But Riggs was also betting on contests he couldn’t control: like horseracing and pro and college football. With California bookmakers, he’d place bets on every televised football game and often on games that weren’t on TV. On a New Year’s Day in the early 1970s, he lost every bowl game, dropping nearly $30,000 to the bookmakers, his friends said. At Caesars Palace, Kuhle recalls that Riggs, sloppy from too much bourbon, lost $17,000 playing baccarat in a few hours.
Riggs enjoyed far more betting success on the seniors’ tennis circuit, dominating his opponents. In the early ’70s, he beseeched the top women players to play him in a series of exhibition matches, but no one agreed. After having vanished from the public eye for nearly two decades, Riggs saw the proposed matches as a chance to climb back into the spotlight and make some easy money.
Six weeks after Hal Shaw heard the mob leaders weigh the appeal of a fixed tennis match, Bobby Riggs held a news conference at the Westview Hotel in downtown San Diego. It was February 1973. Before a roomful of reporters, Riggs held up a $5,000 cashier’s check—the money was staked by a local developer—that he was offering to Margaret Court or Billie Jean King. All either one had to do was agree to play him.
Court, then 30, agreed to a match with the 55-year-old Riggs, telling friends it would be an easy payday. Almost overnight, there was worldwide interest; Riggs made sure of it with quotable chauvinistic rants against women that sounded as if they were intended to get under the skin of King, a crusader for the women’s liberation movement and a cofounder that year of the Women’s Tennis Association.
“He took the most basic conflict in the world, which is man versus woman, and he took that conflict and used tennis as the metaphor and created the match,” says Kuhle. “And therefore the whole world became interested.”
Riggs had no doubt he would defeat Margaret Court. “I’m just going to destroy her,” he told his son, Larry.
And over the next three months, Riggs trained 10 to 12 hours a day, playing hours of tennis against outstanding young male players and running miles alongside a San Diego golf course. This was Riggs’s usual routine: train, rigorously, for a big match. “Never underestimate opponents,” Riggs advised in his list of rules for competition titled “You Too Are Champions” published in the late ’60s.
By the time she faced Riggs, Court was 30 years old and had won 18 of her previous 25 tournaments, including three majors—the U.S. Open, Australian, and French. She was one of the most dominant players of all time, having won a total of 62 Grand Slam singles and doubles events in her career—a feat never matched by a man or a woman. Still, the oddsmakers, all men, installed Riggs as the betting favorite in the Las Vegas sports books. The match attracted a fair amount of action; nearly everyone bet on Bobby Riggs.
On May 13, 1973, an overflow crowd of fans and celebrities assembled at San Diego Country Estates in Ramona, California, and more than 30 million people watched on CBS. Before the first serve, Riggs handed Court a bouquet of red roses. She curtsied.
Riggs made few errors and relied on his masterful service game and trademark lob while Court looked flummoxed and hit shot after shot into the net. Riggs coasted, winning 6–2, 6–1. “Sometimes I look back and think, Why did I need to do it?” Court now says. “I was number one in the world in tennis . . . Look, we all make mistakes in life, and probably that was one of my mistakes.”
“As soon as Margaret lost, I said, ‘I have to play,’” King, 69, told Outside the Lines in an interview last week. “I knew I was going to say yes and I knew that it was on, the match was on.” And she knew she had to win. A boxing promoter and television producer named Jerry Perenchio, who promoted the Ali-Frazier bout in 1971 as “The Fight,” organized “The Battle of the Sexes” between King and Riggs. He put up a $100,000 winner-take-all prize for the best-of-five-sets match and arranged for it to be played in the Houston Astrodome in prime time on national television.
A week after Wimbledon, which King had won for the fifth time, Riggs and King hammed it up at a raucous news conference at the Town Tennis Club in Manhattan. “Personally,” Riggs said, “I would wish that the women would stay in the home and do the kitchen work and take care of the baby and compete in areas where they can compete in because it’s a big mistake for them to get mixed up in these mixed sex matches.” (Kuhle and Riggs’s son, who was in his midtwenties at the time, say this was pure shtick, that Riggs was not a chauvinist, but viewed women as equals; his first tennis coach back in LA was a woman.)