# What is Billie Jean King's greatest achievement?

> Trophies on one side, a union and a lawsuit on the other. The hardest part is deciding whether the tennis or the paperwork mattered more.

*By YPB Team · Published August 23, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-billie-jean-kings-greatest-achievement*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Beating Bobby Riggs** — score 1000/1000
   The 1973 Battle of the Sexes, won in straight sets in front of about 50 million American viewers.
2. **Congressional Gold Medal** — score 808/1000
   Awarded in 2024, an honour Congress has given fewer than 200 times in its history.
3. **Founding the WTA** — score 636/1000
   In 1973 she and eight other players created the women's tour that still runs the sport.
4. **Thirty-nine majors in total** — score 621/1000
   Twelve in singles, sixteen in women's doubles and eleven in mixed, across nine seasons of peak form.
5. **Twenty Wimbledon titles** — score 538/1000
   Six singles, ten doubles and four mixed, a Wimbledon record she shares with Martina Navratilova.
6. **Presidential Medal of Freedom** — score 538/1000
   Awarded in 2009, the first female athlete to receive the country's highest civilian honour.
7. **The $1 contracts** — score 323/1000
   The 1970 Houston boycott, signed for a dollar each, that began the women's professional circuit.
8. **Carrying on after 1981** — score 323/1000
   Outed by a lawsuit, she lost every endorsement inside a day and kept playing and organising anyway.
9. **The tennis center's name** — score 323/1000
   The USTA's home in Flushing Meadows was named after her in 2006, the first major sports venue named for a woman.
10. **Twelve singles majors** — score 179/1000
   A dozen Grand Slam singles titles between 1966 and 1975, taken from every surface then in use.
11. **Equal prize money in 1973** — score 179/1000
   Her campaign made the US Open the first major to pay its men's and women's champions the same.

Tags: usa, women, tennis, billie jean king