Category: 1973 Redux

After injury, illness, a summer-long media circus, and a nationally-televised battle with Bobby Riggs, Billie Jean King deserved a break. After finishing up her duties in Houston, she took one… for exactly ten days.

The week after her victory over Riggs, Madame Superstar sat out as most of the top women gathered for the Slims event in Columbus, Georgia. Chris Evert edged out Rosie Casals in the semis, then claimed the title when Margaret Court withdrew with a pulled calf muscle.

One week, apparently, was enough. When the tour made its next stop in Phoenix, King was there. On October 2nd, she returned to action, facing 24-year-old Peggy Michel in the first round.

King received a hero’s welcome, but Michel had plenty of support as well. She was a local favorite, having starred for four years as part of the Arizona State tennis team. After a comfortable 6-1 first set for the top seed, Michel took advantage of the familiar conditions to mount a comeback.

Billie Jean struggled with the altitude, watching many of her serves and groundstrokes float just long. Things got worse in the sixth game of the second set, when she believed a Michel shot was out, but neither the linesman nor the chair umpire saw it. They replayed the point, and from a 3-2 advantage, King was broken to even the set.

Michel broke again in the twelfth game, helped by a King double fault at set point. The underdog won the set, 7-5. In the decider, though, the veteran regrouped, cut down on the errors, and delivered a 6-1, 5-7, 6-3 victory.

“I got through by the skin of my teeth,” said Billie Jean. It was unusual for her to spend more than an hour on court in the early going; she hadn’t lost a set in a first-round match since April. She admitted–obliquely, anyway–that she couldn’t keep up her pace indefinitely. Phoenix, she said, would be her last tournament of the year.

Would you have believed her? Could the warrior of women’s tennis really sit on the sidelines for three months?

Spoiler alert: No. No, she could not.

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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

Roy Emerson wasn’t planning to head west for the 1973 Fireman’s Fund International in Alamo, California. But his tennis-camp schedule opened up, so he took advantage of the free time and made a quick trip to the Golden State.

At the Pacific Southwest, the first leg of his two-tournament swing, Emerson turned in a performance typical of his 37-year-old self. He won a couple of singles matches, then lost in straights to Tom Okker. In the doubles, he paired with Ken Rosewall to reach the semis. He was still one of the best doubles players around: Even as a part-timer, he had picked up five titles in 1973 alone.

A week later in Alamo, the Australian veteran played like a younger man. He battled through a three-setter against Jeff Austin in the second round. He overcame a 5-7 first-set loss to Roscoe Tanner to advance through the quarters. In the semi-finals, Arthur Ashe took another 7-5 first set, but Emerson stormed back to win, 6-2, 6-1.

“I play better when I don’t play so much,” he said. “I can concentrate and enjoy it more if it isn’t week after week.” Alamo–the site of the Round Hill Country Club, outside of Oakland–was just his second tournament since July, and the value of the time off was evident.

On September 30th, Emerson’s opponent in the final was a man nearly two decades his junior, Sweden’s Björn Borg. Everything, it seemed, was new to the 17-year-old, but his learning curve was extraordinary. He had lost first-rounders to middling opponents in his two previous outings on California cement. Here, though, he demolished the big-serving Vladimir Zednik and outlasted third seed Tom Gorman.

Borg got off to a strong start in the final, as well. Despite losing four of the first five games, he reeled off five in a row to win the first set, 7-5. For the third match in a row, Emerson dropped the opener by the same score.

“An old body takes a long time to warm up,” he said.

Emmo started returning better, and he realized that Borg’s two-handed backhand often created opportunities for his own backhand volley–the bread-and-butter shot that had won a dozen major titles for the Australian. He cruised through the second set, 6-1.

An Emerson return, at 4-all in the third, proved to be Borg’s breaking point. At deuce, Emmo ran around a weak serve, blasted a forehand, and won the point. The Swedish teen double-faulted to hand his opponent the break. The veteran served it out for a 5-7, 6-1, 6-4 victory.

Emerson owned more than 100 career singles titles, but it had been awhile. How long? “You would have to ask me a difficult question, wouldn’t you?” said the champion. “Gosh, it’s been so long, I honestly can’t remember.”

Not counting exhibitions, it had been four years. His trophy haul had been doubles-only since the summer of 1969, when he ran off three titles in a row on European clay. He wasn’t about to change his schedule, though: He wouldn’t appear on a singles court again until March.

