2 weeks ago
When Billie Jean King near assemblage successful 1964, she had a purpose. Within a fewer years, she had go nan top-ranked tennis master successful nan world. Over a trailblazing career, she won 39 championships, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a legislature Medal of Honor – each while pushing publically for gender and salary equality.
Last year, she yet returned to decorativeness nan grade successful history she started much than six decades ago. On Monday, she graduated, astatine 82 years old.
“It is simply a privilege for maine to beryllium present arsenic a personnel of your graduating class,” King said astatine her commencement. “Yeah baby, only 61 years!”
King recalled increasing up successful a working-class family, nan girl of a firefighter begetter and homemaker mother.
“Like truthful galore of my chap graduates, I americium nan first personnel of my contiguous family to postgraduate college, for illustration galore of you,” King said.
She chose Cal State Los Angeles, past known arsenic Los Angeles State College, because nan tennis coach, Scotty Deeds, trained men and women together. He said it would thief springiness her nan level of title she needed to excel.
“Their attack to winning successful tennis was revolutionary astatine nan time,” King said of Deeds and nan women’s coach Dr Joan Johnson. “Even coming astir collegiate D-1 and D-2 tennis teams do not person nan women and men believe together. Scotty and Dr Johnson had it correct and they took nan other measurement for their student athletes.”
King distinguished herself arsenic a tennis champ successful college, winning Wimbledon doubles while enrolled. King was 18 and her partner, Karen Hantze, was 17, making them nan youngest squad to win astatine nan time.
But King told nan crowd that her existent information since puerility had been to conflict discrimination, a calling she first remembered emotion astatine property 12, erstwhile she realized that virtually everyone astatine nan tennis clubs wherever she trained was white.
“I asked myself, wherever is everybody else?” King said. “From that time forward, I committed my life to equality and inclusion for all. Tennis is simply a world athletics and it became my platform, but equality was my dream – to make nan world a amended place.”
She added: “We tin ne'er understand inclusion unless we’ve been excluded.”
King, 1 of nan first openly cheery master athletes, founded nan Women’s Tennis Association successful 1973 and successfully campaigned to get nan US Open to salary adjacent purses astatine nan US Open. That aforesaid year, she defeated Bobby Riggs successful a historical match billed “The Battle of nan Sexes” – a feat later dramatized successful a Hollywood movie staring Emma Stone and Steve Carell.
King ended her reside pinch words of proposal for her chap graduates.
“Have fun,” King said. “Be fearless. And make history.”
