In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Bobby Riggs [USA]Born: 25 February 1918
Died: 25 October 1995
Career: 1933-50
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1939)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 103
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In 2013, a Florida man approached ESPN with a story about an overheard conversation. Forty years earlier, he had heard two mobsters discussing what sounded like a plot to fix Bobby Riggs’s match with Billie Jean King. He was far from the first person to question whether the Battle of the Sexes was on the up-and-up.
Riggs was known as–among other things–the “happy hustler,” a showman whose sense of ethics lagged far behind his flair for publicity. He would bet on anything. If you weren’t interested in a wager, he’d badger you until you changed your mind.
He usually won, and he was a rarely in a situation where throwing a match would benefit him. Tanking a set or two, though? He’d been doing that since he was a teenager racking up both trophies and illicit cash on Los Angeles courts in the 1930s. He had a hard time getting motivated without money on the line, so in a lopsided early-round match, he’d often play indifferently. After losing a few games or couple of sets, a buddy in the stands might signal that he’d finally found someone to take the other side of a bet.
Even before the first Battle of the Sexes–the “Mother’s Day Massacre” of Margaret Court that convinced Billie Jean King to take on Riggs a few months later–some people wondered which side Bobby would back. His bluster was convincing, but he was a 55-year-old pusher taking on the best woman player in the world.
His triumph against Court couldn’t have been greater. He destroyed her in 57 minutes, dropping only three games. What’s more, the event captured the world’s imagination, attracting record television audiences and guaranteeing him a steady stream of sponsorship and appearance income. If anyone threw that match, it was Margaret. But it’s far more likely she just wasn’t prepared for either the spectacle or the craft of the greatest dinkballer of all time.
Everything was different against Billie Jean. Riggs was out of shape. Before the match, he was the one who looked morose, overwhelmed by the occasion and the 30,000-strong crowd at the Houston Astrodome. His play was ineffectual from the outset. He double-faulted, made careless errors, and watched as King smashed away one lob after another.
That’s what really got people talking about a fix. Bobby was a control artist. Even with tennis elbow and 15 extra pounds, those aren’t skills that just disappear. He had dominated seniors competition–not to mention won Wimbledon 34 years earlier–by anticipating every one of his opponents’ moves and putting each of his shots exactly where he wanted it. In his prime, he claimed, he once went six months without double faulting.
And then there was the lob. While Riggs had a well-rounded game, his lob was the pièce de résistance, the shot that gave him a chance against some of the greatest players of all time. Some of his friends, like former US National doubles champion Gene Mako, were convinced that he wasn’t just tanking, he was playing badly in such a way that savvy fans would realize it. It’s an odd way to salvage one’s dignity, but it can’t be ruled out.
Bobby insisted to his dying day that he played his best. King is also adamant that there was no funny business. Riggs could’ve laid an egg that day for all sorts of other reasons, most of them stemming from the overconfidence he gained four months earlier. We’ll probably never know for sure. With every year that passes, the truth gets that much murkier.
But there’s a reason the debate interests me so much. Bobby Riggs was so good at age 55 that he obliterated Margaret Court. Experts were convinced he should have had nearly as easy a time with Billie Jean. Just how good was this guy?
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It’s almost as difficult to get a handle on Riggs’s greatness as it is to determine what really happened at the Astrodome in September 1973. Bobby never looked like a champion, and his game was easy to underestimate. As Rosie Casals liked to point out, he walked like a duck. (“And besides, he was an idiot.”) His career was split between the amateurs and the pros, with a generous bite taken out of the middle by World War II.
Bobby was a wiry five-feet-seven-inches tall. While his height wasn’t quite the disadvantage it would be now, it sure didn’t help. His main adversaries were six-footers; his rival Frank Kovacs was six-foot-four. The size difference counted against him both on and off court. As a junior, he was denied some playing opportunities because–among other reasons–he didn’t look like a future star.
His finesse game didn’t help matters. Riggs eventually developed a strong first serve, but as a teen, he just spun it in. He handled himself adequately at net, but he didn’t worry much about getting there. He anticipated well, he was breathtakingly fast, and he almost never missed. He was the GPOAT: Greatest Pusher of All Time.
Yet even that description doesn’t do him justice. He was more than just an exemplary exponent of a playing style designed to wear down and aggravate opponents. Surrounded by serve-and-volleyers like Jack Kramer and power hitters like Don Budge who also sought to take the net early, Riggs deployed a defensive game so deadly it might as well have been offense.
Bobby had consistently lost to Budge before the war, but in a series of Army-Navy exhibitions for the troops, he began to edge ahead. The two men faced off at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles in January 1946, a rematch after an earlier contest that was largely decided by an arm injury to Budge.
The Pan-Pacific had a huge clock that hung from the ceiling above the court. Bobby’s lobs not only had to clear the reach of the six-foot-one Budge, they also had to stay under the clock. Riggs recalled:
Every time I lobbed I could hear the crowd holding its breath to see where the ball would go. Most of them fell within six inches of the baseline. Only three of them actually hit the clock. I must have lobbed him about seventy times during that match.
Riggs won, and he solidified his status as the world’s best professional. He’d lose that distinction a couple of years later when he toured against Kramer, but even then, Bobby’s crafty tactics held up against the leading proponent of the hyper-aggressive Big Game. Riggs took the opening match of the series at Madison Square Garden, and he held his own for several weeks before Kramer improved and pulled ahead.
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It takes a bit of discipline to work out Riggs’s place on the timeline of tennis history. He was a rising star in the late 1930s, when Budge’s Grand Slam overshadowed everything else in American tennis. He won three majors between 1939 and 1941, then turned pro just as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. After a couple of post-war years at the top of the pro game, he stepped aside for Kramer.