Borg, for his part, was satisfied with his second-place finish. “I play my own game and if I lose, I lose,” he said. “Next time, I’ll beat him.”

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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

On clay, Ilie Năstase had no peer. The 27-year-old showman from Bucharest had won the 1973 French Open without dropping a set. In Rome, he disposed of Manuel Orantes–the next-best player in the Grand Prix points race–by the imperious score of 6-1, 6-1, 6-1. By September, he had already picked up eight clay-court titles; his only loss was a nailbiter to Adriano Panatta in Bournemouth.

Enough of the circuit was played on clay that Năstase‘s results made him the clear leader in the season-long Grand Prix. Heading into Chicago’s Tam International at the end of September, he had 408 points. The rest of the top six clustered between 284 (Orantes) and 233 (Jimmy Connors).

On less familiar surfaces, the Romanian was vulnerable. He lost to Sandy Mayer at Wimbledon and Andrew Pattison at the US Open. On cement at the Pacific Southwest in Los Angeles, he fell in the semi-final to Tom Okker. Now Năstase needed to contend with the fast, indoor hard courts in Chicago.

It was a surface where anybody could beat anybody. For Năstase, the threat arrived on September 27th, in the form of 23-year-old Australian Phil Dent. Dent was a promising player with many of the usual attributes of his countrymen, like a penchant for grass courts and a knack for doubles. His serve got him into plenty of tiebreaks, but it hadn’t delivered any significant winning streaks.

Though Năstase liked to clown around in the early going, he quickly learned he was in for a fight. American tennis officials had taken some of the fun out of his hijinks, too. At the Cincinnati tournament in August, Ilie spent much of the final protesting line calls, cursing the referee, and stalling in protest. When he won–Orantes, again, was the victim–the referee withheld his prize money. A USLTA disciplinary committee eventually ruled that he would be fined $4,500–half of his earnings in Cinci.

Not so long ago, the charismatic Romanian had been held up as a savior for professional tennis, a TV-friendly face and personality who could drive interest in the game. But with the rise of Stan Smith, and now Connors and Björn Borg, he wasn’t quite so indispensable. There were no shortcuts to sporting fame and fortune: He needed to keep winning.

In fairness, he never stopped doing that. He came into the Dent match with an astonishing total of 94 victories in 1973 alone.

He somehow made it 95. Dent took a close first set, 6-4. Năstase equalized by the same score. It was the highest-quality match of the tournament, perhaps the best Ilie had played on a hard court since he dueled with Connors back in March. Both men served big, returned well, and took care of the business at the net. The crowd, according to the Chicago Tribune, was left “gasping.”

The final set was the most dramatic of all. Neither man edge ahead, and the contest came down to a deciding tiebreak, the 8th of Năstase’s career. Dent couldn’t muster any more heroics, giving the Romanian the breaker and the match, 7-4. The top seed survived the scare, and the tournament kept its drawing card.

The 1973 campaign had brought Ilie down a peg, but only one. Dent, like Mayer and Pattison before him, had shown that the charismatic cad could be beaten–on a fast court, at least. Any more would-be challengers needed to hurry. However things ended in Chicago, Năstase’s next stop was Barcelona, where he would return to his beloved clay.

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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

The Battle of the Sexes concept was so popular that, for a few months in 1973, it seemed like everyone would have a go at it. Throughout the summer, local clubs hosted their own, pitting, say, a woman teaching pro against a men’s age-group champ. In one oddball variation, the woman was seven months pregnant.

By the time Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs settled things at the Astrodome, the public had had enough of the banter and ballyhoo. Riggs wanted a rematch, but America wanted a break.

The last gasp* of the season’s sensation came three days after the Battle itself, in Atlanta on September 23rd. Riggs had appeared at the city’s Bitsy Grant Tennis Center for a doubles exhibition with a few other prominent senior citizens the day before. The main event of the weekend, though, was an intersex matchup even more ridiculous than Billie-versus-Bobby.

* Haha, no, of course this wasn’t the last gasp.

The main drawing card in Atlanta was the facility’s namesake, Bryan “Bitsy” Grant. The 63-year-old pride of Southern tennis had first cracked the national top ten in 1930, won two matches against Australia for the 1937 Davis Cup squad, and twice reached the semi-finals at the US National Championships. Like Riggs, he was a touch artist. The nickname gave it away: He stood only five feet, four inches tall.

