Bobby Riggs wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The 55-year-old former Wimbledon and US Open tennis champion had been goading Billie Jean King for months back in 1973 about playing an exhibition match, just so he could prove “the man was supreme” but King, 29, wasn’t taking the bait.
Instead, Riggs turned his attention to playing Australia’s Margaret Court, winner of 24 Grand Slam titles and the reigning world women’s number one. On May 13 – Mother’s Day – 1973, Riggs trounced Court in straight sets during a match in Ramona, Calif., winning 6-2, 6-1.
The “Mother’s Day Massacre” was the final straw for King, who viewed Court’s defeat as yet another setback for women’s tennis.
“Before Margaret’s match I told her she had to win, but she didn’t,” the 79-year-old King recalls to The Post. “In fact, she lost badly and when she lost I knew I had to play him.
“I had no choice.”
Next week, on Sept. 20th, it will be 50 years since Billie Jean King faced Bobby Riggs in a contest billed as “The Battle of the Sexes.” It was a match that both made and changed history — helping women’s tennis to finally secure the same financial and cultural gravitas as its male counterpart.
Outspoken and provocative, Riggs, who at 55 was then the same age as King’s father, had openly criticized the women’s game for being inferior to the men’s and was insistent that even a retired middle-aged pro like him could still beat the best woman players on the planet.
Now, after months of deliberating — and chastened by Court’s defeat — Billie Jean King finally accepted the challenge and agreed to take Riggs on. The timing was auspicious: Not only had King just won the Wimbledon triple crown of women’s singles, women’s doubles (with Rosie Casals) and mixed doubles (with Owen Davidson), she was also in the middle of forming the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and deep in negotiations with the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) to secure equal prize money for women at the US Open.
With businessman and promoter Jerry Perenchio directing the pre-match build-up, Riggs threw himself into a publicity blitz. There were appearances on television with Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin and press interviews galore where, inevitably, Riggs would denigrate his opponent and women more generally.
“I’ll tell you why I’ll win,” Riggs insisted in one press conference. “She’s a woman and they don’t have the emotional stability. She’ll choke, just like Margaret did… the man is supreme.”
Riggs was aggressive and outlandish in his efforts to court media attention. At one practice session, Riggs invited reporters and then showed up wearing a T-shirt with two circles cut out to expose his nipples, explaining that he thought the shirt would look better on his opponent.
Lornie Kuhle was Riggs’s coach and manager for the Battle of the Sexes match.
He believes Riggs was the perfect player for the contest – and not simply because of his tennis talent. “Bobby Riggs was pretty much like P.T. Barnum – he was a consummate promoter,” he tells The Post. “He would make statements like “I believe women should stay in the bedroom and in the kitchen” and women would boil when they read this stuff. You wouldn’t believe the poison pen letters Bobby received.
“But it was all tongue in cheek for Bobby,” adds Kuhle, now 83 and living near San Diego.
Billie Jean King isn’t so sure, particularly considering the wide-spread inequality women then faced at every level of society. “Maybe he even believed in all the things he was saying, I don’t know,” she says, “but much of what Bobby said and did in 1973 would not be tolerated today.”
“But in 1973 women were paid 56.6% of what men earned, and women of color made even less. We couldn’t even get a credit card without a man’s signature on the application; we were second class citizens.
“That’s part of the reason he got away with it.”
The publicity blitz worked wonders — particularly when it came to the bottom line.
While the winner would take all of the $100,000 prize on offer (the equivalent of nearly $700,000 today), Riggs ensured he wouldn’t go home empty-handed by signing endorsement deals with American Express, Hai Karate aftershave and the snacks company Nabisco.
King, meanwhile, secured sponsorship with Sunbeam hair curling irons.
Come match day, there were 30,472 fans crammed into the Houston Astrodome – the biggest ever attendance for a tennis match. And the celebrity-laden front row, which included singers Glen Campbell and Andy Williams along with actors Janet Leigh and Rod Steiger, made it seem more like a prize fight.
At home, meanwhile, a TV audience of 90 million people watched the action. To put that in context, just 53 million watched that year’s Super Bowl between the Miami Dolphins and Washington Redskins (Miami won 14-7).
