‘I’m going to tell the truth. Screw this!’ Billie Jean King at 82 on coming out, tearing up tennis – and her one big regret

She was the world No 1, whose fight for equal prize money changed women’s lives. As competitive as ever in her ninth decade, she discusses sexuality, tenacity and what it was like to finally graduate college this year

Every day, Billie Jean King tries to come up with a “gratitude list” in her head, identifying the people who have played a part in making her life so fulfilling. On the day we speak, the list includes her nephew and her wife, Ilana Kloss, who like her is a decorated former tennis player. And, as ever, Susan Williams, who was in King’s fifth grade class at school in Long Beach, California, when she was 11 years old.

“Do you want to play tennis?” Williams asked one day. “What’s tennis?” King responded. She had always been a sporty child, and her parents, unusually for the time, encouraged her athletic ambitions just as much as they did her brother’s (he later became a major league baseball pitcher). Although basketball was a big part of her early childhood, Williams was the first person to tell her about tennis. “She said: ‘You get to run, jump and hit a ball.’ And I went: ‘Oh, three of my favourite things.’”

As soon as she tried it, King was hooked, and it wasn’t long before she was telling her parents she was going to be the No 1 player in the world, which indeed she became. Across her career, King won 39 grand slam titles: 12 singles titles, 16 doubles and 11 mixed doubles. Across disciplines, she won Wimbledon 20 times, a record matched only by Martina Navratilova. And that’s not to mention her off-court achievements, especially leading the fight to secure equal prize money for men and women.

A new documentary about her life, Give Me the Ball!, tells the story of the “original 9” female tennis players. In 1970, and driven largely by King, they founded the first major women’s professional tennis tour, famously signing symbolic $1 contracts with World Tennis publisher Gladys Heldman to protest against the gender inequality of prize money. Much of the film focuses on 1973, the year King beat self-identifying “male chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs in the historic “Battle of the Sexes” exhibition match. It was, she says in the documentary, “the pivotal year in women’s tennis”, but she was “a mess, emotionally”. Her internal struggle with her sexuality (she now identifies as a lesbian) was coming to a head, and her marriage to the lawyer and sports promoter Larry King was becoming increasingly strained.

We speak via video call – King, 82, is at home in New York, while I’m in London – and she bursts on screen in a hot pink jacket and matching pink glasses, and immediately begins talking energetically. She tells me my name, Lucy, is a favourite of hers and Kloss’s. “We named our dog that,” she adds, which I think she means as a compliment. She cuts a stately figure, with dark brown hair immaculately coiffed, pearls around her neck and in her ears. On topics such as the state of the US (we are speaking on the day of the midterm elections) and the importance of access to sport, she is serious and authoritative. But she is also enormous fun, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the way she has thrown herself into all kinds of projects over the years: from a cameo role in the cult lesbian TV show The L Word to her more recent appearance on the US edition of The Masked Singer, in which she performed Philadelphia Freedom, the song her friend Elton John wrote about her, dressed as a giant hen.

Born Billie Jean Moffitt to a firefighter father and a housewife mother, King was “the goody-two-shoes of the family,” she says, an identity she has carried into adult life: she hates lying, doesn’t drink, and when the first women’s tennis tour was sponsored by cigarette brand Virginia Slims, she never once had a puff. For the first part of her life, she was a Christian too. Now, although she is “still spiritual” and continues to pray, King dislikes organised religion, because in many cases she thinks women are still treated “as second-class citizens”. But she attended church with her family as a child, where her pastor was the two-time Olympic pole-vaulting champion Bob Richards. She says she learned a lot from Richards, and it was easy to believe when she was young that there was a God looking out for her. “Look at all the unbelievable things that happened to me,” she says, pointing to the offer to play tennis from Williams, and the fact that she was able to access free tennis instruction from the professional player Clyde Walker at her city’s public courts.

After she retired from professional singles tennis in 1983, King repaid that good fortune, famously instructing the then-children, Serena and Venus Williams, at a tennis clinic they attended in 1988. Even at the age of six, Serena’s serve was “so beautiful”, King says. “I told her: ‘Don’t let anyone change a thing.’”

“That clinic had a big impact on my life,” Serena says, appearing in Give Me the Ball! alongside footage from the clinic. Although King remembered being filmed by a local newspaper at the time, she had never seen those videos before, and was delighted to finally have access to them. Tellingly, though, one of the first things she notes when we discuss it is her weight at the time, which she says had shot up because of medication she was on for heart issues.

King has opened up before about her struggles with a binge-eating disorder, which she thinks grew out of her discomfort with her sexuality. In recent years, she has started using small doses of a GLP-1 weight loss medication to help quiet the intrusive thoughts she experiences around eating. “I think it’s OK to worry about your health and your body,” King says. What isn’t healthy, she says, is our culture’s obsession with body image. “Women have always been taught we’re supposed to look a certain way,” when most of the time “we’re just great the way we are. Same with the men,” she says.

At times, King makes for a difficult interviewee – not because of any lack of openness, quite the opposite, but because she is so reluctant to have a one-way conversation, and keeps batting questions back at me after she has answered them. “We’re talking about you!” I have to remind her at one point. “I’m always interested in everybody else,” she says, adding that she has been told throughout her life that she asks “too many questions”.

“My friends just look at me like: ‘All right, stop.’ And then I laugh,” she says. But it’s just the way she is, she explains. “There’s always so much to learn.” Her appetite for broadening her knowledge is so great that last year she returned to the history degree she dropped out of in 1964, graduating earlier this year – just one example of King’s refusal to stop pushing herself. She says she thrives under pressure.

