Billie Jean King is pioneering women’s sports again—this time as an investor and advisor

A half a century after founding the Women’s Tennis Association, which created the first worldwide tennis tour for women, Billie Jean King is still on the proverbial court—and rink. When the six-team Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) launched its inaugural season on January 1 this year, with a game between New York and Toronto in Toronto’s Mattamy Athletic Centre, the tennis legend and advocate for women’s sports stepped to center ice to drop the first puck. 

The puck drop may have been ceremonial, but King’s participation in the PWHL has been anything but. The league was formed in June 2023, after a group of investors bought out the struggling Premier Hockey Federation to create a North American pro league worthy of the world’s best players. King advised athletes throughout the formation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players Association in 2019, which advocated for the creation of the new league. And she helped secure a commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars from Mark Walters, owner of the LA Dodgers (of which King is a minority owner) to launch the league. Today, King serves on the PWHL’s advisory board.

Though King retired from professional competition four decades ago, she remains active in the business of women’s sports—especially over the past few years, as interest and investment has skyrocketed. Through her Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF), which champions equality in sport, and her BJK Enterprises investment arm, King has touched just about every aspect of the growing women’s sports ecosystem. The WSF sponsors research on the benefits of women’s sports, advocates for policies such as Title IX, and funds local sports programming. It also distributes travel and training funds to promising young athletes, such as now-famed figure skater Michelle Kwan. BJK Enterprises, meanwhile, has invested in teams like the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks and the NWSL’s Angel City FC and backed media company Just Women’s Sports and tech startup Sports Data Labs, which uses body-worn sensors to analyze athletic performance. BJK Enterprises also consults for a variety of other companies on opportunities in women’s sports.

In the process, King has built an incomparable personal and professional network of women’s sports business leaders, sponsors, and athletes. When asked about her secret to success, King tells me that between herself and her wife, business partner, and former professional tennis player Ilana Kloss, they “can get to anybody in the world, just about, with a couple of phone calls.” 

Many of those people gathered at the Cipriani Wall Street in October for the WSF’s Annual Salute to Women in Sports. Everyone from boxing icon Laila Ali to soccer Olympian Julie Foudy congregated on the red carpet to pose for photos and celebrate the often under-recognized accomplishments of women athletes. 

There was also the tennis champion herself—just a few weeks away from her 80th birthday—weighing in on the subject of investment in women’s sports at a time when revenues are reaching record levels. A recent Deloitte report calculated that “elite” women’s sports, which include pro leagues, NCAA events, and competitions like the Olympics, will generate $1.28 billion in in 2024. 

“We’re at a tipping point, and people want to invest in women’s sports now. It’s a good investment. It’s good business,” King said, wearing her signature thick-framed glasses. “I’ve waited my whole life for this moment.”

At the gala, presenters celebrated Stacey Allaster, chief executive of the United States Tennis Association; Rosalie Fish, Indigenous long-distance runner; and Jon Patricof and Jonathan Soros, cofounders of public benefit professional sports league Athletes Unlimited. Then the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to King.

King quieted the cheering. “I’m not done yet,” she told the room. 

Born to be King

King was born in Long Beach, California, in 1943 to a working-class family. Her father served as a firefighter and moonlighted at a plastics factory. Her mother worked as a receptionist and sold Avon and Tupperware products to get by. King paid for her own first tennis racket and attended free tennis lessons at public parks. 

It was through sport that both King and her brother, former professional baseball player Randy Moffitt, achieved financial mobility. Moffitt played Major League Baseball for 12 years as a relief pitcher for teams like the San Francisco Giants, Houston Astros, and Toronto Blue Jays. King won 39 singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles at the four major, or Grand Slam,  tournaments—including a record-breaking 20 championships at Wimbledon. She was also the first woman in the history of sports to win $100,000 in a single year and defeated Bobby Riggs during the infamous “Battle of the Sexes” match in 1973, which was seen by a record-breaking 90 million people worldwide. 

In her memoir, All In, King describes the difficult—and arguably irrational—bet that her family made on her athletic career. When she began playing youth tennis in the 1950s, there were no college sports scholarships nor professional sports leagues (besides the Ladies Professional Golf Association) for women. Even with these limited prospects, King’s family invested their finite resources into their daughter’s sports.

King has spent her career attempting to change the calculus for families like hers, calling for increased investment in women’s sports to lower the barrier to entry, and rallying for equal pay among women and men athletes. In 1972, for example, King received $10,000 for her U.S. Open championship win—$15,000 less than what Ilie Nastase received for his that same year. In response, she and her competitors threatened to boycott the tournament if the prize money was not level set. A year later, King helped found the WTA, serving as its first president, and secured equal prize money for women at the U.S. Open. That same year, she beat Riggs.

When speaking with young women athletes today, King stresses the importance of understanding the financial fundamentals of the sport they play. “You need to know your business,” she says. “Take tennis, for instance. Players will come up to me and complain, and I go, ‘Yeah, but when you play in a tournament, have you ever [thought about] the promoter who owns the tournament and took the risk? Do you ever ask them how they did?’”

She continues, “In sports, you’re finished very early in life. So you need to have something else. That’s why it’s so important to understand the business.”

King knows everyone

If King’s career can be marked by accomplishments such as helping establish the WTA, winning a record 20 championships at Wimbledon, and being awarded the presidential medal of freedom in 2009, King’s empire can best be defined by her personal and professional network. 

“I’ve lived a long time. So that helps,” King says, with a laugh, when asked how she’s built this network. “But I really do love people. I always think in terms of ‘we’ instead of ‘me.’” She continues, “‘Me’ is no fun for me. Fun is getting people organized to make progress,” for her sport and others, including women’s hockey. 

