When I clicked on the link in an email last week, an old black-and-white photo of nine women in a very-’70s Houston living room popped onto my screen.

Eight of them were tennis players, all surrounding a woman in sunglasses. All of them were holding up $1 bills and had million-dollar smiles.

My eyes went to Billie Jean King and those oversized glasses she always wore back then. It took a cutline to fill in the blanks on the other names and a headline from the old Houston Post to remind me of a moment 50 years ago that ignited not only a change in women’s professional tennis, but a jumpstarted a decade of change for women in sports, period.

That it happened in Houston, well, it’s one of those stories only some remember, let alone tell.

I admit I didn’t give it much more than a passing glance back in the fall of 1970. I was a high school senior thinking about the upcoming Lee-Lamar football game and Texas football. The Longhorns were coming off that national championship season and, in less than a year, I would be headed to Austin as a biology/pre-med major.

But now? As I read through the 1970 story, I saw the moment very differently.

Yes, the Original Nine as they’re known, changed women’s tennis forever that night in Gladys Heldman’s house. Tired of playing in the shadow of men’s tennis and also tired of playing for infinitely smaller purses, the Nine defied the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association and signed a contract for $1 each to play in what would be the inaugural Virginia Slims tournament at the Houston Racquet Club.

The decision was triggered by the Pacific Southwest Championship, which was offering a total purse of $12,500 to the men and only $1,500 to the women. In addition, the USLTA also refused to create a women’s tour.

Heldman, a former player who founded World Tennis magazine and had just moved to Houston, was, like the Nine, ready for the fight. And King, of course, was the vocal leader who pulled everyone together. She was already the sport’s superstar and, along with her husband, had pushing hard for change.

At the time, the women’s liberation movement was making headlines, irritating the status quo and finding traction in the midst of opposition to the Vietnam War and so many other causes.  And when Heldman partnered with Virginia Slims for the event and eventual tour, the Slims advertising slogan — “You’ve come a long way, baby” — dovetailed into the movement. But King said in a September 15, 1970 story in the Houston Post, their decision had nothing to do with that.

“This is not a women’s liberation movement’’ emphasized Mrs. King. “It’s professional tennis, although it may smack of women’s liberation. If you get money from a sport you should be labeled a pro.

“All we’re doing now with our various titles is confusing the public, and the quicker we can clear up the confusion the faster tennis is going to grow.”

That said, the women did it. Americans King, Peaches Bartkowicz, Nancy Richey, Rosie Casals, Valerie Ziegenfuss and Kristy Pigeon and Australians Kerry Melville and Judy Teagart Dalton signed up to play for a $5,000 purse. Julie Heldman would also sign on.

Melville and Dalton would eventually be suspended in their country and not allowed to compete in Australia, but better things were in motion. The USLTA formed a women’s tour and King engineered a merger in 1973 to create the Women’s Tennis Association.

Suddenly, these women had opened the doors to a world where then up-and-coming players like Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert would play for burgeoning purses, sponsorship contracts, become superstars and take the sport to even higher levels.

In an essay on The Players Tribune, King wrote, “What we did in 1970, we did on our own – and with little or no support from the tennis establishment. They wanted to throw us out, but we have persevered – and today, every time the names Williams, Sharapova, Halep or any of today’s great champions are etched into the history of women’s tennis, I hope history will recognize that they are not only worthy, but they are standing on the shoulders of history.’’

But they’re not alone.

That moment in 1970 when those women knew what they wanted to do and made it happen was just the start of an amazing decade that changed women’s sports forever.

And the state of Texas, once again, played a big part.

Think about it. A year later, Title IX was passed. Then, in 1973, you had not only the formation of the WTA, but Houston took center stage again as King faced Bobby Riggs in “The Battle of the Sexes” and won. The match drew 30,000 to the Astrodome and an international television audience of 90 million as King beat Riggs in straight sets — 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 — and took home $100,000.

Yes, things were changing.

Babe Zaharias, Patty Berg, Louise Suggs and 10 other players — celebrated as “The Founders” — put women’s professional golf on the map in 1950. Women like Wilma Rudolph and Donna de Varona were stepping into the spotlight at the Olympics in the 1960s and players like King were drawing attention in tennis.

But it wasn’t until the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women was formed in 1971 and started holding championships for women that things really took off.

In 1968 when Cynthia Potter graduated from Lamar High School, there were no women’s collegiate diving programs in the state, so she headed off to Indiana to train with the men’s team and went on to compete in four Olympics. By 1975, SMU’s Christine Loock became the first woman to earn a varsity letter in the Southwest Conference and, competing against the men, she finished third in the 3-meter springboard competition.

