Larry King | |
---|---|
Born | Dayton, Ohio, U.S. | January 30, 1945
Occupation | Attorney from University of California/Sports Promoter |
Known for | Founder of World Team Tennis |
Spouses | |
Children | 2 |
Larry William King (born January 30, 1945) is an attorney, pilot, real estate broker, American sports promoter, and the ex-husband of former World No. 1 professional tennis player Billie Jean King.
King was born in Dayton, Ohio, and raised in Eagle Rock, California. He met Billie Jean Moffitt at California State University, Los Angeles in 1963, when he played on one of the school’s best men's tennis teams, coached by Scotty Deeds. He married Billie Jean on September 17, 1965 in Long Beach, California. [1]
In 1971, King conceived the idea of a professional tennis tour for women and helped organize a group of nine (the Original Nine) top women players: Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals, Judy Dalton, Julie Heldman, Kerry Melville, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Nancy Richey, and Valerie Ziegenfuss. He obtained the backing of Gladys Heldman of World Tennis Magazine and Joe Cullman, CEO of Philip Morris, and the Virginia Slims pro circuit was started. In 1973, along with Dennis Murphy, Jordan Kaiser and Fred Barman, King developed the concept of World Team Tennis, and started the league the following year. [2] In 1974, King and Billie Jean co-founded and began publishing WomenSports magazine.
In 1976, King invented a smokeless ashtray, called The Clean Air King. In 1984, Billie Jean became the major owner of World Team Tennis.
King and Dennis Murphy also founded Roller Hockey International, a professional hockey league that operated from 1993 to 1999. [3] Murphy had also been instrumental in the founding of the American Basketball Association and the World Hockey Association.
King, a director and master duplicate bridge player, founded the Money Bridge tour. [4] He also founded Bridge University to promote bridge throughout the country.
King had a big impact on the rise of his wife's fame. Billie Jean was not always a feminist icon; in the 60s he had helped her start to think about the lack of scholarships for sports for women. He never tried to tear down Billie Jean's aspirations of becoming a tennis superstar and promoted her success continuously. [5]
In 1971, Billie Jean had an abortion that was made public in a Ms. magazine article. [6] Larry had revealed Billie Jean's abortion without consulting her. [6]
In 1973, Billie Jean defeated Bobby Riggs in a well-publicized match. In 2017, the film Battle of the Sexes was released. In the film, King was shown as becoming aware, that year, of Billie Jean's infidelity with another woman, and decided to ignore it; King said that was false. [7]
Billie Jean was sexually involved with her former secretary, Marilyn Barnett, during Larry and Billie Jean's marriage. In 1981, Billie Jean admitted publicly that the relationship had taken place, in response to a lawsuit by Barnett that asked for palimony. [8] King and Billie Jean divorced in 1987. [9]
King lives in Grass Valley, California, with his wife, Nancy, a cardiologist technician and pilot, and two children, Sky and Katie. According to the movie Battle of the Sexes, Billie Jean King and her partner Ilana Kloss are godparents to the Kings' children.
The Women's Tennis Association (WTA) is the principal organizing body of women's professional tennis. It governs the WTA Tour, which is the worldwide professional tennis tour for women, and was founded to create a better future for women's tennis. The WTA's corporate headquarters is in St. Petersburg, Florida, with its European headquarters in London and its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Beijing.
Billie Jean King, also known as BJK, is an American former world No. 1 tennis player. King won 39 Grand Slam titles: 12 in singles, 16 in women's doubles, and 11 in mixed doubles. King was a member of the victorious United States team in seven Federation Cups and nine Wightman Cups. For three years, she was the U.S. captain in the Federation Cup.
World TeamTennis (WTT) was a mixed-gender professional tennis league played with a team format in the United States, which was founded in 1973.
Rosemary "Rosie" Casals is an American former professional tennis player. During a tennis career that spanned more than two decades, she won more than 90 titles and was crucial to many of the changes in women's tennis during the 1960s and 1970s.
Randall James "Randy" Moffitt is an American athlete. He was a baseball pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, Houston Astros and Toronto Blue Jays. Born in Long Beach, California, he is the younger brother of tennis star Billie Jean Moffitt King, and alumnus of Long Beach Polytechnic High School and California State University, Long Beach.
Julie Heldman is an American tennis player who won 22 singles titles. In 1968 and 1969, she was ranked No. 2 in the U.S. She was Canadian National 18 and Under Singles Champion at age 12, U.S. Champion in Girls' 15 Singles and Girls' 18 Singles, Italian Open Singles Champion, Canadian Singles and Doubles Champion, and U.S. Clay Court Doubles Champion. She won three medals at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, and three gold medals at the 1969 Maccabiah Games.
