Claressa Shields, two-time Olympic boxing champion and 13-time girls’s boxing world champion, says that King has taught her that “sports activities has no gender.” 

“I’ve met [King] 4 instances now,” says the undisputed middleweight champion, who just lately grew to become the primary girl to be paid $1 million for a combat. “Each time, she’s identified precisely who I’m and given me recommendation for the way I could make girls’s boxing equal to males’s.” 

“Ladies’s boxing hasn’t gotten the place it must be, however we’re shifting the needle,” Shields continues. “[King’s example] provides a blueprint for what I have to do. And if I gotta get within the ring and combat a person to point out them ‘Hey, pay us the identical sum of money,’ Billie Jean has given me the power to try this.” 

The enterprise of Billie Jean

It’s not simply King’s relationships that put her within the epicenter of girls’s sports activities. She’s additionally constructed a mini enterprise empire that’s serving to to gasoline the trade’s progress.

In the present day, King’s BJK Enterprises does strategic investing, consulting, and advertising and marketing for shoppers that embody behemoths like Adidas, ESPN, and Microsoft. Its funding portfolio consists of girls’s sports activities groups, but additionally firms like Kinlo, a skincare line for melanated pores and skin established by tennis star Naomi Osaka and First Women’s Bank, a industrial financial institution with a strategic give attention to the ladies’s financial system. In the meantime, BJK enterprises’ new Trailblazer Venture Studio, an accelerator program of types, provides startups a leg up within the trade, providing strategic recommendation and connections to buyers. Amongst its first cohort are upstart volleyball league LOVB and girls’s sports activities media firm Togethxr, cofounded by Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Jessica Robertson, Sue Chook, and Simone Manuel. 

King’s entrepreneurial journey started considerably tumultuously. In 1974, King and her ex-husband legal professional, actual property dealer, and sports activities promoter, Larry King launched womenSports journal, the primary journal devoted to girls in sports activities. They raised $700,000, however the journal misplaced $1 million in its first yr. It was offered, then closed, after which reclaimed by the duo who oversaw its publication for 20 years. In 1998, Condé Nast bought womenSports for beneath $5 million and folded the group into Self journal two years later. The pair additionally co-founded World TeamTennis, a mixed-gender skilled tennis league which misplaced $12 million in its inaugural 1975 season. 

When King was outed in 1981, she confronted even higher monetary challenges. She estimates that she personally misplaced tens of millions in endorsements and advertising and marketing offers, that her ex-husband misplaced $400,000, and that World TeamTennis misplaced about $150,000.

“A just about accomplished $500,000 deal to deliver out a Billie Jean King clothes line beneath the Wimbledon model was canceled abruptly,” she writes in her memoir. “I additionally misplaced a $300,000 contract with Murjani Denims, a $90,000 Japanese clothes contract, and $45,000 from Charleston Hosiery, whose chief government referred to as me a ‘slut’ in a letter when he fired me.”

In the present day, King’s enterprise efforts intention to deal with most of the injustices she herself confronted on and off the court docket. Earlier this yr, she introduced a partnership with EDGE Certification, which gives DEI coaching, evaluation, and credentialing for workplaces. Aniela Unguresan, founding father of EDGE Certification, says that King’s model as somebody who advocates for underrepresented teams is more and more invaluable: “Billie is that this incarnation of the truth that the combat for equality, fairness, and inclusion… calls for to be taken additional.” 

Simply as Unguresan argues that leaders have to show the enterprise case for investing in DEI efforts, King argues that ladies’s sports activities leaders have to name consideration to the monetary alternative of investing in girls’s sports activities with the intention to make progress. 

“I’ve waited my entire life for this to occur,” says King. “For individuals to—as a substitute of simply being good to us, and caring about us—to actually need to spend money on [women’s sports] as a result of it’s good enterprise, for individuals to see that they’re going to earn cash.” 

Whether or not it’s a household deciding if they’ll dedicate funds to assist their daughters play sports activities or an organization deciding if they’ll rent girls leaders, King needs individuals to see that their funding will repay. 

“Sport is a microcosm of society. It displays what’s happening in the remainder of the world and in companies. We all know that you probably have no less than 30% of girls on a board, that [margins] go up 6%. We all know that 94% of girls within the c-suites determine as an athlete,” says King. “That’s why I all the time need women to enter sports activities as a result of they discover ways to be resilient and belief their our bodies—we’re taught to not belief our our bodies. All these issues translate into being happier as a human being.”