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Billie Jean King recalls coming out and building women’s tennis
Billie Jean King won 39 Grand Slam titles in her career: 12 in singles, 16 in doubles and 11 in mixed doubles. She won Wimbledon 20 times, a record matched only by Martina Navratilova. A new documentary, “Give Me the Ball!”, tells the story of the “Original 9,” the female tennis players who, driven largely by King, founded the first major women’s professional tennis tour in 1970. They signed symbolic $1 contracts with World Tennis publisher Gladys Heldman to protest inequality in prize money. The film focuses in part on 1973, when King beat Bobby Riggs, who called himself a “male chauvinist…
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