At 81, Billie Jean King is back, chasing a degree

Steve Lopez, Tribune News Service

Everyone reaches a point in life when it's OK to sink into the easy chair, prop up their feet and take a deep breath. Apparently, no one has told this to Billie Jean King. Since the time she was a child in Long Beach, raised by a firefighter and homemaker, King has been filling history books. She won more singles and doubles championships at Wimbledon than anyone before or since, and she was the No. 1 female tennis player in the world.

She's been carrying a flag, for decades, for gender equality in sports and society. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Fifty million people tuned in on their televisions one evening in 1973 and watched her whip Bobby Riggs in a tennis challenge billed as "The Battle of the Sexes."

But King's resume, which would stretch from one end of Wimbledon's Center Court to the other and keep going, is missing one thing, and that was bugging her. The omission came up last year in a conversation she was having with the staff of her New York-based consulting, investing and marketing company. (Yes, she still runs a business and a foundation promoting education, leadership and activism.)

"I hate not finishing," she recalls telling her colleagues. They asked what she meant. "I haven't finished college," she told them. "And, you know, I should finish." Yeah, what a slacker.

In the spring this year, at the age of 81, Billie Jean King went back to school, chasing not a trophy, or a cup, or a medal, but a degree. And there was no doubt in her mind about where she would enroll — at the very school where she began her college education in 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 LA. (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. The woman who keeps making history is now majoring in it. She's taken several courses this year and will soon begin the fall semester as a senior, on track to graduate in the spring with a bachelor's degree in history. "I'm having a great time," she told me Wednesday by video link from her home in New York. King isn't strolling campus with a backpack and hanging with fellow students at the library and food court. Her business ventures keep her on the road and mostly on the East Coast, so she takes her classes remotely, usually one- on-one with professors who helped her craft a flexible schedule. She's also earned course credit for her interaction with other CSULA students who have taken a somewhat circuitous route to a bachelor's degree — they're enrolled in Cal State LA's Prison Graduation Initiative while serving time.

After I interviewed King, she spoke remotely with 32 inmate/students at the maximum-security state prison in Lancaster and sent me an email when she was done. "They have made a commitment to improving their lives through education," she said, and "getting their degree will be life-changing for them." A few months ago, she did the same hookup with inmate/students at the California Institute for Women in Chino. "I wanted to know their stories," King told me, adding that she told them to work together toward shared goals. She also asked them what they miss most while in prison. The answers, she said, were quite candid. "One woman took total ownership. She said, '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 classes will include US and Latin American history. Her favourite spring semester class was historiography, a study of how historians research and interpret the past. "It's like the history of history," King said. I felt like I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask about her GPA. King said she hasn't gotten a report card yet, but says she's taking no shortcuts on assignments, and the homework load is not exactly light. "I just read like crazy all the time," said King, who has turned her paper chase into something of a cause. In social media posts extolling the value of continuing to engage, learn and grow — at any age — she sits next to a stack of assigned texts, including "Contested Histories in Public Space" and "Fighting Over the Founders."

She's also reading books on Title IX, the civil rights law that banned sexual discrimination in federally funded education programmes. On that subject, King is more teacher than student. She was an early and persistent advocate for Title IX, and testified before Congress. "The thing they like," she said of her professors, "is that I have lived some of these historical moments." King said she hasn't been shy about pointing out what she considers errors in the telling of history she was a part of.

"It drives me crazy." In that regard, and other obvious ways, King is not the prototypical Cal State LA student. "It's been 50 years of changing the world," communications studies department Chair David Olsen said of King's achievements. But in other ways, she's typical. I used to teach a class at CSULA, and most of my students were jugglers. They had jobs and families, and with so many other responsibilities and pursuits, they weren't in and out in four years. Some, like King, took a break but circled back. "Oh, I guess I am like them," King said. "It's never too late to return, and it's never too late to finish," Olsen said. "The coming back, to me, is what's so important and inspiring" — especially because finishing her education was an elective rather than a requirement.

"To be a lifelong learner — that's an important lesson," said Scott Wells, chair of the CSULA history department. "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 asked King, who's been at the forefront of so many social justice movements, what it's like to live through this moment in political and cultural history, in which many of the gains she fought for are under threat, and in which our heritage is depicted on government websites as white, covered wagon pioneers. "How about slavery?" King said. "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 ways. "I mean, we were fighting so hard ... for Roe vs. Wade, and we got it through," she said of the landmark Supreme Court decision on women's reproductive rights in 1973. "And now we're going backwards again." Her job in her 80s, King said, is not to lead the resistance, but to ask the next generation what it wants and to offer guidance and support.

"It's important to know history, because the more you know about history, the more you know about yourself," King said. "But more importantly, it helps you shape the future." I had one last question for King. The graduation ceremony is a really big deal at Cal State L.A., I told her. Many of the grads are first-generation college students, and the achievement is celebrated by cheering extended families.

Will you walk the stage in the spring in cap and gown? She smiled. "If I can," she said, "I will."