The chronology doesn’t lie, but Bobby seems to exist in a kind of parallel tennis universe. Thanks to his size, his penchant for gambling, and his wrong-side-of-the-tracks origins, he was never embraced by Perry Jones, the grand poobah of Southern California tennis. Instead, his mentor throughout his teen years was Esther Bartosh, a physician who only took up tennis in her late twenties because she was frequently on call. She needed a sport she could play while still within reach of a phone.
Most promising youngsters traveled the country with financial aid from their regional associations. Bobby had to scare up his own boosters. Bartosh contributed some money and transportation, and Riggs later hooked up with a gadfly named Jack Del Valle. Del Valle drove him to tournaments around the country, funding their travels with bets on Riggs’s matches.
Other stars played for pride–or at least they pretended to. With Bobby, money was always front and center, whether he was negotiating outsized “expenses” from tournament directors or risking his take in an all-night poker game the night before the final.
Eventually Bobby moved to Chicago, where the local establishment was more accepting of his quirks. It helped that he won almost every tournament he entered. Jones’s influence kept him off the Davis Cup team until 1938, and the USLTA didn’t send him to Wimbledon until 1939. By then, still only 21 years old, he was clearly the best amateur player in the country. He was more than ready: He won the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles on his first try.
Only then did Riggs fall in step with the usual status and schedule of an amateur champion. But the war in Europe tore up the calendar. Wimbledon wouldn’t resume until 1946. After Bobby suffered the most painful loss of his career to Adrian Quist in the Davis Cup Challenge Round that September, he had no chance to redeem himself. The international team competition was suspended for the duration as well.
Observers looking for reasons to discount his accomplishments didn’t have to work very hard. For one thing, the Wimbledon and Forest Hills titles became much more accessible after Budge had turned pro. Even Bobby wouldn’t have backed himself against Budge at that stage. For another, the impending hostilities limited the field. Gottfried von Cramm destroyed Riggs at Queen’s Club in 1939, beating him 6-0, 6-1 in under 20 minutes. Von Cramm would’ve been the favorite at Wimbledon, but the All-England Club forbade him from competing because of a politically-motivated morals conviction in Germany.
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With so many gaps and asterisks on the Riggs record, we’re left to rely on the assessments of his peers. Four-time national doubles titlist Bill Talbert called him “the percentage player par excellence.”
[Riggs had] no real weakness—and no real strengths, either, except the all-important one: he got the ball into the court. He returned everything. His own shots were delivered—like the pitches of such baseball ‘junk artists’ as Preacher Roe of the Dodgers and Eddie Lopat of the Yankees—with a baffling variety of speeds.
Jack Kramer never stopped insisting Bobby was even better than that. He claimed that Riggs was “by far the most underrated of all the top players.”
He had such quickness and ball control, he could adapt to any surface, and he was a super match player…. [H]e could find ways to control the bigger, more powerful opponent. He could pin you back by hitting long, down the lines, and then he’d run you ragged with chips and drop shots. He was outstanding with a volley from either side, and he could lob as well as any man…. He could disguise it, and he could hit winning overheads. They weren’t powerful, but they were always on target.
In the five-plus years between the summer of 1936 and the end of 1941, Bobby won a whopping 68 amateur singles titles. TennisArchives.com credits him with a career tally–including pro tournaments–of 534 match wins against only 93 losses. Many early-round matches are not accounted for, so the actual victory count and corresponding winning percentage are quite a bit higher.
After Kramer dethroned him, Riggs stepped away from serious competition. He returned to serious tennis only in the late 1960s, after a couple of decades promoting pro tours, half-heartedly pursuing a business career, and hustling every rich golfer in America. For Sports Illustrated, it was like Bobby–“The Great Retriever”–never left. “How could anyone really forget Bobby Riggs?”
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Few men could’ve mustered a second act that would outstrip such a sterling first. Only a one-of-a-kind character could play two matches for the history books at 55 years of age.
Journalist Curry Kirkpatrick wrote, “probably his entire life cycle has been one long rehearsal for Ramona”–the Mother’s Day match against Court. Riggs had often played the villain, the cocky dark-haired runt against All-American boys like Kramer. He didn’t mind, especially when it helped him get better odds.
The Battle of the Sexes spectacle could never have reached the same level of notoriety with anyone else. Bobby’s flair for promotion was a good start. But his deceptive game style was what made the whole thing work. He was the weekend pusher against Court’s heavy hitting and King’s netrushing, the unassuming physical specimen against a five-foot-nine Australian nicknamed “The Arm.” Kramer, for one, had far better male chauvinist credentials–Riggs almost certainly exaggerated his own sexism–but he never could’ve played the underdog.
King and Riggs in 1973
One of the best arguments that Bobby didn’t throw the match against Billie Jean is that he believed a small fortune in future income was at stake. He estimated that he made $1.5 million from the match at the Astrodome, and he envisioned an annual challenge match in which he’d take on the best player on the women’s circuit until someone finally beat him. His celebrity persisted–and paid off–nonetheless. But he didn’t know that until afterwards.
Whatever ultimately caused Billie Jean’s 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 victory, Riggs came to terms with it:
The operation was a great success, a beautiful promotion. The only thing is, me, the patient, got killed. But, hey, a happy ending. I cried all the way to the bank.
Bobby learned in his time hustling golf that playing well was only half the battle. Skillfully negotiating the terms of the bet–handicaps, ground rules, and the like–was every bit as important. He applied the same logic to his everyday tennis hustles, quibbling over what advantages he would give a challenger in order to create the appearance of an even match while still keeping a bit of an edge for himself.
Still, no matter what the terms, he still had to win. Across five decades of competitive tennis, he almost always did just that. In the match with Billie Jean, Bobby finally found something even better. He could win even by losing.