LOVE 15 LOVE 15

$100,000 in a season, conqueror of Bobby Riggs in the ballyhooed Battle of the Sexes, founder of the Women’s Tennis Association, King is the most consequential player in the history of women’s tennis. Her vision and toil created the professional women’s game, sometimes at cost to her own career.

So many of today’s mantras –‘If you see it, you can be it’, ‘Be the change you want to see’, ‘Be your authentic self’, the embrace of inclusion and diversity – King personifies.

The rebel who took on the establishment became the establishment. In 2006, the USTA, which banned King in the 1970s, named its HQ for her – the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. In 2009, she was the first female athlete to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; in 2020 the Fed Cup was renamed for her.

“It’s been a lovely, sometimes lonely, o en soul-shaking, ultimately gratifying ride,” King writes at the end of All In Women’s tennis wouldn’t be what it is today without its ultimate o -court champion.

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2gladys Heldman

That iconic picture of the Original Nine holding $1 notes?

Those dollar-bill contracts were with Gladys Heldman, publisher of World Tennis magazine, mother of top-10 pro Julie Heldman, and organiser of the first standalone women’s pro event, in September 1970. Heldman was the godmother of women’s pro tennis, but when asked who started the women’s tour, mockingly replied: “Jack Kramer”.

The former champion and tournament promoter was so insulting in his treatment of women players – offering a pittance of the male purse at his Californian event – that the women pros, led by King and Heldman, felt they couldn’t do any worse going out on their own. Defying lawsuits, threats and bans, Heldman recruited her friend, Phillip Morris chief Joe Cullman, to put up some of the $7500 prize money for the inaugural Virginia Slims Invitational of Houston. The rest is tennis history.