Billie Jean King graduates from college at age 82 after leaving for tennis: ‘Yeah baby, only 61 years!’ | US news
When Billie Jean King left college in 1964, she had a goal. In just a few years, she became the highest-ranked tennis professional in the world. During a trailblazing career, she won 39 championships, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Medal of Honor – all while publicly advocating for gender and wage equality.
Last year, she finally returned to complete the history degree she began more than sixty years ago. On Monday, she graduated at age 82.
“It is my privilege to be here as a member of your graduating class,” King said at his graduation. “Yeah baby, only 61!”
King remembers growing up in a working-class family, the daughter of a firefighter father and a stay-at-home mother.
“Like many of my fellow graduates, I am the first in my immediate family to earn a college degree, as are many of you,” King said.
She chose Cal State Los Angeles, then known as Los Angeles State College, because the tennis coach, Scotty Deeds, coached men and women together. He said it would give her the level of competition she needed to excel.
“Their approach to winning at tennis was revolutionary at the time,” King said of Deeds and women’s coach Dr. Joan Johnson. “Even today, most D-1 and D-2 collegiate tennis teams do not allow women and men to train together. Scotty and Dr. Johnson were right and they went the extra mile for their student-athletes.”
King distinguished herself as a tennis champion in college, winning the Wimbledon doubles while enrolled. King was 18 and his partner, Karen Hantze, was 17, making them the youngest team to win at the time.
But King told the crowd that her true motivation since childhood was to fight discrimination, a calling she remembers first feeling at age 12, when she realized that virtually everyone at the tennis clubs where she trained was white.
“I wondered, where is everyone else?” said the king. “From that day on, I dedicated my life to equality and inclusion for all. Tennis is a global sport and it became my platform, but equality was my dream: to make the world a better place.”
She added: “We can never understand inclusion without having been excluded. »
King, one of the first openly gay professional athletes, founded the Women’s Tennis Association in 1973 and successfully campaigned for equal purses to the U.S. Open. The same year, she defeated Bobby Riggs in a historic match titled “The Battle of the Sexes” – a feat later dramatized in a Hollywood film starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell.
King ended his speech with advice for his fellow graduates.
“Have fun,” King said. “Be fearless. And make history.”
