Billie Jean King: ‘I Have My Life Back’

For the last two years, Billie Jean King has had a second birthday, of sorts, to celebrate.

The former tennis pro and Wimbledon champion marks the day she underwent double knee replacement surgery and reclaimed her life. “I can’t tell you what it’s done for me,” King said. “I have my life back in a lot of different ways. It’s an unbelievable feeling.”

For most of her life, King suffered from a different kind of “unbelievable feeling”—the excruciating pain of deteriorating knee joints. She underwent her first knee repair surgery at 23, the year she first won the Wimbledon championship. Over the course of her career—in which she won 12 Grand Slam singles titles, 16 Grand Slam women’s doubles titles and 11 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles as well as defeating former Wimbledon men’s singles champion Bobby Riggs for $100,000 in 1973—King had five additional procedures performed on her knees; none worked. The pain steadily grew worse.

King’s decrepit knees ultimately forced her from the game she loved and ruled for a dozen or so years. “That put a knife through my heart,” she recalled last week at this year’s American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif.

There were other heartbreaking losses through the decades as well—her gradual inability to stroll through Central Park in Manhattan, or to walk on the treadmill at her gym, or even to stand for prolonged periods of time. Perhaps none was worse though, then the blow to her own self-confidence and emotional well-being. King got to the point where she began to dream about performing simple everyday tasks, like simply getting out of a chair.

“I live in New York, and as you know in New York we walk a lot,” King told a standing room only crowd at the AAOS booth for Smith & Nephew plc. King was at the booth to share her experience receiving the company’s Legion knee replacement (with Verilast technology), a device shown through testing to last 30 years.

“It got to the point where I could only walk a block, then when I would go to the gym, I couldn’t use the treadmill,” she continued. “I started to dream about things like walking through Central Park, playing tennis again and even getting out of a chair. The emotional pain of not being physically active was just as bad as the physical pain.”

For years though, King tolerated the physical pain because she didn’t want to undergo another unsuccessful surgery. “I kept putting it off. I didn’t think it [the replacements] would last,” she told Orthopedic Design & Technology.

Then King was referred to a surgeon that used Smith & Nephew’s Legion knees on his patients. Admittedly, King knew nothing about the implant before undergoing the procedure on Feb. 10, 2010—in a move typical of her personality, the tennis legend underwent the surgery and then conducted exhaustive research on the product. She even visited Smith & Nephew workers that make the implant. “I wanted them to understand what they do and how they help people,” she said.

King did not discuss much of the technical data associated with the Legion knee, preferring instead to focus on the human side of her story. But data from the company show that the Legion is made with Oxinium oxidized Zirconium, combination of lightweight, hypoallergenic metal and a special “highly cross-linked” plastic that is more resistant to common implant wear.

The Legion Cruciate Retaining knee made with Verilast technology was subjected to the equivalent of 45 million steps, or about 30 years of an active adult’s life under typical conditions. After 5 million steps, according to lab tests, the Legion knee with Verilast technology reduced wear by 98 percent compared with a knee made from traditional implant materials. At the 45 million mark, the Legion knee reduced 81percent of the wear when compared with the 5-million-cycle knee implant made from traditional materials.

King knew the surgery would be painful and require intense rehabilitation. And while she admitted there were days where she thought “what in the world did I just do?” King realized she would never fulfill her dream of playing tennis again (for fun) without working hard to rehabilitate her broken knee joints.

Eventually, King’s hard work paid off. Eight months after her surgery, she was back on the tennis courts, hitting the ball again (“not great,” she quipped, but well enough to restore her confidence). Her ultimate goal is being able to hit the tennis ball once each day like she did when she was competing. “If I could hit one shot like I did as a professional—just once every day— then I have my life back and that is what is major for me.”

To read more about Billie Jean King and her Legion knee implants, click here.