Meghan Duggan, three-time hockey Olympian and eight-time women’s world hockey champion, recalls meeting King in 2017. “The U.S. women’s hockey team was going through our big gender equity battle against our governing body. We were in the thick of it,” she remembers. 

Despite being the top-ranked team in the world and having won three world championships, the U.S. women’s hockey team received significantly different treatment from the national governing body for the sport, USA Hockey. The women, for example, traveled by coach while the men flew business class; women players were forced to share hotel rooms while each man got his own room. 

So in 2017, Duggan and her U.S. national teammates boycotted the International Ice Hockey Federation world championship, in hopes of securing equal treatment—not even equal pay—compared to the U.S. men’s hockey team. King gave the players the encouragement they needed to stick to the boycott. 

“We were at a really tough stage, and I remember I picked up my phone one day, as one of the leaders of the group, and I had a text from this number. It said ‘We’re following you. We’re supporting you. We’re here if you need us. We’re proud of you—Billie Jean and Ilana.’ I showed the team, and I was like, ‘Guys, I think we’ve made it.’”

Duggan has served on the WSF’s board of directors for the past six years. “The fact that [King] has so much going on, but she’s still in tune, and in-the-know, is amazing,” she says. 

Among tennis players, King has been known to offer technical advice and coaching, as she’s done for Tunisian tennis star Ons Jabeur and Belgium’s Kim Clijsters. And women across the sports ecosystem say they are still using King’s 1972 playbook for breaking gender—and pay—boundaries. 

Olivia Pichardo, the first woman to play NCAA Division I baseball, says that King paved the way for her: “She played against a man and she beat him—and I’m a woman in a men’s sport.” Claressa Shields, two-time Olympic boxing champion and 13-time women’s boxing world champion, says that King has taught her that “sports has no gender.” 

“I’ve met [King] four times now,” says the undisputed middleweight champion, who recently became the first woman to be paid $1 million for a fight. “Every time, she’s known exactly who I am and given me advice for how I can make women’s boxing equal to men’s.” 

“Women’s boxing hasn’t gotten where it needs to be, but we’re moving the needle,” Shields continues. “[King’s example] gives a blueprint for what I need to do. And if I gotta get in the ring and fight a man to show them ‘Hey, pay us the same amount of money,’ Billie Jean has given me the strength to do that.” 

The business of Billie Jean

It’s not just King’s relationships that put her in the epicenter of women’s sports. She’s also built a mini business empire that’s helping to fuel the industry’s growth.

Today, King’s BJK Enterprises does strategic investing, consulting, and marketing for clients that include behemoths like Adidas, ESPN, and Microsoft. Its investment portfolio includes women’s sports teams, but also companies like Kinlo, a skincare line for melanated skin established by tennis star Naomi Osaka and First Women’s Bank, a commercial bank with a strategic focus on the women’s economy. Meanwhile, BJK Enterprises’ new Trailblazer Venture Studio, an accelerator program of sorts, gives startups a leg up in the industry, offering strategic advice and connections to investors. Among its first cohort are upstart volleyball league LOVB and women’s sports media company Togethxr, cofounded by Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Jessica Robertson, Sue Bird, and Simone Manuel. 

King’s entrepreneurial journey began somewhat tumultuously. In 1974, King and her ex-husband attorney, real estate broker, and sports promoter, Larry King launched womenSports magazine, the first magazine dedicated to women in sports. They raised $700,000, but the magazine lost $1 million in its first year. It was sold, then closed, and then reclaimed by the duo who oversaw its publication for 20 years. In 1998, Condé Nast purchased womenSports for under $5 million and folded the organization into Self magazine two years later. The pair also cofounded World TeamTennis, a mixed-gender professional tennis league which lost $12 million in its inaugural 1975 season. 

When King was outed in 1981, she faced even greater financial challenges. She estimates that she personally lost millions in endorsements and marketing deals, that her ex-husband lost $400,000, and that World TeamTennis lost about $150,000.

“A virtually completed $500,000 deal to bring out a Billie Jean King clothing line under the Wimbledon brand was canceled abruptly,” she writes in her memoir. “I also lost a $300,000 contract with Murjani Jeans, a $90,000 Japanese clothing contract, and $45,000 from Charleston Hosiery, whose chief executive called me a ‘slut’ in a letter when he fired me.”

Today, King’s business efforts aim to address many of the injustices she herself faced on and off the court. Earlier this year, she announced a partnership with EDGE Certification, which offers DEI training, assessment, and credentialing for workplaces. Aniela Unguresan, founder of EDGE Certification, says that King’s brand as someone who advocates for underrepresented groups is increasingly valuable: “Billie is this incarnation of the fact that the fight for equality, equity, and inclusion . . . demands to be taken further.” 

Just as Unguresan argues that leaders need to demonstrate the business case for investing in DEI efforts, King argues that women’s sports leaders need to call attention to the financial opportunity of investing in women’s sports in order to make progress. 

“I’ve waited my whole life for this to happen,” says King. “For people to—instead of just being nice to us, and caring about us—to truly want to invest in [women’s sports] because it’s good business, for people to see that they’re going to make money.” 

Whether it is a family deciding if they will dedicate funds to help their daughters play sports or a company deciding if they will hire women leaders, King wants people to see that their investment will pay off. 

“Sport is a microcosm of society. It reflects what’s going on in the rest of the world and in businesses. We know that if you have at least 30% of women on a board, that [margins] go up 6%. We know that 94% of women in the c-suites identify as an athlete,” says King. “That’s why I always want girls to go into sports because they learn how to be resilient and trust their bodies—we’re taught not to trust our bodies. All those things translate into being happier as a human being.”