The shoes King had to fight to wear at the 1973 Battle of the Sexes are back as a lifestyle sneaker, timed to this year’s U.S. Open.
Back in 1973, Billie Jean King had to argue just to wear color on court. Adidas is now selling that bit of stubbornness for $110 a pair.
When King played Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes that September, around 90 million people worldwide watched her win. Riggs showed up in a “Sugar Daddy” jacket. King wore a mint dress by Ted Tinling, a blue wristband, and blue suede Adidas shoes, because she wanted color on a court where everyone else wore white with blue stripes. She later told Hypebae the powers that be didn’t want her to, and she told them no. Riggs, afterward, admitted he’d underestimated her.
With this year’s U.S. Open on, Adidas has turned that shoe into a lifestyle sneaker for the first time. The Billie Jean King Shoe goes for $110 and tucks the history into the details: King’s image and signature on the tongue, the match’s set scores on the heel, in blue or off-white. An Adidas spokesperson says the idea was to hold onto the look and feel of the original Blue Suede Shoe while reshaping it into something that sits comfortably next to today’s lifestyle footwear.
For King, the shoe was never really about one afternoon of tennis. In a statement, she said the shoes remind her of how far things have come and how much is still left to do, and that she hopes bringing them back pushes the next generation to keep fighting for equality and to speak up for change. She gave her original pair to the New-York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History in 2016.
There’s genuine product history here too. Adidas first put out the Blue Suede Shoe as a performance tennis shoe in the 1970s, its first colored velour tennis shoe on the market. The brand has come back to the colorway since, using it for King’s Here to Create Change campaign for young women in sport. In 2018 it released the limited-edition blue-and-white AM4BJK and ran a BJK Your Shoes activation at the U.S. Open, spray-painting people’s sneakers blue no matter what brand they wore.
Bringing the shoe back for a bigger audience lets Adidas pull off two things at once: nod to its own archive and pass King’s message to people who weren’t around for the match. The sell is that you’re not just buying a sneaker. You’re buying a piece of the point King proved on the court.
