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

LOS ANGELES

- 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. I 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.