The Bobby Riggs–Billie Jean King spectacular wasn’t the only tennis on offer in Houston. The Battle of the Sexes was slated for Thursday. On Monday, September 17th, the Virginia Slims of Houston tournament kicked off. Billie Jean was there.
I will never cease to marvel at this. The Riggs match, for all its silliness, was enormously consequential–and King knew it. She was out to avenge her gender for Margaret Court’s loss in May, all the insulting things Bobby had said, and–oh yeah–every other slight in the history of male-female relations. She had spent part of the year injured and much of the last week in bed with a virus. Her last appearance at a major, against Julie Heldman at the US Open, had ended by retirement in a heat-induced haze.
The Slims event was little more than an anonymous tour stop. Billie Jean had every reason not to show. Yet on opening day, she not only played one match: She played two.
In the first round, she dispatched Cynthia Doerner of Australia, 6-0, 6-4. Things got a bit shaky in the second set, but the whole match took less than an hour. King came back later for a second-round tilt against 20-year-old Kris Kemmer. That one was even easier: 6-0, 6-2.
Kemmer, like most of the women in Houston, had no problem balancing competition with support for a fellow player. Wearing a pin that said “Billie Jean is No. 1,” there was no question who she’d cheer for on Thursday. “I think we’ll all die if she doesn’t win,” she told a reporter. “She just has to win.”
King was ready to do just that. “I am very healthy again,” she said after securing her place in the quarter-finals. Riggs “had better be ready to play tennis. I am very serious about this match.”
With that, Madame Superstar went into “hibernation.” She wouldn’t give any more interviews. She wouldn’t have to play the Slims event again until Friday. She would practice, she would prepare, and she would shut out the non-stop distraction machine that was Bobby Riggs.
Easier said that done. Riggs went on every Texas talk show that would have him, often several in a single day. He got a medical checkup from a noted heart surgeon, Dr. Denton Cooley. The doc visit was almost certainly just for press consumption; Bobby was more concerned about a nagging case of tennis elbow.
He practiced, too, but even that was part of the show. A bubble was set up next to the Astrodome, and Team Riggs charged five bucks to watch the old man wheeze through a workout. Even with the $100,000 spectacle on the horizon, he couldn’t help but hustle, challenging all comers to a $50 or $100 match, arranging chairs on his side of the court to slow himself down and even the odds.
“Last month was for wine, women, and song,” Bobby told a friendly hometown reporter. This month, he said, “It’s all tennis.”
Riggs and King had very different ideas of what it meant to have a single-minded focus on the game. Under the lights, in front of millions of eyes, would it matter? In three days, the world would find out.
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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.
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