First of all, why did anyone ever think it would seriously prove anything if a 30-year-old woman, ranked second in the world, beat a washed-up out-of-shape 55-year-old man at tennis? Even Billie Jean King knew the equation and understood it’s limits.
Secondly, did Billie Jean King really beat Riggs, or did Riggs throw the match? Was the match, as sports journalist Don Van Natta Jr. implies, fixed? (Von Natta Jr. probably doesn’t have a “smoking gun”; he takes what he does know, however, and builds a pretty strong case.)
I never did think much of King’s victory. Riggs, at 55, had recently decisively and humiliatingly crushed the number 1 ranked woman in the world, Margaret Court. This happened just a few months before the King match. In the time leading up to his match with Court, Riggs practiced up to 12 hours day, lost weight, worked on his fitness, exercised, and trained. In the months leading up to the King match, he gained weight, stopped practicing (he didn’t even do a proper warm up in the days leading up to the match), drank, partied, and generally did everything he could to ensure that his 55-year-old body would not be in any condition to beat any serious competitor in a full-length match. During the match itself, Riggs made many unforced errors and double-faulted on critical serve after serve, a performance that was so uncharacteristic that the broadcast team, which included Howard Cosell, thought there might be something wrong with him.
If his intent had been to up the odds, by crushing Margaret Court, and then betting against himself against King, he could not have been more perfect. He made it look like it was simply personal carelessness and sloppiness: not a plot.
If King’s victory had been emblematic of a shift in perception of women’s abilities and competence, why were there no sequels? Why didn’t we ever see Navratilova or Evert or Hingus take on any of the leading male players? Think about it– if the King vs. Riggs match really meant anything, would we not almost certainly seen more matches of top women players against men? Yet we did not see any.
The answer is obvious: because, like Court, they would have been humiliated. They would have been destroyed.
In the movie, “The Battle of the Sexes”, great care is taken to imply that Margaret Court lost to Riggs because she was nervous. She choked. The same woman who won 24 of 47 Grand Slam tournaments. She suddenly couldn’t take the spotlight? But there is a reason why “The Battle of the Sexes” wants you to think that: because King had to be shown to win because she was a superior tennis player (to a 55-year-old man, no escaping that). Nobody believes that King was very much superior to Margaret Court in 1973. So if it wasn’t confidence, what could it be? Could it be, as many have long suspected, that Riggs threw the match? The film doesn’t want to let you think that.
So the narrative has been promulgated that King proved something when she beat this washed-up, out-of-shape, clown. If I were a woman, I would be embarrassed that anyone ever tried to claim that this match proved anything about women’s capabilities.
[whohit]The King-Riggs Hoax[/whohit]