When it was finally over, fans stormed the court and engulfed King, and Riggs hugged her. “You could just see he wanted it so badly and couldn’t get it going,” she says. “I think he got so nervous—it exhausted him.” He just “choked,” she says. “We’ve all done it. I’ve choked. Everybody chokes.”
At the postmatch news conference, a subdued Riggs saluted King’s performance. “Billie Jean was too good, too quick,” he said. “I know I said a lot of things she made me eat tonight. I guess I’m the biggest bum of all time now. But I have to take it.” Prior to the match, King says she told Riggs, win or lose, she would never play him again. But before the assembled reporters, Riggs quickly called for a rematch. “I would’ve given Billie Jean a rematch if I had won, so I want a rematch.”
“Why should there be a rematch?” she said. Billie Jean King had nothing left to prove.
Nearly 40 years later, “The Battle of the Sexes” is one of the most iconic sporting events in American history. The match’s value is especially cherished by tennis people because it proved the game, like King, was a trailblazer for society. King planted a flag for women’s equality. Gradually, America followed.
“I think it wasn’t just for women,” says King. “It was really about both genders. Men come up to me constantly, many times with tears in their eyes, and tell me their story, like ‘Oh, I was 12 years old when I saw that match, and now I have a daughter and I have a son, and I really want both of them to have equal opportunity.’
“So I think for men, it changed them to think differently about things. For women, also, they thought differently about themselves—they were much more empowered to ask for what they want and need to have more self-confidence.”
This past July, King and several hundred members of tennis’s elite gathered at the International Tennis Hall of Fame, in Newport, Rhode Island, for the annual induction ceremonies. On a Sunday evening, they watched a new documentary film that will air September 10 on PBS that salutes King’s victory. Afterward, Martina Hingis, a Hall of Fame inductee who wasn’t alive in 1973, appeared awestruck by what she had just seen on the big screen. “This was bigger than anything probably anyone can go through . . . so, congratulations,” Hingis told King. “I mean—amazing.”
In attendance were the aging male members of tennis’s old guard, who applauded for King. None of these men knew about Hal Shaw’s allegations, and only a few knew about Bobby Riggs’s mob friends. Still, the men remarked among themselves that there wasn’t a single word in the film about the belief by some that Bobby Riggs had thrown the match for a big payday.
Across nearly 40 years, some of the men who knew Riggs best have wondered: was “The Battle of the Sexes” nothing more than a cultural con job?
“A lot of my tennis friends immediately suspected something was up, and many of us still believe something was up,” says John Barrett, the longtime BBC tennis broadcaster. “It wasn’t so much that Bobby lost. It was that he looked as if he had almost capitulated. He just made it too easy for Billie Jean King. We all wondered if the old fox had done it again.”
“Everything was different,” says Adler. “If you were a tennis person that knew Bobby Riggs, the first thing that comes to your mind is he threw the match.”
Steve Powers, who owned the guesthouse where Riggs stayed prior to the match, says, “If Bobby had an opportunity to fix the match, he would have jumped at it. Ethics wouldn’t have stopped him.”
Tennis great Gene Mako, who died in June, had insisted for years that Riggs had thrown the match. “You have to know Bobby,” Mako told author Tom LeCompte in the 2003 Riggs biography, The Last Sure Thing. Mako believed Riggs was so vain that his play was just awful enough to demonstrate to smart tennis people that he had tanked the match.
Almost right after the match, King says she began hearing the rumors that Riggs had thrown it. The rumors were started by “people who were unhappy—guys who lost money,” she says. “And a lot of people, men, particularly, don’t like it if a woman wins. They don’t like it. They make up stories. They start just thinking about it more and more. It’s hard on them. It’s very hard on their egos.”
King also says because of all the stories about Riggs’s betting and hustling, especially in Los Angeles, it was just natural that some people would assume the fix was in.
Asked recently whether she could believe Riggs had thrown the match, former world number-one player Chrissie Evert said she wouldn’t think so but you could never be sure. “Ninety-nine percent of me would say [King] beat him fair and square,” Evert says. “But if you know Bobby Riggs, you can’t put anything past him.”