A half a century after founding the Women’s Tennis Association, which created the first worldwide tennis tour for women, Billie Jean King is still on the proverbial court—and rink. When the six-team Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) launched its inaugural season on January 1 this year, with a game between New York and Toronto in Toronto’s Mattamy Athletic Centre, the tennis legend and advocate for women’s sports stepped to center ice to drop the first puck.
The puck drop may have been ceremonial, but King’s participation in the PWHL has been anything but. The league was formed in June 2023, after a group of investors bought out the struggling Premier Hockey Federation to create a North American pro league worthy of the world’s best players. King advised athletes throughout the formation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players Association in 2019, which advocated for the creation of the new league. And she helped secure a commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars from Mark Walters, owner of the LA Dodgers (of which King is a minority owner) to launch the league. Today, King serves on the PWHL’s advisory board.
Though King retired from professional competition four decades ago, she remains active in the business of women’s sports—especially over the past few years, as interest and investment has skyrocketed. Through her Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF), which champions equality in sport, and her BJK Enterprises investment arm, King has touched just about every aspect of the growing women’s sports ecosystem. The WSF sponsors research on the benefits of women’s sports, advocates for policies such as Title IX, and funds local sports programming. It also distributes travel and training funds to promising young athletes, such as now-famed figure skater Michelle Kwan. BJK Enterprises, meanwhile, has invested in teams like the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks and the NWSL’s Angel City FC and backed media company Just Women’s Sports and tech startup Sports Data Labs, which uses body-worn sensors to analyze athletic performance. BJK Enterprises also consults for a variety of other companies on opportunities in women’s sports.
In the process, King has built an incomparable personal and professional network of women’s sports business leaders, sponsors, and athletes. When asked about her secret to success, King tells me that between herself and her wife, business partner, and former professional tennis player Ilana Kloss, they “can get to anybody in the world, just about, with a couple of phone calls.”
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