However, she deliberately chose not to ask too many questions during the making of Give Me the Ball!. When athletes and entertainers “have a lot of say” in documentaries about them, “I don’t think it comes out as good as it should or could,” she says. The resulting film doesn’t shy away from anything – not King’s abortion, which she had in 1971 because “I did not want to bring a baby into the world not knowing what was going to happen with Larry and me”, and which was made public the following year, against her will, when King, without asking her, agreed for her name to appear in a Ms magazine list of high-profile women who had had abortions. Nor the “mess” of being publicly outed, after her secret relationship with Los Angeles hairdresser Marilyn Barnett ended and Barnett sued her, threatening to make the love letters King had sent her public if her demands for a share of King’s property and earnings weren’t met.

Barnett and her law firm were betting on King handing over the money to avoid the story of the relationship coming out, King thinks. Her ex “knew how tough it was for us and how we had to stay quiet,” she says – had she revealed her sexuality earlier in her career “we wouldn’t have had a tour,” because sponsors wouldn’t have supported something associated with gay people. “So what do you think I’m going to do? I’m not going to say anything. I want the tour for everyone. This is when it’s not about yourself sometimes – it’s about the future of the sport.”

But when she started receiving legal threats from Barnett, she decided enough was enough. “This has just gone on too long,” she remembers thinking. “I’m going to tell the truth. Screw this.” Sure enough, after confirming the nature of her relationship with Barnett in a 1981 press conference, she “lost every endorsement overnight”. But finally, the lies were over.

King thinks the bravery to speak out came from her parents, who had always taught her “to thine own self be true”, which is ironic, given that they were “so homophobic”, she says. It took their “whole lifetime” to come round to the idea of their daughter being gay, King says. And even up to her death in 2014, King suspects her mother thought she should have stayed with Larry, “deep down in her heart of hearts”.

King doesn’t deny that a lot of her relationship with Larry was wonderful. She thinks part of the reason it took her so long to figure out her sexuality was because of her love for him. “If I hadn’t loved him, it would have been different. But he was so cute, man,” she says. Prior to meeting Larry, she had kissed one woman while she was at university, but had not given the possibility of being attracted to women much thought. “Well, actually, she kissed me,” King clarifies, explaining her theory that everyone, romantically, can be categorised into “seekers” and “soughts”.

“And I’m definitely a sought,” which she says surprises people, because of her “go get ’em” attitude to most other things in life. But when it comes to relationships, “everybody’s always come to me”. When she started dating Kloss more than four decades ago, “I knew she was my life life life partner,” she says in the documentary. But King was still married to Larry – she had first asked him for a divorce in 1969, but he didn’t agree until 1987. She says he apologised before he died earlier this year. “We had good closure,” she says.

Though neither Kloss nor King were bothered about having “a big wedding” (they turned down Elton John’s offer to play), they tied the knot in a lowkey ceremony in 2018. It felt important to get married, not just to “make sure Ilana gets everything” after she dies (King’s wife is 12 years her junior) but also to honour “the people that came before us”, who fought to get same-sex marriage legalised, King says. “I also worried that the rights would be taken away, and they still could be,” she adds.

“We can lose it overnight,” she says. “Look at Roe v Wade.” The US supreme court ruling, establishing a constitutional right to abortion, made in 1973 – two years after King had her own abortion – was overturned in 2022. “It’s gone full circle,” King says with a grimace. She namechecks her recently departed friends Gloria Steinem and Dolores Huerta, who fought for human rights in the 60s and 70s, and hopes a “new crop of leaders” will emerge to tackle the issues facing the world today.

King has long been vocal in her support for minority groups, from people of colour to the transgender community, who she says “have it really rough right now”. Although she thinks when it comes to elite sports “it’s not an easy fix”, she hopes a way to better include trans people can be found. “I want them to be OK, and I want people to just let them be,” she says.

Given her staunch support for LGBTQ+ rights, it has surprised some of her fans that she has been open to tennis’s engagement with Saudi Arabia, a country where same-sex sexual activity is punishable by death. In 2024, when the Women’s Tennis Association hosted its Finals event in Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, King was reported in the Telegraph as saying: “I don’t think you really change unless you engage.” Though she stands by her belief in engagement, “I also think that was a difficult one,” she tells me now. “I don’t know what I would have done if I’d been in charge.”

King is clearly still hyper-engaged with the tennis world, politics and feminism, and is determined to continue making her mark. But, as she approaches 83, she says: “I’m running out of time, which is really getting me upset. I have so much I want to do before I’m out of here.”

Probably her only regret, she says, is that she and Ilana don’t have children. “I wish we did,” but “it was too tough around the 80s” for two women to have a child together. “But we know so many young people … we have nieces, nephews,” and the nonprofits she has founded, the Women’s Sports Foundation and the Billie Jean King Foundation, have given the couple the opportunity to support the next generation. King and Kloss are also godparents to Larry’s children from his second marriage.

“Know what you like,” is her biggest piece of advice for young people figuring out what they want to do with their lives. And then whatever it is, try to do it “every day for the rest of your life”. Which brings us back to Susan Williams, who, on that day in the fifth grade, introduced King to the thing she came to like best in the world.

“She changed my life,” King says. The pair are still in touch, and she won’t let her friend forget what an impact she made, seven decades on. “Every time I see her, I go: ‘It’s all your fault.’”