orig. Billie Jean Moffitt
born Nov. 22, 1943, Long Beach, Calif., U.S.
U.S. tennis player.
She won her first Wimbledon doubles championship in 1961 as part of the youngest team to do so. She went on to capture a record 20 Wimbledon titles (singles, women's doubles, and mixed doubles) from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s; in 2003 her record was tied by Martina Navratilova . She also won several U.S. singles titles (1967, 1971–72, 1974) and the Australian (1968) and French (1972) titles. She was ranked first in the U.S. seven times and first in the world five times. In 1973 she defeated the 55-year-old former men's champion Bobby Riggs in a widely publicized "Battle of the Sexes." She was cofounder and first president (1974) of the Women's Tennis Association, and in 1974, with her husband, Larry King, she also founded World TeamTennis, of which she served as director. She wrote two autobiographies (with cowriters) and a history of women's tennis, and she cofounded the magazine Womensport .
Billie Jean King.
Colorsport