Ilana Sheryl Kloss is a South African former professional tennis player, tennis coach, and administrator. She was the World's No. 1 ranked doubles player in 1976, and World No. 19 in singles in 1979. She won the Wimbledon juniors singles title in 1972, the US Open juniors singles title in 1974, and the US Open Doubles and French Open Mixed Doubles titles in 1976. She won three gold medals at the 1973 Maccabiah Games in Israel. After her playing career, Kloss was the commissioner of World TeamTennis from 2001–2021.
"Philadelphia Freedom" is a song by English musician Elton John and songwriter Bernie Taupin. It was released as a single on 28 February 1975, credited to the Elton John Band. The song was the fourth of John's six number-one singles in the US during the early and mid-1970s, which saw his recordings dominating the charts. In Canada it was his eighth single to hit the top of the RPM national singles chart.
In tennis, "Battle of the Sexes" describes various exhibition matches played between a man and a woman, or a doubles match between two men and two women in one case. The term is most famously used for an internationally televised match in 1973 held at the Houston Astrodome between 55-year-old Bobby Riggs and 29-year-old Billie Jean King, which King won in three sets. The match was viewed by an estimated fifty million people in the United States and ninety million worldwide. King's win is considered a milestone in public acceptance of women's tennis.
Jim Jorgensen is a serial entrepreneur. He has started over 25 enterprises since getting his MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business at the age of 24. Jorgensen's industry selection for these new enterprises has been wide, running from retail to manufacturing, from Internet to mail order, and from oil exploration to insurance. Some of the entities remained small, while two of them reached market caps in excess of $1 billion.
womenSports magazine was the first magazine dedicated to women in sports. It was launched in close conjunction with Billie Jean King's Women's Sports Foundation and each issue of the magazine contained a two-page article written by the executive director of the Foundation. It was started soon after Billie Jean's win at the Battle of the Sexes.
Gladys Medalie Heldman was an American tennis player, manager and magazine publisher. She was the founder of World Tennis magazine. As a manager, she supported and represented Billie Jean King and eight other female tennis players: Rosie Casals, Judy Dalton, Julie Heldman, Kerry Melville, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Nancy Richey, and Valerie Ziegenfuss. They were called the Houston Nine and formed the Virginia Slims Tour in the early 1970s. She is a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame and the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
Leonard Bloom is a former sports and entertainment owner and real estate developer in California.
The Virginia Slims Circuit was a tennis tour consisting of a group of originally nine female professional players. Formed in 1970, the Virginia Slims Circuit eventually became the basis for the later WTA Tour. The players, dubbed the Original 9, rebelled against the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) because of the wide inequality between the amount of prize money paid to male tennis players and to female tennis players.
Valerie Jean Bradshaw is an American former female professional tennis player. She started as an amateur player at the beginning of the 1970s, then turned professional.
The 1970 Houston Women's Invitation was a women's only tennis tournament. The tournament was the first women only tournament and was created by Gladys Heldman and held at the Houston Racquet Club.
Dennis Arthur Murphy was an American sports entrepreneur who helped co-found the American Basketball Association (1967–1976), the World Hockey Association (1972–1979), the original World Team Tennis (1973–1978) with Larry King, Roller Hockey International (1992–1999), and several other trend-setting amateur and professional sports concepts and events. Each of his innovations exhibited ground-breaking marketing and promotional tactics, new rules, and a style of play that forced the evolution of the entrenched incumbent. Among the many visionary rules and promotional concepts introduced by Murphy include the 3-point shot (ABA), the Slam-Dunk Contest (ABA), team cheerleaders (ABA), the first $1 million contract (WHA), and he paved the path for the ever-growing wave of European and Russian hockey players that now play in North America.
The homosexual sports community in the United States has one of the highest levels of acceptance and support in the world and is rapidly growing as of 2020. General public opinion and jurisprudence regarding homosexuality in the United States has become significantly more accepting since the late 1980s; for example, by the early 2020s, an overwhelming majority of Americans approved of the legality of same-sex marriages.
Battle of the Sexes is a 2017 sports comedy-drama film directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton and written by Simon Beaufoy. The plot is loosely based on the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The film stars Emma Stone and Steve Carell as King and Riggs, leading an ensemble cast including Andrea Riseborough, Elisabeth Shue, Austin Stowell, Bill Pullman, Natalie Morales, Eric Christian Olsen, and Sarah Silverman in supporting roles. The film marks the second collaboration between Carell and Stone after Crazy, Stupid, Love and the second collaboration between Riseborough and Stone after Birdman.
The 1974 Barnett Bank Tennis Classic was a women's tennis tournament played on outdoor clay courts at the Orlando Racquet Club in Orlando, Florida in the United States. It was part of the USLTA Women's Circuit of the 1974 WTA Tour. It was the inaugural edition of the tournament and was held from September 22 through September 26, 1974. Unseeded 17-year old Martina Navratilova won the singles title after reaching her first WTA final and, as she was still an amateur, she had to hand over her $10,000 first-prize money to the Czechoslovakian tennis federation.