📍Long Beach, CA, USA
1943 – 1961“Billie Jean Moffitt was born in San Francisco in November 1943 and grew up in Long Beach, California, a busy port city of neat suburban streets and public parks south of Los Angeles. Her father, Bill, was a firefighter who had once had a tryout for a professional basketball team, and her mother, Betty, had been a fine swimmer; her younger brother, Randy, became a major league baseball pitcher. The family was Methodist, sporty and supportive. She was a natural athlete who played basketball and then softball; at ten she was shortstop on a team of fourteen-year-olds that won the city championship. Her parents suggested she try a more ladylike sport, and a friend introduced her to tennis. When she found that free lessons were offered at the public courts in Houghton Park, she saved eight dollars from odd jobs to buy her first racket, and the coach there, Clyde Walker, became her first mentor. After her first lesson she told her mother she would be number one in the world. At eleven, playing at the elite Los Angeles Tennis Club, she was kept out of a group photograph because she wore the tennis shorts her mother had made instead of a dress, and she noticed that everyone there wore white and was white, and wondered where everyone else was. She went on to win 39 Grand Slam titles, including twenty at Wimbledon, and in 1973 she beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes. She founded the Women's Tennis Association and spent her life fighting for equality. Long Beach's main public library now bears her name.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today