Battle of the Sexes (1973): Billie Jean King vs Bobby Riggs

The Battle of the Sexes was an exhibition tennis match played on 20 September 1973 at the Houston Astrodome in Texas, in which Billie Jean King, the world’s leading woman player, defeated the former men’s champion Bobby Riggs in straight sets. Watched by a record crowd and tens of millions of television viewers, the match became a cultural event far beyond sport. It came at a turning point in the fight for equal pay and respect for women athletes, and it remains one of the best-known moments in tennis history.

Background: women’s tennis in revolt

When tennis became fully professional in 1968, prize money for women was usually far lower than for men, sometimes by a ratio of eight or more to one. In 1970 a group of nine women, later called the “Original 9”, broke away to play in a new tournament in Houston organised by the publisher Gladys Heldman, signing token one-dollar contracts. This led to the Virginia Slims circuit, a separate professional tour for women.

Billie Jean King, already a multiple Wimbledon champion, became the leading voice for equal treatment. In June 1973, at a meeting at the Gloucester Hotel in London shortly before Wimbledon, she and other players founded the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA). The same year the US Open became the first major tournament to offer equal prize money to men and women.

Bobby Riggs and the challenge

Bobby Riggs had won the Wimbledon singles title and the US Championships in 1939. By the early 1970s he was in his fifties and well known as a hustler and showman who liked to play for bets. He claimed that even an older man could beat the best woman player, a boast that tapped into public arguments about women’s liberation.

King at first refused his challenge. Riggs then played the Australian Margaret Court, the top-ranked woman at the time, on 13 May 1973 in Ramona, California. Court appeared unsettled by the occasion and lost 6–2, 6–1, a result the press dubbed the “Mother’s Day Massacre”. After that defeat, King accepted Riggs’s challenge, believing that a second loss would damage the women’s game.

The match

The match was staged as a showbusiness spectacle. King was carried into the Astrodome on a gold litter borne by bare-chested men, while Riggs arrived in a rickshaw pulled by models. The two exchanged joke gifts: Riggs gave King a giant lollipop, and King presented him with a piglet, a reference to the “male chauvinist pig” label used at the time. The ABC broadcast featured the commentator Howard Cosell.

A crowd of 30,472 attended, then the largest ever for a tennis match, and estimates of the US television audience were around 50 million. The winner was to receive 100,000 US dollars.

King had prepared carefully. She had watched how Riggs used soft, spinning shots and lobs to unsettle Court, and she decided not to play into his hands. Instead she stayed mostly at the back of the court, hit the ball deep and ran Riggs from side to side, wearing out a man more than 25 years older. Riggs took an early lead in the first set, but King broke back and gradually took control.

She won 6–4, 6–3, 6–3 in a little over two hours. Riggs, who had trained far less seriously than for the Court match and spent much of the build-up on promotional events, jumped the net to congratulate her and later admitted that he had underestimated her.

Reaction

The result was front-page news across the United States and beyond. For many supporters of the women’s movement, King’s win was a symbolic answer to the claim that women could not handle pressure or compete in serious sport. King herself said afterwards that she felt she would have set women back if she had lost, and she described the match as being about social change rather than tennis.

Not everyone was impressed. Some commentators pointed out that a 29-year-old champion beating a 55-year-old man proved little about the relative abilities of men and women in their prime. Others criticised the circus atmosphere as trivialising women’s sport. Yet the size of the audience showed that there was a huge market for women’s tennis, a lesson that sponsors and broadcasters did not miss.

The match was also not the only event of its kind. In 1992 Jimmy Connors played Martina Navratilova in a later “Battle of the Champions” in Las Vegas, with special rules to level the contest; Connors won. None of these later matches came close to matching the cultural impact of 1973.

Key people

• Billie Jean King (born 1943): American player who won 39 Grand Slam titles across singles, doubles and mixed doubles, including 12 in singles, and a leading campaigner for equality in sport.
• Bobby Riggs (1918–1995): American 1939 Wimbledon champion who became famous as a promoter of novelty matches; he and King later became friends.
• Margaret Court (born 1942): Australian player who holds the record of 24 Grand Slam singles titles; her loss to Riggs set up the King match.
• Gladys Heldman (1922–2003): Founder of World Tennis magazine and organiser of the 1970 Houston tournament that launched the women’s tour.

Myths and facts

A popular claim, raised in a 2013 ESPN report, is that Riggs deliberately lost to clear gambling debts owed to the Mafia. The story rested on the recollection of one man who said he had overheard a conversation decades earlier. King and those close to Riggs denied it, and historians generally regard the claim as unproven.

Another misconception is that the match by itself won equal pay. In fact the US Open had already agreed equal prize money earlier in 1973, and the other majors took much longer: Wimbledon and the French Open did so only in 2007.

Legacy

King’s victory gave women’s professional tennis enormous publicity at a moment when the WTA was only months old, and it encouraged many girls and women to take up sport. It also coincided with the early years of Title IX, the 1972 US law that opened school and college sport to women. In 1974 King founded the Women’s Sports Foundation, which campaigns for girls’ and women’s access to sport and funds research and grants for female athletes.

King received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, and the home of the US Open in New York was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in 2006. The match has been retold in documentaries and in the 2017 feature film Battle of the Sexes.

Timeline

• 23 September 1970: The “Original 9” sign one-dollar contracts to play in Houston, beginning the women’s tour.
• 13 May 1973: Bobby Riggs defeats Margaret Court in the “Mother’s Day Massacre”.
• June 1973: The Women’s Tennis Association is founded in London.
• 20 September 1973: Billie Jean King defeats Riggs 6–4, 6–3, 6–3 at the Houston Astrodome.
• 1974: King founds the Women’s Sports Foundation.
• 2007: Wimbledon and the French Open adopt equal prize money.

Why it matters

The Battle of the Sexes turned a novelty match into a public test of attitudes towards women. King’s win, in front of a vast audience, strengthened the case that women athletes deserved serious attention and fair pay, and it remains a landmark in the history of the women’s movement and of sport.