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A half a century after founding the Ladies’s Tennis Affiliation, which created the primary worldwide tennis tour for ladies, Billie Jean King remains to be on the proverbial courtroom—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 ladies’s sports activities stepped to heart ice to drop the primary puck.
The puck drop could 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 traders purchased out the struggling Premier Hockey Federation to create a North American professional league worthy of the world’s greatest 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. Right this moment, King serves on the PWHL’s advisory board.
Although King retired from skilled competitors 4 a long time in the past, she stays energetic within the enterprise of ladies’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 ladies’s sports activities ecosystem. The WSF sponsors analysis on the advantages of ladies’s sports activities, advocates for insurance policies comparable to Title IX, and funds native sports activities programming. It additionally distributes journey and coaching funds to promising younger athletes, comparable 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 research athletic efficiency. BJK enterprises additionally consults for a wide range of different firms on alternatives in ladies’s sports activities.
Within the course of, King has constructed an incomparable private {and professional} community of ladies’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 planet, 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 crimson carpet to pose for photographs and have a good time the customarily under-recognized accomplishments of ladies athletes.
There was additionally the tennis champion herself—only a few weeks away from her eightieth birthday—weighing in as regards to funding in ladies’s sports activities at a time when revenues are reaching document ranges. A current Deloitte report calculated that “elite” ladies’s sports activities, which embrace 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 wish to put money into ladies’s sports activities now. It’s a superb funding. It’s good enterprise,” King mentioned, sporting her signature thick-framed glasses. “I’ve waited my complete life for this second.”
On the gala, presenters celebrated Stacey Allaster, chief govt 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 “Pleased Birthday” to King.
King quieted the cheering. “I’m not carried out but,” she informed 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 unit. Her mom labored as a receptionist and bought 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 way 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 aid 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 in the course of 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 tough—and arguably irrational—wager that her household made on her athletic profession. When she started taking part in youth tennis within the Nineteen Fifties, there have been no faculty sports activities scholarships nor skilled sports activities leagues (in addition to the Women Skilled Golf Affiliation) for ladies. Even with these restricted prospects, King’s household invested their finite sources into their daughter’s sports activities.
King has spent her profession making an attempt to alter the calculus for households like hers, calling for elevated funding in ladies’s sports activities to decrease the barrier to entry, and rallying for equal pay amongst ladies and men athletes. In 1972, for instance, King acquired $10,000 for her U.S. Open championship win—$15,000 lower than what Ilie Năstase acquired for his that very same yr. In response, she and her opponents threatened to boycott the match 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 ladies on the U.S. Open. That very same yr, she beat Riggs.
When talking with younger ladies athletes at present, King stresses the significance of understanding the monetary fundamentals of the game they play. “It’s essential know your corporation,” she says. “Take tennis, as an example. Gamers will come as much as me and complain, and I’m going, ‘Yeah, however if you play in a match, have you ever ever [thought about] the promoter who owns the match and took the danger? Do you ever ask them how they did?’”
She continues, “In sports activities, you’re completed very early in life. So it’s worthwhile to have one thing else. That’s why it’s so essential to grasp the enterprise.”
King is aware of everybody
If King’s profession will be marked by accomplishments comparable to serving to set up the WTA, successful a record 20 championships at Wimbledon, and being awarded the presidential medal of freedom in 2009, King’s empire can greatest be outlined by her private {and professional} community.
“I’ve lived a very long time. In order that helps,” King says, with fun, when requested how she’s constructed this community. “However I actually do love individuals. I at all times 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 ladies’s hockey.
Meghan Duggan, three-time hockey Olympian and eight-time ladies’s world hockey champion, remembers assembly King in 2017. “The U.S. ladies’s hockey workforce was going by way of our massive gender fairness battle in opposition to our governing physique. We had been within the thick of it,” she remembers.
Regardless of being the top-ranked workforce on the planet and having gained three world championships, the U.S. ladies’s hockey workforce received significantly different treatment from the nationwide governing physique for the game, USA Hockey. The ladies, for instance, traveled by coach whereas the boys flew enterprise class; ladies gamers had been pressured to share resort 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 workforce. King gave the gamers the encouragement they wanted to stay to the boycott.
“We had been at a extremely powerful stage, and I keep in mind I picked up my telephone in the future, 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 should you want us. We’re pleased with you—Billie Jean and Ilana.’ I confirmed the workforce, 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 occurring, however she’s nonetheless in tune, and in-the-know, is wonderful,” she says.
Amongst tennis gamers, King has been recognized to supply technical recommendation and training, as she’s carried out 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 best way for her: “She performed in opposition to a person and she or he beat him—and I’m a lady in a males’s sport.” Claressa Shields, two-time Olympic boxing champion and 13-time ladies’s boxing world champion, says that King has taught her that “sports activities has no gender.”
“I’ve met [King] 4 occasions now,” says the undisputed middleweight champion, who just lately grew to become the primary girl to be paid $1 million for a struggle. “Each time, she’s recognized precisely who I’m and given me recommendation for the way I could make ladies’s boxing equal to males’s.”
“Ladies’s boxing hasn’t gotten the place it must be, however we’re transferring the needle,” Shields continues. “[King’s example] provides a blueprint for what I must do. And if I gotta get within the ring and struggle 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 ladies’s sports activities. She’s additionally constructed a mini enterprise empire that’s serving to to gasoline the business’s development.
Right this moment, King’s BJK Enterprises does strategic investing, consulting, and advertising and marketing for purchasers that embrace behemoths like Adidas, ESPN, and Microsoft. Its funding portfolio consists of ladies’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 concentrate on the ladies’s financial system. In the meantime, BJK enterprises’ new Trailblazer Venture Studio, an accelerator program of kinds, provides startups a leg up within the business, providing strategic recommendation and connections to traders. 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 Hen, 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 ladies in sports activities. They raised $700,000, however the journal misplaced $1 million in its first yr. It was bought, then closed, after which reclaimed by the duo who oversaw its publication for 20 years. In 1998, Condé Nast bought womenSports for below $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 thousands and thousands in endorsements and advertising and marketing offers, that her ex-husband misplaced $400,000, and that World TeamTennis misplaced about $150,000.
“A nearly accomplished $500,000 deal to deliver out a Billie Jean King clothes line below 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 govt referred to as me a ‘slut’ in a letter when he fired me.”
Right this moment, King’s enterprise efforts intention to handle lots of the injustices she herself confronted on and off the courtroom. Earlier this yr, she introduced a partnership with EDGE Certification, which presents 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 helpful: “Billie is that this incarnation of the truth that the struggle for equality, fairness, and inclusion… calls for to be taken additional.”
Simply as Unguresan argues that leaders must reveal the enterprise case for investing in DEI efforts, King argues that girls’s sports activities leaders must name consideration to the monetary alternative of investing in ladies’s sports activities in an effort to make progress.
“I’ve waited my complete life for this to occur,” says King. “For individuals to—as a substitute of simply being good to us, and caring about us—to really wish to put money into [women’s sports] as a result of it’s good enterprise, for individuals to see that they’re going to become profitable.”
Whether or not it’s a household deciding if they are going to dedicate funds to assist their daughters play sports activities or an organization deciding if they are going to rent ladies leaders, King needs individuals to see that their funding will repay.
“Sport is a microcosm of society. It displays what’s occurring in the remainder of the world and in companies. We all know that if in case you have at the very least 30% of ladies on a board, that [margins] go up 6%. We all know that 94% of ladies within the c-suites establish as an athlete,” says King. “That’s why I at all times need women to enter sports activities as a result of they learn 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.”
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