Jamie Lee Curtis posted a tribute to Billie Jean King on Instagram this week, and she kept it brief. The post read “G🎾AT @billiejeanking” – a tennis ball emoji in place of the letter O, spelling out GOAT. Greatest of All Time.
Curtis let the designation stand on its own.
It can sound like hype, or it can sound like obvious fact. It depends on how much you know about the history. In King’s case, it’s pretty clearly the latter.
King won 39 Grand Slam titles in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles competition across her career. She took 12 Grand Slam singles titles, including six at Wimbledon. She was ranked the world’s top women’s player five times during the 1960s and 70s. She’s also the main reason women’s prize money at the U.S. Open equals the men’s. She pushed for parity. In 1973, the tournament made it policy.
That same year, King played arguably the most famous tennis match ever held. Bobby Riggs was a former world No. 1. He had spent months claiming publicly that women’s tennis couldn’t compete with men’s. He backed it up with public challenges and eventually got King on the court at the Houston Astrodome. More than 30,000 people showed up. An estimated 90 million watched on television worldwide. King won in straight sets.
The “Battle of the Sexes” has been written about, filmed, and argued over for decades. By now it’s part of American sports mythology. Riggs came in loud. King came in prepared.
Her impact off the court might be larger than the trophies suggest. She founded the Women’s Tennis Association in 1973 and the Women’s Sports Foundation a year later. She was among the first high-profile professional athletes to come out publicly as gay. The women’s international team tennis competition – previously known as the Fed Cup – was renamed the Billie Jean King Cup in 2020. That honor reflected everything she had built. In 2009, Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
King is 82 now and still shows up to the big events.
Curtis is best known for the Halloween franchise, True Lies, and her Academy Award win for Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2023. She’s been vocal about women’s rights and LGBTQ+ causes for years. Her support for King isn’t a surprise. It fits her long public record.
There’s no mystery to this one. Curtis knows who built women’s sports. She said so in a few characters. King took women’s tennis from an afterthought to a profession with real standing and visibility. Curtis pointed at that history with a single emoji swap. The record does the rest.
