Billie Jean King added an unlikely line to one of the most decorated résumés in sports on Monday, walking across the stage at the Shrine Auditorium to receive her Bachelor of Arts in history from California State University, Los Angeles. She is 82. Her enrollment dates back to 1961.
The 39-time Grand Slam champion and founder of the WTA joined roughly 6,000 fellow members of the Class of 2026, accented in hot pink glasses, royal blue sneakers, and a gold stole embroidered on one side with her initials and the letters G.O.A.T., on the other with a multicolored tennis racket.
President Berenecea Johnson Eanes handed her the diploma. King raised her right arm in triumph, the same gesture that punctuated countless wins at Wimbledon and Forest Hills decades ago, and later volleyed signed tennis balls into the lower bowl of the auditorium.
Unfinished business. King began her studies at what was then Los Angeles State College in 1961 and stepped away to pursue professional tennis full-time, a career that produced 12 Grand Slam singles titles, 16 in women’s doubles, and 11 in mixed doubles, alongside a record 20 Wimbledon championships across the three disciplines.
She also founded the WTA in 1973, defeated Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes that same year, and led the Original 9 in their 1970 breakaway that birthed women’s professional tennis. The degree, she said, was the one item still on the list.
“More than 60 years have passed before I returned to the classroom to complete my degree in history,” King told her fellow graduates. “Talk about delayed gratification, and I came back with a purpose. I had unfinished business, and it is important to me to finish what I started. I like completing things.
It’s like shaking hands at the net after a match.” She added that she had long corrected biographers who described her as a college graduate. “I said, ‘Don’t ever say graduated, I haven’t earned it yet.'”
On the syllabus. King’s coursework included material she helped author, with the WTA noting she spent the semester analyzing the LGBTQ+ and Title IX movements she helped architect.
She is the first member of her immediate family to graduate from college, a distinction shared with many in the Cal State LA cohort, which serves a predominantly Hispanic and Latino student body. A bronze statue of King already stands outside the campus physical education building.
She also took the opportunity to underline a point about access. “Being a student-athlete didn’t mean I had a scholarship,” she said. “Financial support wasn’t available to women in 1961, even though my friends Arthur Ashe and Stan Smith were both scholarship students on the men’s teams at UCLA and USC.” Title IX, the federal law requiring equal athletic opportunity in education, would not pass until 1972.
What’s next. Asked whether a master’s degree might be on the horizon, King gestured to the day’s news cycle. “I just turned on the news and there’s Shaq walking across at LSU getting his master’s,” she said. Her message to the rest of the Class of 2026, and to anyone watching, was simpler: “It’s never too late, whatever age you are, whatever your abilities are, go for it if you want it.”
