On the eve of the match in Houston, Mulloy, the tennis legend who was Riggs’s close friend, visited him in his leopard-patterned Tarzan Room at the AstroWorld Hotel. A party was raging. Riggs looked heavier to Mulloy; he had gained 15 pounds in the four months since the Court match. “Bobby was in his pajamas,” Mulloy recalls, “and I looked around at a half a dozen cuties there, and they’re all having their drinks and laughing.”
Mulloy asked, “Bobby, what the hell are you doing? You got to play tomorrow.”
“Oh, there’s no way that broad can beat me,” Riggs replied.
The next morning, Mulloy was scheduled to warm up Riggs on the Astrodome court for one hour, but Riggs quit after 10 minutes. Mulloy was stunned. He was even more astonished to find Riggs that afternoon in a nearby practice facility, standing on a court with a brown dog tied on a leash to his left ankle and an umbrella in one hand. People off the street with tennis rackets were lined up to play Riggs. If they won a game, they played for free; if Riggs beat them, they owed him $100. Riggs’s brother, John, was collecting fistfuls of cash.
Mulloy says Riggs urged a millionaire friend named Jack Dreyfus not to bet on him against King. “Prior to the match, Jack Dreyfus had called him and said he wants to make a bet, how do you feel, where should I get odds,” Mulloy recalls. “Bobby says, ‘Don’t bet on me.’ That made me believe he was going to tank it.”
Moments before the match at the Astrodome, some spectators say Riggs appeared sullen, almost angry—the opposite of the happy hustler. “He wasn’t having any fun,” says Cliff Drysdale, a 72-year-old tennis broadcaster and former top-ranked pro who attended the match. With the first serve, Billie Jean King attacked aggressively in a bid to send a message to Riggs that this would not be another Margaret Court cakewalk. When one of King’s early forehands rocketed past him, Riggs told King, “Atta girl.” Still wearing his Sugar Daddy warm-up jacket, Riggs moved as if he were underwater. “I was surprised,” King says. “He was extremely nervous. So was I.”
“He was in slow motion,” says Donald Dell, a 75-year-old lawyer, former Davis Cup captain, and one of the first professional sports agents. “It was as if he had taken a sleeping pill.”
“Well, as I watched the match, I was surprised that he wasn’t attacking more,” says Stan Smith, a 66-year-old two-time major winner and a former number-one men’s player in the world.
King was ahead 2–1 in the first set. During a break, Riggs finally peeled off his Sugar Daddy jacket. His blue shirt was soaked with sweat.
At the LA Tennis Club where Riggs had won tens of thousands of dollars hustling its members on the tennis court, the golf course, and at the card table, the members watched the match on a large television. Riggs looked nothing like the spry, dominant player who had crushed Margaret Court four months earlier. During the first set, says tennis broadcaster Doug Adler, a friend of Riggs’s since they met at the club, someone shouted, “Looks like Bobby bet on Billie Jean!”
Riggs lost a game late in the first set on a double fault, something he rarely did. After losing the first set, Riggs told Kuhle to offer a friend of King’s, named Dick Butera, a $5,000 bet that he’d come back to win, at 2–1 odds. Prior to the match, Riggs had bet $10,000 with Butera that he’d beat King. But Butera, who was sitting courtside, refused this midmatch bet, apparently assuming Riggs was once again keeping his game “in the barn.”
From across the net, King says, Riggs looked “a little bit in shock” by his first-set loss. And she says she is certain he wasn’t tanking: “Bobby Riggs wanted to win that match. I saw it in his eyes. I saw it when we changed ends, and there is no question. I have played matches where players have tanked, and I know what it feels like and I know what it looks like, and he did not. He just was feeling the pressure.”
Riggs played even worse in the second set, moving around even more listlessly.
In the broadcast booth, Howard Cosell and tennis analysts Rosie Casals and Gene Scott repeatedly sounded puzzled by Riggs’s soft, erratic play. “He doesn’t look right to me,” Casals said. After Riggs hit a weak return right at King, Casals said, “That’s pretty unusual for Bobby.” And later, she asked, “Where is Bobby Riggs? Where did he go?”
Scott said Riggs was “just nonchalant with the forehand.”
Riggs was well known for a nearly flawless service game, but he missed on nearly half of his first serves. Four times, he double-faulted, all on critical points. The level of play hardly lived up to all the hype and the anticipation. King was grinding down the old man, who was the same age as her father. “Funny, with this match I guess we all expected some high humor involved in it,” Cosell said. “Instead, it’s become a very serious, serious thing because the comedy has gone out of Bobby Riggs.”