Who is the greatest GOAT of them all? And how do you measure greatness anyway? We invited our writers to rank their top 10 greatest athletes of all time, and asked some to write about their favourites. We’ll publish one GOAT a day this week. On Saturday, we’ll reveal our top 50, based on our experts’ votes.
Billie Jean King is the GOAT of tennis.Credit: Matthew Absalom-Wong
At 81 years old, you’ll still find Billie Jean King on the tennis court, in the royal box at Wimbledon, or at the tennis centre in Flushing Meadows that hosts the US Open every year and was renamed after her in 2006.
As the 39-time grand slam winner once said, “no one changes the world who isn’t obsessed”.
After all these years, King is still obsessed, outspoken and opportunistic – that’s why she’s the greatest of them all.
The world was a different place when King – then Billie Jean Moffitt – first picked up a tennis racquet in Long Beach, California in 1954.
It was a world where an 11-year-old King was told she couldn’t be in a tournament photo because she wasn’t wearing a skirt. A world where there was no such thing as a professional tennis circuit for women, and a world where, when prizemoney was first handed out in 1968, women would often pay their own way to tournaments to earn a third of the winnings compared to their male counterparts.
So often in tennis, we measure success by the number of grand slam titles a player has won, and that’s because it’s bloody difficult to do. But King’s success and influence is so much more than trophies and titles.
If we compare King with her contemporaries, she’s a little further down the list when it comes to grand slam singles titles, but with a still extremely impressive 12 to her name.
Novak Djokovic will begin 2025 at the Australian Open on the hunt for his 25th singles title. Rafael Nadal recently retired with 22 titles to his name, and Roger Federer with 20 – that’s the “big three” for you.
And, we’ve seen equal success and dominance in the women’s game in the open era (the current professional era from 1968 onwards).
Steffi Graff finished her tennis career with 22 major singles titles.Credit: AP
To date, Steffi Graf is still the only tennis player, male or female, to have completed the golden slam – winning all four grand slams and Olympic gold – in a calendar year. When she retired in 1999 she was a 22-time grand slam singles champion.
Serena Williams won 23 grand slam singles titles, and she won her final title at the 2017 Australian Open while she was pregnant with her daughter Olympia. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova finished their careers each with 18 singles titles.
But in Williams’ own words, “without Billie Jean King I don’t know if any of us female athletes would be here”.
King was instrumental in creating the first women’s professional tennis tour in 1971, the Virginia Slims Circuit, where female players rebelled against the governing body at the time so they could have fair prizemoney.
“More and more tournaments were going to men-only, and we were getting squeezed … there was no place for the women to play,” King told the Women’s Tennis Association website in a 2021 interview.
“Men controlled all the tournaments, as promoters and players, and they really didn’t want us to play any more because we took some of the prizemoney – albeit only a small percentage – if we did. Really, I wanted us all, men and women, to be together. But the guys looked at me like I must be joking, and a couple of them said that nobody would pay a dime to watch the women play.”
In the same year, King became the first female athlete to win $100,000 in prizemoney in a single season – a feat so great the US president at the time, Richard Nixon, phoned her to offer his congratulations.
Two years later she took on former professional player Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” exhibition match, after he claimed he could beat the top women’s players.
King beat Riggs in straight sets in a match that was watched by 90 million people worldwide and was a turning point for female athletes.
Add the creation of the WTA and continual championing of equal prizemoney and opportunity for women and LGBTQ rights to that list, and King has the most impressive resume in tennis.
The US Open celebrated 50 years of equal prizemoney in 2023, an achievement only possible because King raised the sponsorship money. It was another 34 years before all grand slam tournaments followed suit.
And even still, while tennis is trying to navigate the path between money and morality with finals events in Saudi Arabia, a country where women can’t play sport without permission from a male guardian and homosexuality is illegal, King, who is in a same-sex relationship, is pushing for change.
“It’s a really hard one,” King told the BBC.
“For the girls that live there, I want them to see the best too. I would love to see a female player come out of the Middle East as the No.1 in the world as she could influence in a huge way I think.”
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