Billie Jean King

Tennis Player

1943-11-22

Billie Jean King is an American tennis champion and equality advocate whose career transformed women’s professional sports.

Quotes by Billie Jean King

Tennis taught me so many lessons in life. One of the things it taught me is that every ball that comes to me, I have to make a decision. I have to accept responsibility for the consequences every time I hit a ball.
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Tennis taught me so many lessons in life. One of the things it taught me is that every ball that comes to me, I have to make a decision. I have to accept responsibility for the consequences every time I hit a ball.
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I wanted to use sports for social change.
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It is very hard to be a female leader. While it is assumed that any man, no matter how tough, has a soft side... and female leader is assumed to be one-dimensional.
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Sports teaches you character, it teaches you to play by the rules, it teaches you to know what it feels like to win and lose-it teaches you about life.
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I always wanted to help make tennis a team sport.
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There is no life for girls in team sports past Little League. I got into tennis when I realized this, and because I thought golf would be too slow for me, and I was too scared to swim.
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Any therapist will tell you that when you're ready, you will come out. To be outed means you weren't ready.
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Women's sports is still in its infancy. The beginning of women's sports in the United States started in 1972, with the passage of Title 9 for girls to finally get athletic scholarships.
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It's just really important that we start celebrating our differences. Let's start tolerating first, but then we need to celebrate our differences.
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I used to be told if I talked about my sexuality in any way that we wouldn't have a tennis tour.
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I was always in the tennis business-from 1968. I was in tournaments and also on World Team Tennis teams as well.
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I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards being a champion.
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Everyone has people in their lives that are gay, lesbian or transgender or bisexual. They may not want to admit it, but I guarantee they know somebody.
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Men can have a huge turnover of sponsorship and still survive a lot better than the women. But the women's ratings are better, at least at home in the United States than in the men's tennis.
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Tennis is a perfect combination of violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquillity.
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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.
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A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.
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When they take surveys of women in business, of the Fortune 500, the successful women, 80% of them, say they were in sports as a young woman.
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The trouble with being number one in the world at anything is that it takes a certain mentality to attain that position in the first place, and that is something of a driving, perfectionist attitude, so that once you do achieve number one, you don't relax and enjoy it.
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