American tennis player and activist Billie Jean King was BOTD in 1943. Born Billie Jean Moffitt in Long Beach California, she was a star athlete as a child, switching from baseball to tennis at 11 as her parents considered it a more “ladylike” sport. She began playing competitively in 1959, making her Grand Slam debut at the US Championships, and won the women’s doubles title at Wimbledon in 1961. After struggling to find an athletic scholarship, she received private sponsorship to train in Australia. She went on to dominate women’s tennis through the 1960s and 1970s, winning all four Grand Slam singles tournaments, notably at Wimbledon where she won six times. In 1973, she became world famous for challenging Bobby Riggs to an exhibition match, after Riggs boasted that women were inferior athletes to men. King won the game in three straight sets. The match, known as Battle of the Sexes, attracted huge publicity and a worldwide television audience of 90 million people, becoming a key event in 1970s feminism and significantly boosting the profile of women’s sport. A long-time advocate for pay equality, King persuaded cigarette company Virginia Slims to sponsor women’s tennis. After winning the 1972 US Open, she announced she would not compete again until male and female players were paid equally. The following year, the US Open became the first major tournament to do so. She continued to play into the 1980s, battling persistent knee injuries, before retiring in 1983. King was married to Larry King in 1965, but realised she was attracted to women. In 1971, she began a relationship with her secretary Marilyn Barnett, who sued her in 1981 for palimony. A media storm erupted, and King acknowledged the relationship, subsequently losing millions of dollars in endorsements. In 1987, she formed a relationship with her doubles partner Ilana Kloss, becoming life partners, and marrying in 2018. Now hailed as a heroine of the LGBTQ community, she was portrayed by Holly Hunter in 2001 TV film When Billie Beat Bobby and by Emma Stone in the 2017 biopic Battle of the Sexes.