The era in which I grew up, in life and in sports reporting, was known for its macho…and that’s being charitable. In terms of gender comparisons, sport was often considered an oil and water mix. Consequently, when the so-called “Battle of the Sexes” came along in 1973, it was regarded — at least in some quarters — as a made-for-TV gimmick.
I was not among the 90 million people who watched it.
For the benefit of anybody tuning in late, The Battle of the Sexes featured the best women’s tennis player of her time, 29-year-old Billie Jean King, against a men’s champion from the ’40s, Bobby Riggs, then a 57-year-old hustler. There was good reason to regard it as a gimmick: Billie Jean King thought so, too.
That was before Riggs demolished another women’s champion, Australia’s Margaret Court, in a match billed as the “Mother’s Day Massacre.” After rebuffing Riggs many times, King had no choice but to silence him, which she did in straight sets.
In hindsight, the match had enormous implications. Combined with the creation of the Women’s Tennis Association — founded by King and eight others — her whipping of Riggs turned the page on women’s tennis. Make that, women’s sports.
Before that, the most famous women athletes were almost exclusively tennis players. The exposure, and the leverage, and the legitimacy that followed turned that page for all women’s sports. That’s partly why King, last week, was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, which shockingly has been around as long as America. By my count, she’s the 11th athlete or team to receive it, and almost half the others never knew because they’d died, starting with the first one, baseball’s Roberto Clemente.
Also shocking is that she’s the first women’s athlete, and that it took 50 years. Really?
Most Congressional Gold Medal sports recipients — from Jesse Owens to Arnold Palmer to Jackie Robinson (28 years after his death) — were chosen because they made a major impact on changing their sport or on some humanitarian issue, like Clemente.
In interviews with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, King said what forming the players’ union meant:
“I made a decision when I was 12 years old, my epiphany, that I would fight for equality the rest of my life…[that] any girl born in this world would have a place to compete and be appreciated for our accomplishments and not only our looks and, most importantly, to be able to make a living playing the sport we had a passion to play. It provided a platform for every single professional woman tennis player. A platform for her to be a leader, be effective in her community…it could be a village, it could be a town, it could be a country, it could be a continent.”
Without Billie Jean, would there have been a tennis player as dominant as Serena Williams? A Simone Biles in gymnastics? A Caitlin Clark in basketball? Maybe, but it was the lift King gave the confidence of women athletes that launched the kind of universal acceptance that they enjoy today. And that started with an exhibition tennis match, a gimmick, against one of the game’s long-forgotten and long-retired chauvinists.
Riggs: “I underestimated you.”
Didn’t we all.
