Billie Jean King walked across the stage at Cal State Los Angeles on Monday to collect a diploma in history, completing a degree she abandoned in 1964 to chase a tennis ball around the world. She was 82 years old. The gap between leaving and returning: 61 years.
King had good reason to go. Within years of departing campus, she became the world's top-ranked professional tennis player. She won 39 championships, claimed a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a congressional Medal of Honor, and fundamentally changed the sport. But the degree stayed unfinished until last year, when she decided it was time.
"It is a privilege for me to be here as a member of your graduating class," King told the crowd at commencement. "Yeah baby, only 61 years!"
The choice to attend Cal State Los Angeles, then called Los Angeles State College, was deliberate. King wanted a coach willing to push her hard, and she found one in Scotty Deeds, who trained men and women together on the same courts. "Their approach to winning in tennis was revolutionary at the time," King said of Deeds and the women's coach Dr. Joan Johnson. The setup gave her the caliber of competition she needed.
While still enrolled, she made history. At 18, King and her doubles partner Karen Hantze, 17, won Wimbledon, becoming the youngest team ever to claim the title. She could have stopped there. She didn't.
Growing up in a working-class household, the daughter of a firefighter and a homemaker, King said she became the first in her immediate family to finish college. But her real drive came from something deeper. At 12, standing at a tennis club, she had a moment of clarity: almost everyone around her was white. "I asked myself, where is everybody else?" she recalled on Monday. "From that day forward, I committed my life to equality and inclusion for all."
Tennis became her platform. In 1973, she founded the Women's Tennis Association and pushed the US Open to offer equal prize money. That same year, she faced Bobby Riggs in a match billed as "The Battle of the Sexes," a victory so significant it later became a Hollywood film. King, one of the first openly gay professional athletes, never let tennis be just about tennis.
At her commencement address, she kept the message simple for her fellow graduates: "Have fun. Be fearless. And make history."
Author James Rodriguez: "King's return to finish what she started feels like the perfect capstone to a life spent refusing to settle for what the world told her was enough."
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