I wanted to change the sport

"Ever since that day when I was 11 years old, and I wasn't allowed in a photo because I wasn't wearing a tennis skirt, I knew that I wanted to change the sport." – Billie Jean King

September 20, 1973, In a $100,000 dollar, winner take all tennis match Billie Jean King defeats Bobby Riggs.  It was a battle of the sexes, as Bobby Riggs had famously boasted that no woman could defeat a male because women were the weaker sex.

I respect the fact that Billie Jean King decided to change the sport, instead of change sports!

I have to confess at a very young age when I was more stupid than anything else.  That age when you're so stupid you have no concept of how stupid you really are!  I used to be a male chauvinist!  I wasn't raised that way, I was just stupid.  God Almighty gave me a daughter a few years later and cured me forever of that ignorance.  I remember laying on the floor doing homework for college and watching this little girl play on a blanket in front of me when it began dawning on me how utterly ignorant and moronic I had been.  How so many of the things in my life I thought I believed and knew was completely wrong.

I became the biggest proponent of Women's Liberation while my daughter was still in diapers.  She is twenty and in college today, and let me tell you she isn't part of any weaker sex.  She can run circles around men and women her own age, and she isn't intimidated by anybody, man or women.  I am extremely proud of her if you can't tell.

Posted in: Tennis Battle Sexes Billie Jean King