She had already fought for and won equal prize money at the US Open that same year, a structural change that altered what the sport communicated about the value of women's athletic excellence. She founded the Women's Tennis Association in 1973, giving professional women's tennis an institutional foundation it had never had. She co-founded the Women's Sports Foundation in 1974, building an advocacy organization that would outlast any individual career. She won 39 Grand Slam titles across singles, doubles, and mixed doubles, 12 of them in singles, and held the world number one ranking across a playing career that spanned three decades. Each of those achievements would be sufficient on its own. She produced all of them in the same career, often simultaneously, because she understood that winning matches and building institutions were the same project conducted on different surfaces.

In 1981 she was outed in a palimony lawsuit and lost her endorsements almost immediately. She continued. She kept advocating, kept building, and eventually came out fully on her own terms, becoming one of the most prominent LGBTQ athletes in the history of American sports at a time when that visibility carried real cost. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. Life magazine named her one of the 100 most important Americans of the twentieth century. Those recognitions documented what the tennis record alone could not contain: a person who used every platform the sport gave her to change something larger than the sport. The match in Houston was one afternoon. The institutions she built are still standing.