With the 170-piece University of Houston marching band ramping up the atmosphere, Bobby Riggs entered the arena on a carriage pulled by “Bobby’s Bosom Buddies,” a group of local women who had been picked for the part on account of their bust size.
King was also carried on to the court, accompanied by the band playing the Helen Reddy feminist classic “I Am Woman.”
But even the match announcer, ABC’s Howard Cosell, found himself dragged down to Riggs’s tawdry level. “And here comes Billie Jean King . . . a very attractive young lady,” he said. “Sometimes you get the feeling that if she ever let her hair grow down to her shoulders, took her glasses off, you’d have somebody vying for a Hollywood screen test.”
Joining Cosell in the commentary box that day was King’s friend, doubles partner and Hall of Famer, Rosie Casals. She says Riggs’s and Cosell’s misogynist attitude was typical of the time. “Just listen to the broadcast and you’ll know,” says Casals, now 74, who now runs the Love & Love Tennis Foundation in Southern California.
For Casals, though, Riggs played his role to perfection. “Of course, he was a chauvinist pig – at least he acted that way in order to get the match,” she says.
“But I’m not sure he truly felt that way – he was always respectful to Billie Jean and me.”
Over-confident and underprepared, Riggs, the bookies’ favorite, was no match for King and with the world watching, she routed her opponent in straight sets, winning 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 and inflicting a humiliating defeat on the 55-year-old.
Later, Riggs would describe the contest as “the most disappointing, disheartening experience of my life.”
Billie Jean King, meanwhile, simply couldn’t conceive of any other result. “I knew I had to win,” she says. “There was so much on the line. The future of women’s tennis was counting on me. The second wave of the women’s movement was at its peak and they were counting on me.
“There was so much pressure, but I like pressure – and pressure is privilege.”
Despite Riggs’s persistent provocation and very public defeat, King and Riggs became firm friends in the years to come. Whenever they met, they would often relive the match and debate the lasting impact of the Battle of the Sexes game.
When Riggs was dying from prostate cancer in 1976-77, the pair remained in touch.
On the day before he died, for example, King called Riggs to find him weak and barely able to speak. “His last words to her before he passed away were ‘we really made a difference, didn’t we?’ recalls Lornie Kuhle.
Bobby Riggs died on Oct. 25, 1995, aged 77.
Before he passed away, he and Kuhle founded the Bobby Riggs Tennis Club and Museum in Encinitas, California to help raise awareness of prostate cancer, as well as to display his many trophies, medals and memories, including items from the infamous Battle of the Sexes decades earlier.
For Kuhle, who now runs the USTA Billie Jean King‘s Girls National Championships, the Battle of the Sexes turned out to be a victory for both players. “Billie Jean’s cause was much bigger and it became a milestone for women’s rights. She was on a crusade and it meant everything in the world for her to win,” he says. Those victories would still take time to materialize, however: It was only in 2007 that women finally received the same pay as men in pro tennis’ four Grand Slam events.
“Had Bobby won the match it would’ve been forever buried in the annals of history. But losing perpetuated his legacy too,” Kuhle continues. “Name one other tennis player from 50 years ago that they still talk about almost every day?”
Rosie Casals, meanwhile, believes the ramifications of the match can’t be underestimated. It was, and still is, the biggest and most impactful match in the 20th century,” she says.
“[But] I’m glad it turned out the way it did. A loss would have set women and women’s tennis back 20 years or more.”
For Billie Jean King, however, the Battle of the Sexes — which was further immortalized in the hit 2017 movie of the same name — remains “both significant and historic” and barely a day goes by without someone asking her about it.
And there’s a reason for that.
“As I spoke with people in the days, weeks and months after the match, I saw women who felt empowered for the first time. And the men who talked to me, many had tears in their eyes, and realized they wanted the same opportunities for their daughters as their sons,” says King, who’s recently come under fire for her support of transgender athletes in female sports.
“So, the legacy of the match is and was all about social change.
“We changed the hearts and minds of people.”
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