While her days of dominating at the Slams may be behind her, tennis—and fitness in general—still remains a major facet of Billie Jean King’s life. Even today, her passion is obvious. “There’s nothing like it,” the tennis icon tells SELF from her Upper West Side apartment in a January 30 Zoom call. “When the ball hits the strings, it’s magical.”
In fact, the 81-year-old spent the first few minutes of the Zoom call talking tennis—in particular, the latest big news in the sport: Madison Keys’s victory at the Australian Open. “I got to text her, tell her, ‘You finally did it!’” King says. “I’ve known her forever, and I’ve watched her progress through the years and seen how she always wanted to win a major…. I’m so happy for her, because she’s such a great person—a very kind, very good person.”
For someone clearly still so passionate about tennis, however, it may come as a surprise that King went through a period in which she didn’t play at all. It was only a few years ago—around the height of the pandemic—that her wife, retired South African pro Ilana Kloss, convinced her to take it up again. Sidelined by knee surgeries (she wears braces to play now), King “hadn’t hit a ball for 20 years,” she says. “[Ilana] got me back” into it. Today, the two—who started out as doubles partners decades ago and married in 2018—play on a public-private court at a John McEnroe Tennis Academy location, hitting back and forth on a half-court. Topspin, direction, speed, angle, altitude: “Every ball that comes to me is never the same, ever, so it’s a new thing every time,” King says. “It’s like a new present, a new gift.”
While King’s eyesight is still keen—“With glasses, I see 20/10 or 20/15 still”—she’s incorporated strength, agility, and balance work into her off-court fitness routine so she can continue to play strong. Before a rally with Kloss, she often stretches and warms up her muscles with resistance bands. “More limber, less chance to get injured,” she explains. For instance, as she showed in an Instagram reel last October, she’ll use the bands for internal and external shoulder rotation moves (important for full and safe range of motion) as well as biceps and triceps exercises. Then, to prep her lower body, she’ll perform 20 bodyweight squats before starting to hit.
What’s more, King is big on lifting weights to maintain and build strength, since muscle mass wanes with age. Even everyday tasks like “picking up packages, picking up or opening a bottle, that gets harder as you get older,” she says. While she appreciates the benefits of lifting, however, it can’t compare to tennis for her. Restarting “absolutely has changed my life,” she says. “I feel better. My brain stays more active.” Since King’s still working full-time—she serves as an Adidas global ambassador, a Women’s Sports Foundation board member, a Professional Women’s Hockey League advisory board member, and a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Angel City FC ownership group, among other commitments—she “need[s] that to keep going.”
Still, King has never been just a tennis player, though she has enough personal accomplishments on the court to make her one of the sport’s all-time greats: With 39 major titles to her name (including one Australian Open, one French Open, six Wimbledon, and four US Open singles titles), she has the third most wins of any female tennis player in history. But King’s impact extends beyond her own life and career. Named one of Life magazine’s 100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century, she had a heavy hand in transforming women’s tennis into the sport we know and love today. Not only did she help found the Women’s Tennis Association, she also successfully campaigned for equal prize money for men and women and defeated Bobby Riggs in the infamous Battle of the Sexes in 1973. In her eyes, though, more progress needs to be made. “Girls are behind. We haven’t had as much attention given to us, in this area particularly,” she says. “And I know it because I’ve lived it forever.”
That continuing crusade is one reason why King has partnered with personal care brand Dove to raise awareness of the body confidence issues that affect a significant percentage of girls in sports. Based on research conducted by Dove and Nike, nearly half of teen girls who quit sports do so because they were told their body isn’t right for it. In a 2022 review published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, researchers wrote that most female athletes reported facing coach pressure to modify their body shape to better align with the purported ideal for their sport. “I’m so glad I’ve lived long enough to see changes, but we still have so much work to do,” King says. “We”—women and girls—“really are socialized not to trust our bodies.” And, she adds, “body image, body talk, how you think and feel about yourself, is so important in life, not just in sports.”
While King’s Dove partnership meshes well with her history of advocacy for women, it’s also informed by her personal experience. She doesn’t specifically say if she faced any criticism about how her body looked as a young, talented, ambitious tennis player, but she came of age in the 1950s and ’60s—an era now widely viewed as a heyday of sexism. “Every girl my age in those days got the message, ‘Why are you trying to do this?’,” she says. “It was considered very masculine to play a sport.” (Not that those gender norms stopped King: As frowned upon as it might have been for her, both she and her brother Randy—who later pitched for the MLB—were highly competitive from an early age. “If we lost, I wouldn’t have wanted to be my parents,” she says. “When my brother and I lost, oh my God, we were terrible. We hate losing.”)
And King, who started out playing basketball and softball, encountered plenty of dissenting voices along the way once she switched to tennis too—voices she had to figure out how to ignore. In the run-up to the Battle of the Sexes, for example, Riggs famously made comments mocking women and women’s tennis. It “stinks,” he said, according to the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. You “can see some pretty legs, but it’s night and day compared to the men’s game.” (And, of course, we all know how the Battle of the Sexes match turned out.)
Whether you’re 8 or 80, a figure skater or a tennis player, confidence is a big factor in success—a lesson King learned long ago. “It’s really important to have strong self-talk, believe in yourself, even if others do not,” King says. Her own life is an excellent case study. “A lot of people never thought I’d be number one in the world, and I didn’t care what they said—I knew I had to,” she says. “Well, I did care, but I didn’t listen to them. I didn’t take it to heart. My self-talk was strong enough to overcome that.” And, she adds, that’s what she wants girls in sports experiencing low body confidence to learn how to do: “To believe in their bodies, to trust their bodies and say they’re great the way they are.”
Related:
- How Tennis Skirts Have Changed Over 100+ Years of Play
- The Best Tennis Gear for Beginners, According to Pros
- Here’s What It’s Like To Try Out for the US Open Ball Crew
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Caroline Tien
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