Billie Jean King’s Global Revenge Tour: How One Backhand Smacked Patriarchy from Paris to Riyadh

BILLIE JEAN KING, OR HOW ONE WOMAN MADE THE WORLD PRETEND TO CARE ABOUT EQUAL PAY FOR AN AFTERNOON
By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats

PARIS—In the city that once guillotined its aristocrats for sport, a bronze statue of Billie Jean King now stands on the hallowed clay of Roland-Garros, racket frozen mid-backhand as if eternally reminding the French that even their revolution was late to the gender-equality party. Tourists shuffle past, snap a selfie, and depart secure in the belief that progress is a statue you can tag on Instagram. The irony, of course, is thicker than a post-match crepe: a nation that still can’t decide whether “Mademoiselle” is sexist has immortalized an American lesbian athlete for smashing patriarchy with a tennis ball.

King’s 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” victory over Bobby Riggs was broadcast to 90 million viewers in 37 countries, back when global television was essentially a hostage situation with rabbit ears. Overnight, she became the patron saint of marginally better prize money, a role she has spent the subsequent five decades explaining was supposed to be temporary. Temporary, in this context, is geopolitical slang for “until the next fiscal quarter.”

Zoom out and you’ll see King’s real tournament has been played in boardrooms from Riyadh to Reykjavík. In Saudi Arabia, where women were finally allowed into sports stadiums in 2018—roughly the same year the iPhone learned how to wink—state media now cite King’s legacy every time they announce a new female-only marathon, held safely behind tinted glass. In China, the Women’s Tennis Association threatened to pull out over Peng Shuai’s disappearance and invoked King’s name like a diplomatic safe word; the tour returned anyway, citing “constructive dialogue,” which is corporate Mandarin for “we folded faster than a clay-court ankle.”

Meanwhile, the Europeans—never ones to miss a moral parade—have weaponized King’s career as Exhibit A in their ongoing antitrust litigation against men’s football. “If tennis could equalize prize money at Wimbledon by 2007,” the EU commissioners thunder, “surely FIFA can stop paying women in exposure and branded sports bras.” FIFA nods sagely, promises a committee, and schedules the next Women’s World Cup in a country where women still need male guardianship to renew a passport. Progress remains a movable feast, preferably catered by underpaid interns.

King herself keeps a schedule that would exhaust a UN peacekeeping force. Last year alone she jetted from Davos (where billionaires asked her how to empower women without touching executive compensation) to Lagos (where the national tennis federation named a crumbling court after her while simultaneously forgetting to fund the girls’ team). In each locale the script is identical: photo op, panel discussion, polite applause, and a souvenir plaque heavy enough to use as a defensive weapon.

The numbers, when you bother to audit them, reveal the grand joke. Global corporate sponsorship for women’s sports has tripled since 2015, yet still sits at a comedic 0.4% of the men’s take—roughly what FIFA spends on complimentary hummus at the annual congress. Meanwhile, the pay gap in tennis has narrowed to the point where a top-ten woman now earns only 34% less than her male counterpart, a margin economists classify as “statistically adorable.”

Still, every time a twelve-year-old girl in Mumbai picks up a racket because she saw King’s Netflix documentary dubbed in Hindi, the algorithm scores it as a win. And perhaps that is the darkest joke of all: in an era when democracy can be livestreamed and coups crowd-funded, the most reliable vehicle for social change remains a 79-year-old Californian with titanium knees and an unshakeable backhand.

So here’s to Billie Jean King, the woman who proved that if you hit a ball hard enough, long enough, and with just the right amount of righteous fury, even the most entrenched gatekeepers will eventually pretend they were on your side all along. The match isn’t over, but the scoreboard is sponsored by a bank that still pays female executives 22% less. Advantage, cynicism.