Billie Jean King Quotes about Sports

I have often been asked whether I am a women or an athlete. The question is absurd. Men are not asked that. I am an athlete. I am a women.

Sports teaches you character, it teaches you to play by the rules, it teaches you to know what it feels like to win and lose-it teaches you about life.

Champions keep playing until they get it right.

Ever since that day when I was 11 years old, and I wasn't allowed in a photo because I wasn't wearing a tennis skirt, I knew that I wanted to change the sport.

Natural talent only determines the limits of your athletic potential. It's dedication and a willingness to discipline your life that makes you great.

In the seventies we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes. We had to make it okay for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports.

A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.

Be bold. If you're going to make an error, make a doozy, and don't be afraid to hit the ball.

I try to perfect my strong points and make my weaknesses adequate.

I would just never out anybody. I think everyone has to find it in their own way and their own time.

Women get the attention when we get into the men's arena, and that's sad.

In 1973, a woman could not get a credit card without her husband or father or a male signing off on it.

I've never cared that much for cementing my place in history. Sports is so transitory, so ephemeral. It just seems like so much nonsense comparing me to Helen Wills Moody or Suzanne Lenglen or anybody else from some other time. One lesson you learn from sports is that life goes on without you.

When they take surveys of women in business, of the Fortune 500, the successful women, 80% of them, say they were in sports as a young woman.

Women's sports is still in its infancy. The beginning of women's sports in the United States started in 1972, with the passage of Title 9 for girls to finally get athletic scholarships.

Tennis is a perfect combination of violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquillity.

It is very hard to be a female leader. While it is assumed that any man, no matter how tough, has a soft side... and female leader is assumed to be one-dimensional.

I didn't really care if I had a coach that much, me personally, because I was brought up to think for myself.

I like entrepreneurial people; I like people who take risks.

Men still get a lot more opportunity. It is still a big part of the old boy network... They have more companies they can get money from.

I wanted to use sports for social change.

A girl didn't get an athletic scholarship until the fall of 1972 for the very first time.

In 1973, women got 59 cents on the dollar; now we are getting 74 cents on the dollar. In the area of finance and business, we are at 68 cents on the dollar.

I will tell you King's First Law of Recognition: You never get it when you want it, and then when it comes, you get too much.

I always liked co-ed events best so we have two men and two women on each team.