Billie Jean King has spent decades making history. On Monday, the 82-year-old will add a college degree to the list.
The International Tennis Hall of Famer is set to graduate from Cal State LA with a bachelor’s degree in history, about six decades after leaving school to pursue a professional tennis career.
“It’s like a match. You’re shaking hands at net, you know that feeling that it’s done. You did your best win or lose,” King told USA TODAY’s Studio IX on Wednesday. “I’d like to finish. … That’s where I started. I should finish there.”
King attended Cal State LA from 1961 through 1964 and won her first Wimbledon doubles title while she was a student there. She later left to take tennis to another level.
Thirty-nine major championships and a Presidential Medal of Freedom later, King said the degree may be one of her most meaningful achievements.
“This is right up there,” King said of the accomplishment. “I’m the first one in my immediate family (to graduate college), which is important to me.”
King said she had been thinking about returning to college for some time and believed she needed two more years to complete the degree. After BJK Enterprises managing director Marjorie Gantman checked her transcripts, King learned she was only one year away.
“I was just talking out loud and (Gantman) goes, ‘Well, let me check.’ So she checks and she goes, ‘Billie, you have three years (completed). I went, ‘Three years? Oh, I’m going back for sure,'” King recalled.
As she completed remote courses, King said frequent travel for events and appearances turned airplanes into classrooms. She said the experience was very different from her time on campus in the 1960s, before smartphones and laptops existed.
King took classes including LGBT Political History in United States, Historiography, the History of Latin American Women and Gender, and Historical Research & Writing. She said she also wrote an essay on Title IX.
She said her parents had always preached education, and that she did not fully grasp the weight of her decision to return until people began sharing stories and messages about how it motivated them.
“Graduating, it’s just thrilling. Really. I’m thrilled because of the way the other people have responded to this,” King said. “I thought, OK, I’m going to get my degree, but I had no idea people would be so connected and feeling this … in every age group. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, now I’m excited. Because they are.”
King said history has long interested her, and that understanding the past helped shape her leadership.
“Leaders don’t choose followers. Followers choose leaders. They just do. And they pushed me and pushed me to lead,” King said. “So finally I embraced it. But the reason I was able to lead is because I knew the history of our sport.
“And that made a huge difference. … That’s what helps you envision things differently.”
King said one of her favourite parts of her final year was meeting incarcerated students enrolled in Cal State LA’s Prison Graduation Initiative. She said she earned credits for taking part and later gave a commencement speech for the program’s first graduating class at the California Institution for Women in October.
“I talked to a women’s prison and I talked to two men’s (prisons)… That changed my life. I mean, all these things happened that I never would’ve been able to do if I’d gone back to school,” King said.
King is also set to give a commencement speech at her graduation on Monday, May 18. She said her family will be on her mind during the ceremony.
“That’s my one regret. They’re not alive, but boy would they be happy,” King said. “My parents, oh my God, would be over the moon because they’re big on education. They told (my brother) Randy we have to get our education.”
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