The Battle of the Sexes, the 1973 exhibition tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs that King won, while emotional and historically significant, was, at face value, a shitty moment in women’s history. In simply winning that match, King didn’t prove anything except that women have to do dumb things to convince themselves and others that they’re the same as men. But a new ESPN report from the series “Outside the Lines” has called this valueless historical moment into question, revealing that it’s possible that Riggs threw the match because of his deep involvement in gambling.
The year of the Riggs v. King match, Riggs (who was 55 years old and retired) had played female tennis star Margaret Court and won. He then challenged other female tennis players to a rematch, and King, who was not yet 30, took him up on the offer and won. That’s the story has its been memorialized thus far. But now, Hal Shaw, an assistant golf pro at a country club, has revealed that before all of this went down, he heard a group of mobsters at his club discussing how Riggs owed them $100,000 in bets. That’s the same amount of money that would go to the winner of the Battle of the Sexes match:
The men, Shaw says, used an array of nicknames for Riggs — “Riggsy,” “BB,” “Bobby Bolita.” Ragano told the men that “Riggsy” was prepared to “set up two matches … against the two best women players in the world,” Shaw says. “He mentioned Margaret Court — and it’s easy for me to remember that because one of my aunt’s names was Margaret so that, you know, wasn’t hard to remember — and the second lady was Billie Jean King.”
Ragano explained that Riggs “had the first match already in the works … and the second match he knew would follow because of Billie Jean King’s popularity and everything that it would be kind of a slam dunk to get her to play him bragging about beating Margaret Court,” Shaw says Ragano told the men. Shaw also says he heard Ragano mention an unidentified mob man in Chicago who would help engineer the proposed fix.ESPN dove deep into these claims, and came up with very little evidence that can conclusively prove that either scenario is the case. Some refute that Riggs could have owed so much money, while others claim that it’s very possible, given that he was such an erratic dude. One side says that Riggs hadn’t been a world number one since the late 1940s and so of course he won. The other says that you can clearly tell from the footage of the match that he just didn’t even try.
My understanding about how the Battle of Sexes played out was, for many years, relatively simplistic, an analysis relayed to me at a young age by my father. He told me that Riggs was an out of shape, chauvinistic blowhard who thought he was hot shit. My dad believed that that if King had played a man who was in his prime like she was at the time, there was no way she could have won. My father was the type of man who thought women should play five sets per tennis match (they play three and the men play five), especially given that they now – largely because of King’s work – get paid the same amount of prize money during tournaments as men do.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
