“Did he know Mafia guys? Absolutely,” Larry Riggs says. “Is it possible these guys were talking some s——? Yes, it is possible. They talked to him about doing it? Possible.” However, Riggs says, it was more likely his father purposefully lost with an eye toward setting up a bigger payday rematch—and a continuation of the national publicity that he so craved—than throw the match for mob money. Larry Riggs also says he remains baffled by the fact his father did not prepare for the King match—the only match in Bobby Riggs’s life for which he had failed to train. “Never understood it,” Larry Riggs says.
King says Riggs underestimated her. He was devastated that he lost, though King acknowledges he might have been capable of throwing a match. “Oh, I’m capable of tanking; everyone can tank,” King says. “It depends on the situation. But that was not really in Bobby’s best interest in any way to lose that match.”
When Mulloy was told about Shaw’s story, he says, he believed it. “I think that the mobsters of some sort were in on the match with Billie Jean King,” he says. “He didn’t put himself in a position to win, and I think he did it on purpose to make a buck.” Besides, Mulloy adds, Riggs knew his defeat would create intense interest—and money—for a rematch with King.
In the contract signed by Riggs and King, there was an ironclad clause for a rematch, Kuhle and others say. Riggs considered suing King to force a rematch, but friends urged him not to do it. He was “crushed” by King’s decision to deny him a rematch. King says she knows nothing about a rematch clause, wouldn’t have agreed to one, and had never heard that Riggs contemplated suing her. Perenchio, the match promoter who is now 82 years old, did not respond to questions from Outside the Lines along with a request to review the contract.
For Riggs, who was often quoted as saying, “I want to be remembered as a winner,” the aftermath of a loss on such a big stage to a woman he had ridiculed could not have been easy to endure. “He thought for sure she would play him in the rematch,” Larry Riggs says. “He thought for sure he would have redemption.”
Bobby Riggs’s friends say he was depressed for at least six months after his “Battle of the Sexes” loss. Even so, he had become a legitimate national celebrity. (On an airplane, Laugh-In star Arte Johnson told Riggs, “People tell me I look like you,” to which Riggs replied, “Funny—no one tells me I look like you.”) He would do humorous star turns on The Odd Couple and other TV shows. By early 1974—only a few months after the loss to King—Riggs moved to Las Vegas and worked at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino as the resident tennis pro and casino greeter. Paid an annual salary of $100,000, he moved into a house on the hotel’s golf course.
The Tropicana was the casino where mobsters had skimmed packets of $100 bills from the counting room—the crime immortalized in the film Casino. One of the men who benefited from the Tropicana skim was Riggs’s Chicago golfing buddy Jackie Cerone. In 1986, Cerone and four other men, from the Chicago, Detroit, and Kansas City mobs, were convicted of skimming a total of $2 million from the Tropicana during the mid-’70s. Larry Riggs says he is unsure who had arranged the job at the Tropicana for Bobby Riggs.
Through the late ’70s and early ’80s, whispers about an alleged Bobby Riggs fix only grew louder. In 1983, Riggs appeared on a syndicated television show called Lie Detector, hosted by the famous criminal defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey. On the show, Bailey asked Riggs if he had thrown the match, and he said no. Bailey declared for viewers that Riggs had passed the lie detector test. Kuhle says Riggs did the show for $5,000, not because he had felt a need to deny the allegation.
Few people who watched knew that Bailey had helped Santo Trafficante Jr. in the late 1970s avoid a congressional subpoena to testify in the House’s JFK assassination inquiry. Trafficante had faced jail time, but he thwarted the subpoena with Bailey’s help. Now 79 and living in Maine, Bailey says he helped Trafficante as a favor to his lawyer, Henry Gonzalez, whom Bailey called a close friend. “I knew Santo and Henry, but I didn’t represent either one of them,” Bailey says. Waldron, the Mafia expert, says Frank Sturges, one of the Watergate burglars, also appeared on the show and passed his lie detector test. Waldron says Sturges was a bagman for Trafficante.
For years, Riggs’s gambling buddies often asked him about a fix. “Of course it wasn’t on the level,” says Jim Agate of Las Vegas, a golf gambling pal of Riggs’s. He said when he asked Riggs what had happened against Billie Jean King, “he’d laugh and giggle, and roll his eyes and say, ‘Oh, well, you know, it wasn’t my day.’”