For a $500 prize, the eminent Georgian would take on the second-ranking woman player in the South, 19-year-old Betsy Butler. Butler had starred the previous year at Augusta College, playing No. 1 singles on the men’s team. She hadn’t yet tallied many victories on the pro tour, but just a few days earlier, she had lined up in doubles against Evonne Goolagong and aced the Australian twice in a row. Grant had never served as well as the tall teenager already could.

Chris Cobbs, the reporter who covered the match for the Atlanta Constitution, sounded like he would have rather spent his Sunday at home. Bitsy’s first serve kept missing the target, and after he forced a third set, his 63-year-old legs couldn’t keep up anymore. Butler, wrote Cobbs, “dealt another blow to male chauvinist pride and answered a few questions nobody had even thought to ask.”

Young Betsy took the “Atlanta regional” Battle of the Sexes, 6-1, 5-7, 6-3. “A man my age,” said Grant, “has to be a damn fool to play singles like this.”

He was talking about himself, of course. But he could take solace in the fact that he wasn’t the only damn fool running around in September 1973. In defiance of both common sense and Father Time, legions more were ready to cheer the old men on.

* * *

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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

Billie Jean King was the star of the week, there was no doubt about that. Her comprehensive victory over Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome ensured that. Still, it was an awfully good run for Rosie Casals.

On September 22nd, King’s time in Houston finally came to an end. The adrenaline rush of the Battle of the Sexes sputtered out, and in the semi-finals of the Slims event at the Net Set Racquet Club, Billie Jean lost to Casals, 7-6, 6-1. Her favorite racket went missing just before the match, but that wasn’t really the issue: she was “mentally and physically exhausted.” That, she said, “and the fact that Rosie played better tennis.”

Casals had a knack for stepping up on big stages. She won the first Slims event in Houston, back in 1970, and she took the $30,000 top prize at the record-setting Family Circle Cup earlier in 1973. The five-foot, one-inch netrusher was perhaps the best doubles player of her era, winning well over one hundred career titles, including five Wimbledons with Billie Jean. The perpetual runner-up or semi-finalist in singles, she was the second-leading money winner on the 1973 Slims tour, and with King and Margaret Court absent, she picked up a title in St. Louis the week before the Battle.

From the beginning, Rosie had been one of Riggs’s most acerbic critics. She was a reporter’s dream, sitting in the locker room with beer in hand, dishing out one-liners about friends, enemies, and a certain 55-year-old who–she never failed to point out–walked like a duck. When Billie Jean requested a female voice in the Astrodome commentary booth, Casals was the obvious choice. The television producers told her to say whatever she wanted, short of profanity. She obliged.

Rosie also displayed an eerie forecasting prowess. On the telecast, she predicted a 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 triumph for King.

As she continued her run in Houston, she didn’t let up on the old man. “Bobby choked,” she said. “[Co-commentator Gene] Scott said he was a good athlete; I said he wasn’t. He’s old and out of shape–out of our league. I don’t think he could break into the women’s top ten.”

With Casals in the role of attack dog, Billie Jean could afford to be magnanimous. “I felt sorry for him,” she said. “He had tried hard and given his best. I know how that feels. I know what it means to lose. He’s been a great loser.”

That isn’t to say that Riggs was ready to make a habit of it. He was already back in action on the 22nd, joining a group of 60-somethings–including former top-tenner Bitsy Grant–for a doubles exhibition in Atlanta. He and partner Hank Crawford won in straights, and Bobby collected $100 a set.

The Battle of the Sexes had changed the world, but Riggs and King–not to mention Casals–were already back to the grind.

* * *

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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

Less than 24 hours after polishing off Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome, Billie Jean King was back at the Net Set Racquet Club in suburban Houston. She had won two matches at the Virginia Slims tournament on Monday, and on September 21st, she returned to play the quarter-final.

In front of about 400 fans–quite a shift from 30,000 the night before–King took apart 15-year-old Robin Tenney, 6-1, 6-1. She probably spent more time with the press, fielding the inevitable questions about a Battle of the Sexes rematch, than she did on court. Another contrast: Instead of $100,000, this victory was worth about $1,000.

In Saturday’s semi-final, Billie Jean would meet her old friend (and Battle television commentator) Rosie Casals. The two women had come a long way in just three years.

