With this graphic novel, we start a Tour that kicks off in the year of the Olympics and is dedicated to the combination of Sport and Health, but not only because, as the protagonist always says: ‘Sport is above all a platform for social justice.’
She was born Billie Jean Moffitt on 22 November 1943. Her mother was a housewife, her dad was a fireman, and her brother was a baseball player. She initially played basketball and softball and, by chance, started playing tennis at the age of 11 at the public courts in Long Beach. She fell in love with it right away and immediately realized that tennis was her destiny.
Brilliant and competitive, she left the rookie category a year later and placed in the junior category of the most important tournament in Los Angeles. Incredibly, the boys were awarded a racket, and she was given a baby doll! This episode and the attention with which she observes that period of the abolition of segregationism led her to declare that she would become number 1 and tennis would be her platform for activism for equal rights for girls.
Her fight started with the principle of equal pay after she was chosen for the US national team at 16 and made her first trip by plane. From then on, she was entered in the adult tournaments. At only 17, she flew to London with her flight regularly reimbursed by a philanthropist, for although she was already number 4 in the US, until then, she was not paid for her transport expenses and travelled to the tournaments by train. There, she fell under the spell of the Wimbledon
Tournament court and won her first doubles title. But it would take another seven years, with long study periods in Australia, to train with men and succeed after many battles with the establishment in getting professional tennis, the highest paid, to women.
In 1965, the year of the Malcolm X Murder, on 17 September, she married Larry King. She is now #1 in the USA and Billie Jean King. Her battle is also met with boycotts in the newspapers until the dispute for the First Houston Women’s International tournament, which then becomes the Virginia Slims thanks to Philip Morris and a visionary like Gladys Heldman, but Stan Malless with the USTLA threatens the players with ouster, and Gladys contracts nine of them for one dollar. In January 1971, Gladys declared: ‘Have you heard of the emancipation of women? This is the “lob” of women!” Thus, BJK created the Women’s Tennis Association.
The ‘Original 9’ revolt, in which BJK was one of nine women who signed a contract for $1, broke away from the imposition of the USTLA; their dream was to allow every talented girl to compete and earn a living. King’s goal was also to advance the 9th Amendment, which stipulated that federal funds granted to schools, colleges, and universities should be equal for both boys and girls. And she wanted to start with this change in people’s hearts and minds.
But the story continues…
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