And when the University of Texas hired Donna Lopiano as its women’s athletics director in the summer of 1975, she shook things up in collegiate sports the way King did in tennis.

Faced with opposition from those who thought women’s athletics would take money away from football and men’s basketball, Lopiano pushed forward and, along with administrators and schools like Old Dominion, started building strong, solid programs and giving scholarships. Suddenly, female athletes had options;

It wasn’t long until UT’s success, particularly in basketball, volleyball and swimming and diving, fueled women’s programs in the SWC and all around the state. And the Houston Cougars were leading the way in volleyball with two of the best-ever to play the game in Olympians Flo Hyman and Rita Crockett

As the AIAW grew stronger — there were almost 1,000 member schools at one point — and got some television contracts, the NCAA started to take notice. And women’s sports started celebrating their stars.

Donna de Varona had been a breakout star in swimming in the 1964 Olympic Games and made the cover of Sports Illustrated and Look magazines, but by the 1970s, she was breaking into the all-male world of sports broadcasting and joined King in founding the Women’s Sports Foundation. And when the 1976 US women’s 4×100 freestyle relay team ended the Montreal Olympics with a historic upset win over the East Germans, de Varona called the race with Curt Cowdy.

It was quite a moment. Jill Sterkel, just 15, swam the third leg and gave the U.S. the lead then Babashoff held off the East Germans to win the gold. A few years later, Sterkel became one of the first highly-recruited swimmers, signing with Texas and being named to three more Olympic teams.

In 1976, too, women’s basketball was added to the Olympic Games.  And suddenly, all around the country, women were stepping into the spotlight. In basketball, it was Ann Meyers at UCLA and Nancy Lieberman at Old Dominion. Golfer Nancy Lopez, who played at Tulsa, changed the face of the women’s game in 1978.

In 1980, the NCAA started to embrace women’s sports and in 1981 both the AIAW and NCAA held separate Division I women’s championships. The following year, the AIAW ceased operations and those schools moved to the NCAA.

One asterisk in all this was the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. The U.S. boycotted those Games and a number of the country’s best athletes lost a final chance at gold. Yet a mere four years later, women took the spotlight again when powerful gymnast Mary Lou Retton stole our hearts at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

Yes, it was a whirlwind decade for women’s sports and for women in sports. The addition of women’s athletic departments gave women the opportunity to run the business of sports which in turn opened doors for women to move into previously male-dominated jobs in sports administration

In 1992, Lopiano became the CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation and, to no surprise, joined Zaharias, King and de Varona as three of the top four on the Orlando Sentinel’s list of 50 Most Influential Women of the Century. Zaharias was No. 1, followed by King, Lopiano and de Varona. And that was just one list they all made.

Sports journalism was changing, too. In 1975, I became the first female assistant sports editor at the Daily Texan and a few weeks after graduating, went to work as a sports writer at the Austin American-Statesman.

Women were rare in sports departments back then. There were maybe a dozen or so of us in the country. One Austin high school coach spent years referring to me “that girl sportswriter’’ and when I started covering college teams and NFL football it wasn’t unusual to be the only woman — or maybe one of two — in the press box. We fought our battles, but, bottom line, we just wanted to do our jobs and earn the respect of athletes we covered and our peers.

It wasn’t always easy — that’s a story for another time — but we changed perceptions too. We got the job done, became columnists, members of the boards of professional organizations and editors while female broadcasters went from the sidelines to studio jobs.

Four-plus decades later, some of us are still at it.

How did I get all that from a 1970 black-and-white photo and a story from a writer who I would later work with at the Post? Go ahead, shake your head.

Then think about it.

Without those Original Nine, without that moment, we likely wouldn’t have moved through the 1970s at a record pace. It would have been a slower process to open doors for scholarships and championships and professional success.

Yes, it’s been 50 years since that moment in Houston when King said “Let’s do it” and Heldman made it happen. And, yes, women’s sports and women in sports have come a long way.

Today we’re not only celebrating athletes like Simone Biles, Serena and Venus and Katie Ledecky. We’re watching women move up in front offices and on to coaching staffs with the NFL and NBA and other men’s professional teams. We’re seeing women as owners and assistants like San Antonio Spurs assistant Becky Hammon make lists for NBA head coaching positions.

And that photo? Fifty years later, those smiles remind us not only of how far women in sports have come, but in the power of what happens when you believe in something, pull together and just make it happen.