Riggs flew home to California. His son, Larry, says he was friendly with an investor named Steve Powers, who had a Beverly Hills estate renowned for its wild, all-night parties. “Bobby and I had a deal—he got to stay at my house as long as he entertained my guests, and he did that,” Powers says. “He didn’t ask much of me—just get him laid with the wild women in LA. And I did that.”
In July, Riggs moved into Powers’s guesthouse, where he lived—and partied—during the eight weeks prior to the King match.
“Steve had his maid, and she wore the French maid outfit with no underwear on the top or the bottom,” Larry Riggs says. “That set the tone for the parties at nighttime . . . It was just a wild time to be had by everybody, including my dad.”
With a glass of bourbon in his left hand and a glass of Coca-Cola in his right, Bobby Riggs would take big swigs from both glasses and mix the liquids in his mouth before swallowing. And he was always puffing on a fat cigar. “I had never seen him really drink as much as he was then,” Larry Riggs says. “And it concerned me.”
Kuhle’s job was to train Riggs, but for the first time anyone could remember, Riggs refused to practice with solid players or even exercise, his son says. Not once did he use Powers’s lighted tennis court to do anything but goof around for the cameras or hustle matches. Instead, he’d play stragglers off the street for a few quick bucks. “It’s very hard to turn down $500 if a guy wants to come out and play for $500. He can put that in his pocket,” Kuhle says. “There was so much commotion going on, and he just felt he could beat her on roller skates.”
Riggs tirelessly promoted the match, filming several TV commercials (American Express, Sunbeam Curling Iron) and seemingly never refusing an interview request or a party invite. Early one morning, Riggs realized $1,500 had been stolen from his wallet by a young woman he had been drinking with the night before. He grumbled that the woman hadn’t even slept with him.
Riggs relished playing the impish, gambling-mad, chauvinistic court jester for enthralled members of the national media. On its cover, Time magazine called Riggs “The Happy Hustler.” Sports Illustrated warned, “Don’t Bet Against This Man.” A recording artist named Lyle “Slats” McPheeters recorded “The Ballad of Bobby Riggs,” for Artco Records. On 60 Minutes, Riggs tossed playing cards at a wastebasket for money, played tennis with eight chairs on his side of the court, and ran around Las Vegas looking for action on anything, from tennis and golf to backgammon and card tosses, with everyone he met.
“All of the running, all of the chasing, all of the betting, all of the playing—what’s it all about?” Mike Wallace asked Riggs. “Do you do it for money, Bobby?”
“No,” said Riggs with a smirk. “I do it for fun, the sport, it’s the thing to do. When I can’t play for big money, I play for little money. And if I can’t play for little money, I stay in bed that day.”
This wasn’t a midlife crisis. This was a midlife Mardi Gras.
During those weeks, Larry Riggs noticed some “unsavory characters” kept showing up at Powers’s house to meet privately with his father. “They weren’t golfers,” Larry Riggs says. “I called them shady characters with the kind of flashy suits on and the ties and whatever. They just didn’t fit in.”
After one of the visits, Larry Riggs confronted his father. “Who are those guys?”
“Friends of mine from Chicago.”
That’s when Larry Riggs says he recognized the men as associates of Jackie Cerone, the Chicago mob hit man with whom his father had played golf and cards back at the Tam O’Shanter Country Club outside of Chicago. “Very not upright citizens of our country,” Larry Riggs now says of the men visiting his father.
“What the hell are those guys doing?” Larry Riggs asked his father.
“They’re here to see me. We have a little business that we’re doing. Don’t worry about it. Everything’s okay.”
But Larry Riggs says he worried obsessively. And he says his father never identified the men or explained why they flew from Chicago to Los Angeles to meet with him several times before the King match.
As Riggs lived the high life on the West Coast, King trained in South Carolina with the focus of a boxer preparing for a prizefight. Larry Riggs was so sure his father was going to lose to King that he refused to accompany him to Houston for the match. “You’re going to embarrass yourself,” he told his father before he left. Larry Riggs says he bet $500 on King. King says she told her brother “to bet the house” on her.