• TENNIS PLAYER
• Passionate advocate for women's and LGBTQ equality
• Ranked first in the world in tennis in the 1960s
• Won 37 amateur titles, 67 professional singles titles, and 12 Grand Slam tournaments
• Famously DEFEATED tennis player Bobby Riggs after he had openly derided women as inferior athletes; the game was dubbed the "Battle of the Sexes," and watched by an estimated 50 million people around the world
• With the goal of increasing and supporting women in sports, she founded or cofounded womenSports magazine, the Women's Tennis Association, and the Women's Sports Foundation​​
• FIRST: 
  • woman athlete to win more than $100,000 in a single year
  • woman athlete and first ever tennis player to be named Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year​
  • famous athlete in America to publicly come out as gay
  • female athlete to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Named one of the hundred MOST IMPORTANT Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine
• The USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center is named after her, and is the world's largest sports facility named after a woman

Bibliography: Doyle, Caitlin. Girls Can Do Anything: From Sports to Innovation, Art to Politics, Meet Over 200 Women Who Got There First. Buffalo: Firefly Books, 2016. Print.
Hall, Brian. Pioneers In Women's Sports. Minneapolis: Abdo Publishing, 2018. Print.
Kurimay, Anita. "King, Billie Jean." The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, 2008, 19-20.

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