Billie Jean King entered the Houston Astrodome on 20 September 1973 like Cleopatra, borne aloft on a golden litter carried by four bare-chested men. Her opponent, Bobby Riggs, arrived in a rickshaw pulled by models he called "Bobby's bosom buddies", then presented King with a giant Sugar Daddy lollipop; she gave him a squealing piglet, a live comment on male chauvinism. It was vaudeville — and underneath the vaudeville sat one of the highest-stakes tennis matches ever played.
Riggs was not a random loudmouth. He had been the real thing: Wimbledon champion in 1939, when he famously backed himself with a bookmaker to win all three titles he entered, and world number one. By 1973 he was 55, a compulsive gambler and hustler who spotted in the new women's liberation movement the promotional opportunity of a lifetime. His shtick — women belonged in the bedroom and kitchen, the women's game was so inferior that even a pensioner could beat its best — was at least half performance. The problem was that on Mother's Day 1973 he had backed it up, crushing Margaret Court, then the world's top-ranked woman, 6-2, 6-1, in a match remembered as the Mother's Day Massacre. Court had prepared for an exhibition; Riggs, all lobs, spins and junk, had prepared for an ambush. The result put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated and made a match with King, who had previously refused him, unavoidable.
King understood exactly what had been loaded onto her shoulders. This was the year everything in women's tennis was being built: she had led the breakaway that created the Virginia Slims tour, become the first sportswoman to earn $100,000 in a season, founded the Women's Tennis Association that June, and pressured the US Open into becoming the first major to pay equal prize money that same summer — while Title IX, the US law mandating equal opportunity in school sport, was one year old and politically fragile. "I thought it would set us back fifty years if I didn't win that match," she said later. "It would ruin the women's tour and affect all women's self-esteem."
Straight sets in the circus
The scale was unprecedented: 30,472 spectators inside the Astrodome — for decades the largest crowd ever to watch tennis in the United States — a winner-take-all purse of $100,000, and a worldwide television audience estimated at 90 million, with some 50 million watching in America alone, Howard Cosell at the microphone. Riggs opened as the bookmakers' favourite.
King, 29, had studied the Court debacle and refused the bait. Rather than overpower the older man from the baseline, she ran him: soft angles, drop shots, changes of pace, making the 55-year-old legs do the arguing. Riggs, under-trained and over-promoted, wilted in the fifth game of the first set and never recovered his hustler's control of events. King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, and Riggs hopped the net to tell her, "I underestimated you." Rumours surfaced decades later that Riggs, mired in gambling debts, had thrown the match; King, who was there for every point of his scrambling, dismissed them, and most tennis historians do too — Riggs had bet on himself and spent his last years still demanding a rematch King sensibly never granted.
What it actually changed
A circus settled nothing about relative athletic ability — a point King herself always made; she had beaten a 55-year-old showman, not the male tour. What the night changed was perception at scale. Tens of millions of Americans, many watching a woman compete under pressure for the first time, saw the caricature lose in straight sets. Sponsorship flowed into the young WTA; girls' sports participation, newly protected by Title IX, exploded through the decade; and King became the enduring face of the argument that women's sport was sport, full stop. She finished her career with 39 Grand Slam titles across singles and doubles, became the first female athlete awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, and in 2006 the US Open's home was renamed the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. The night has kept its grip on popular culture, retold most recently in the 2017 film "Battle of the Sexes", with Emma Stone as King and Steve Carell as Riggs. The two principals, improbably, stayed fond of each other; King spoke with Riggs the night before he died in 1995. The piglet and the litter are remembered as kitsch. The scoreline is remembered as history.
Quiz nuggets
- Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 at the Houston Astrodome on 20 September 1973.
- Riggs, the 1939 Wimbledon champion, was 55; King was 29, and the winner-take-all purse was $100,000.
- Riggs had crushed Margaret Court 6-2, 6-1 on Mother's Day 1973 — the "Mother's Day Massacre".
- The Astrodome crowd of 30,472 was long the largest for any tennis match in the US, with a TV audience estimated at 90 million.
- In the same year, 1973, King founded the WTA and the US Open became the first major with equal prize money.