The Old Man and Billie Jean: The 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” Tennis Match Reexamined

• In Event: Sport, Dissent, and Representation during the 1970s

Abstract

More than 30,000 fans crammed into the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973 to see if Billie Jean King would finally silence Bobby Riggs. King, the winner of ten Grand Slam singles titles and one of the world’s most aggressive and dominant women’s tennis players, was defending much more than her own athletic reputation on that late-summer evening. She was striking a blow for feminism, fairness, and equality. In 1970, King learned that the male winner of the Pacific Southwest Open made $12,500 while the female winner took in a paltry $1,500. When the promoter of the event refused to negotiate, King and eight elite women players staged a boycott. King, wrote historian Benjamin Rader, emerged as “one of the most important symbols of the revived feminist movement of the early 1970s.”

On the surface at least, Riggs was everything that King was not. At 55, the former Wimbledon champion’s prime had come and gone. His financial debt had also grown with his age. A notorious gambler and hustler, Riggs needed to make money fast and sensed an opportunity in the culture wars of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had always been critical of second-wave feminism and outspoken women such as King. “Don’t you think women are at their prettiest,” he once asked, “when they’re sort of barefoot, pregnant, at home, taking care of the kiddies and doing the housework?” Women tennis players, Riggs concluded, deserved less money, attention, and recognition than men because they were slow and boring, a mere opening act for the men. He insisted that women “belong in the bedroom and kitchen, in that order.

Historians have mostly examined the King-Riggs match through the lens of gender. King is rightly celebrated as a feminist hero, while Riggs is vilified as a chauvinist pig and showman, all of which remains true. My paper instead argues that the match was as much about generation as gender. Though separated in age by twenty-six years, King and Riggs were both raised in middle-class households in Southern California. The King and Riggs’ clans were closely knit, and each attended church regularly. At 5’5” and 5’7” respectively, King and Riggs emerged as long shots, yet, as sportswriter Steve Tignor notes, “this talkative twosome made up for that lack of height with their minds and their moxy.” But gender politics smoothed away their similarities, creating an atmosphere ripe for a “Battle of the Sexes” match. This is only one side of the coin. The other holds that King and Riggs were born to face off. As a child of the Depression and a young soldier in World War II, Riggs matured during the “liberal consensus” of the 1950s and early 1960s. King was a product of the Vietnam War generation, a cohort that had never lived without the Civil Rights Movement. Using the popular press, televised interviews and segments, memoirs, and archival sources, I contend that the significance of the match can only be understood if we consider generation alongside gender.

Author

• Eric A Hall, Northern Illinois University