Everybody reaches a degree in life when it’s OK to sink into the simple chair, prop up their toes and take a deep breath.
Apparently, nobody has instructed this to Billie Jean King.
Because the time she was a baby in Lengthy Seashore, raised by a firefighter and homemaker, King has been filling historical past books.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Instances columnist since 2001. He has received greater than a dozen nationwide journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
She received extra singles and doubles championships at Wimbledon than anybody earlier than or since, and he or she was the No. 1 feminine tennis participant on the planet.
She’s been carrying a flag, for many years, for gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights in sports activities and society. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.
Fifty million folks tuned in on their televisions one night in 1973 and watched her whip Bobby Riggs in a tennis problem billed as “The Battle of the Sexes.”
Bobby Riggs poses for Billie Jean King. King received 12 Grand Slam singles titles, together with six at Wimbledon, however maybe her most well-known match got here in 1973 when she beat Riggs, then 55, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 within the “Battle of the Sexes.”
(Related Press)
However King’s resume, which might stretch from one finish of Wimbledon’s Middle Court docket to the opposite and preserve going, is lacking one factor, and that was bugging her. The omission got here up final 12 months in a dialog she was having with the employees of her New York-based consulting, investing and advertising firm. (Sure, she nonetheless runs a enterprise and a basis selling schooling, management and activism.)
“I hate not finishing,” she remembers telling her colleagues.
They requested what she meant.
“I haven’t finished college,” she instructed them. “And, you know, I should finish.”
Yeah, what a slacker.
Within the spring this 12 months, on the age of 81, Billie Jean King went again to highschool, chasing not a trophy, or a cup, or a medal, however a level.
And there was little question in her thoughts about the place she would enroll — on the very college the place she started her faculty schooling within the ‘60s before going pro. The school that has a statue of her near the courts where she used to smack tennis balls around.
Cal State L.A.
(Would anyone be surprised if she went out for the tennis team?)
Lots of people start college and then take a pause.
King’s lasted 60 years.
Billie Jean King speaks about sexual equality earlier than the Senate Training subcommittee in Washington on Nov. 9, 1973.
(Related Press)
The girl who retains making historical past is now majoring in it. She’s taken a number of programs this 12 months and can quickly start the autumn semester as a senior, on monitor to graduate within the spring with a bachelor’s diploma in historical past.
“I’m having a great time,” she instructed me Wednesday by video hyperlink from her residence in New York.
King isn’t strolling campus with a backpack and hanging with fellow college students on the library and meals courtroom. Her enterprise ventures preserve her on the highway and totally on the East Coast, so she takes her courses remotely, normally one- on-one with professors who helped her craft a versatile schedule.
She’s additionally earned course credit score for her interplay with different CSULA college students who’ve taken a considerably circuitous path to a bachelor’s diploma — they’re enrolled in Cal State L.A.’s Jail Commencement Initiative whereas serving time.
“They have made a commitment to improving their lives through education,” she stated, and “getting their degree will be life-changing for them.”
Just a few months in the past, she did the identical hookup with inmate/college students on the California Institute for Ladies in Chino. “I wanted to know their stories,” King instructed me, including that she instructed them to work collectively towards shared objectives.
She additionally requested them what they miss most whereas in jail. The solutions, she stated, had been fairly candid.
Billie Jean King implores Cal State L.A.’s student-athletes to “make this world a better place” throughout her speech on the unveiling of her bronze statue on campus.
(J. Emilio Flores / Cal State L.A.)
“One girl took whole possession. She stated, ‘I miss my children. I miss being free…. I even miss the husband that I killed.”
Yes, that does sound pretty candid.
King’s fall courses will embody U.S. and Latin American historical past. Her favourite spring semester class was historiography, a research of how historians analysis and interpret the previous.
“It’s like the history of history,” King stated.
I felt like I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask about her GPA.
King stated she hasn’t gotten a report card but, however says she’s taking no shortcuts on assignments, and the homework load is just not precisely mild.
“I just read like crazy all the time,” stated King, who has turned her paper chase into one thing of a trigger. In social media posts extolling the worth of continuous to interact, be taught and develop — at any age — she sits subsequent to a stack of assigned texts, together with “Contested Histories in Public Space” and “Fighting Over the Founders.”
Billie Jean King speaks at a Ladies’s Historical past Month occasion honoring girls athletes in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX on March 9, 2022, on Capitol Hill.
(Jacquelyn Martin / Related Press)
She’s additionally studying books on Title IX, the civil rights regulation that banned sexual discrimination in federally funded education schemes. On that topic, King is extra trainer than scholar. She was an early and protracted advocate for Title IX, and testified earlier than Congress.
“The thing they like,” she stated of her professors, “is that I have lived some of these historical moments.”
King stated she hasn’t been shy about stating what she considers errors within the telling of historical past she was part of.
“It drives me crazy.”
In that regard, and different apparent methods, King is just not the prototypical Cal State L.A. scholar. “It’s been 50 years of changing the world,” communications research division Chair David Olsen stated of King’s achievements.
However in different methods, she’s typical.
I used to show a category at CSULA, and most of my college students had been jugglers. They’d jobs and households, and with so many different tasks and pursuits, they weren’t out and in in 4 years. Some, like King, took a break however circled again.
“Oh, I guess I am like them,” King stated.
“It’s never too late to return, and it’s never too late to finish,” Olsen stated. “The coming back, to me, is what’s so important and inspiring” — particularly as a result of ending her schooling was an elective relatively than a requirement.
“To be a lifelong learner — that’s an important lesson,” stated Scott Wells, chair of the CSULA historical past division. “She doesn’t need to do this for career reasons or economic reasons. It’s a reminder that higher education is not merely getting technical skills or a piece of paper for a job opportunity…. When she posted on social media, ‘Here are the books I’m reading,’ it’s a way of saying that books are important and people should care about history.”
I requested King, who’s been on the forefront of so many social justice actions, what it’s prefer to stay by means of this second in political and cultural historical past, by which lots of the positive factors she fought for are underneath menace, and by which our heritage is depicted on authorities web sites as white, coated wagon pioneers.
“How about slavery?” King stated. “Look at athletes who tried to travel. Look at Jackie Robinson. Look at Althea Gibson. “I learned white history as a kid, and then I realized … the people who were here first were our Indigenous people. “
History repeats itself, King said, and “it’s repeating itself again now” in disconcerting methods.
“I mean, we were fighting so hard … for Roe vs. Wade, and we got it through,” she stated of the landmark Supreme Court docket resolution on girls’s reproductive rights in 1973. “And now we’re going backwards again.”
Her job in her 80s, King stated, is to not lead the resistance, however to ask the following technology what it needs and to supply steering and help.
“It’s important to know history, because the more you know about history, the more you know about yourself,” King stated. “But more importantly, it helps you shape the future.”
I had one final query for King. The commencement ceremony is a very huge deal at Cal State L.A., I instructed her. Most of the grads are first-generation faculty college students, and the achievement is widely known by cheering prolonged households.
Will you stroll the stage within the spring in cap and robe?
She smiled.
“If I can,” she stated, “I will.”
