i am sassa

I’ve gotten a zillion suggestions for who to paint (keep them coming!) and Billie Jean King was the first one I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard of. The name sounded familiar, and the story vaguely familiar. I have to admit what really made me want to paint her were THOSE GLASSES 😍. But as soon as I watched an interview with her I was dead set on painting her for lots of other reasons.

Billie Jean King is a multi-fasceted badass. She was definitely a badass tennis player, winning 20 career titles at Wimbledon. But she also is a champion of women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, equal pay for female athletes, and Title IX, which prohibited gender discrimination in any educational activities that receive federal funding.

King was furious when she found out that female tennis players were making as little as 1/12th the pay of their male counterparts. Women's Pro Tennis was born out of that fury when she and eight others signed a $1 contract and started the Virginia Slims tour.

In 1970 a 55 year old former men's champion and asshat named Bobby Riggs challenged her to a match he called the Battle of the Sexes. The women’s liberation movement was in full swing, and Riggs was belligerent in his opposition to it. He claimed that men were better than women, women didn’t deserve equal pay, and also that they were only of interest to him in the bedroom/kitchen, and should stay “barefoot and pregnant”. Seriously. Watch his interview on the Johnny Carson Show. Or maybe don't. Vomit. She declined his offer, but Margaret Court (please let her middle name be Tennis) took him up on it and lost handily. He called it the “Mother's Day Massacre”. Classy.

After that, Billie Jean felt like she had to take him on, and I love her guts out for it. NINETY MILLION PEOPLE watched her play Captain Butthole, one of which was a twelve year old Barack Obama. He later told Billie Jean that it changed everything, including the way he would eventually raise his daughters. Why? Because she whooped 👏 his 👏 ass 👏.

Thank you, Billie Jean King.