The Houston event was not one of the most lucrative or well-attended stops on the Slims circuit. But it carried a great deal of historical weight. In 1970, the top women pros objected to a insulting prize-money split at the Pacific Southwest in Los Angeles, a longstanding stalwart on the tennis calendar. Gladys Heldman of World Tennis magazine put together her own event in Houston for the same week. Nine women signed symbolic one-dollar contracts, and the Pac Southwest field was gutted. Casals won that first tour event.

The next year, King and Casals went back to Los Angeles. The prize money situation had not improved, and the ladies had a convenient target for their dissatisfaction in Jack Kramer, the tournament director and former superstar player. Kramer believed that fans didn’t want to watch women’s tennis. “Evidence” piled up as the ladies were exiled to outer courts and men’s matches entertained the grandstand crowds. A week–well, a decade–of frustration came to a head after a bad line call in the 1971 final. Midway through a first-set tiebreak, King and Casals walked out, and the match went down as a double default.

That was the last professional women’s match at the Pacific Southwest. While the Los Angeles tournament retained a prime position in the men’s Grand Prix, awarding $11,000 to its 1973 champion, the women’s event turned into a sideshow. There was no longer any prize money at all.

On September 21st, when King joined Casals, Nancy Richey, and Françoise Dürr in the Houston semis, 17-year-old Kathy May led a distinctly lesser field into the Pacific Southwest final four. The Los Angeles Times reported on the men’s matches–Jimmy Connors saved match point to squeak past Stan Smith–but the unofficial organ of the Southern California tennis world didn’t bother to mention to May or her rivals.

Kramer, Connors, Ilie Năstase, and Arthur Ashe were part of a crowd that followed the Battle of the Sexes on locker room televisions. One group of line judges abandoned their posts to join them, and Kramer had to man a line himself. When Connors and Năstase were called to play a doubles match, they didn’t budge; Kramer had to push them out the door.

As it turned out, people really wanted to watch women’s tennis.

* * *

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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

It is hard to convey the degree to which the sports world was seized by the Battle of the Sexes. On September 19th, 1973, the day before the match, newspapers around the United States put together full-page spreads to preview the long-awaited tilt. Punters scrambled to lay last minute wagers: Bobby Riggs was a 5-2 favorite, and it was increasingly difficult to find a Billie Jean King backer to bet against.

Celebrities flocked to Houston. George Foreman would hand over the winner’s check. Bombshell Mamie Van Doren met Riggs on a talk show and became an ardent cheerleader. 69-year-old painter Salvador Dali turned up, for some reason.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said a Baltimore saloonkeeper. “Everybody’s talking about it. I mean people who don’t even like tennis–people who could care less about Ron Laver or whatever his name is. A serious tennis match could never get the public as excited as this thing has.”

Laver himself–Rod, not Ron–wasn’t crazy about it. He feared it was turning his sport into a burlesque.

He wasn’t wrong. But… for a gimmick, it was sure a glorious one. While the 51,000-capacity Houston Astrodome wasn’t going to sell out, more than half of the tickets were already accounted for. The Battle would set a new attendance record for a tennis match, and the television broadcast was expected to reach as many as 90 million viewers.

Rocket Rod, alas, could never.

So much of the spectacle’s success was owing to the goofy charisma of the diminutive, motor-mouthed Riggs. Even the mission-focused Billie Jean couldn’t always help herself: “I like him and I hate him. He is so ridiculous. Sometimes I laugh, but mostly I get furious.”

Bobby promoted the match–and promoted it, and promoted it some more–with a steady stream of male chauvinist patter: Women are at their best in the kitchen and the bedroom. (Billie Jean said she didn’t mind the bedroom part.) He claimed membership in WORMS: the World Organization for the Retention of Male Supremacy.

The irony was evident, even to Riggs. Women’s tennis, he said, “has come a long way, baby, and playing me isn’t hurting either…. Tennis has been the benefactor all over the world. It just happens to be good for Bobby Riggs, too, but that is only incidental.”

What made the match so compelling was that the outcome was truly uncertain. All the social relevance and celebrity appeal in the world couldn’t manufacture a must-watch out of an obvious blowout. Hundreds of the top men tennis players could beat Billie Jean, and a handful of them had done so over the years, in practice. Riggs, with his funky dink-ball game and the wildcard of his advanced age, could bewilder King–as he had Margaret Court–or could be overpowered by her.

The Court result, combined with a general faith in the savviness of the 1939 Wimbledon champion, made it tough to bet against Bobby. But several details tilted the forecast in the other direction. The Sportface surface was a low-bouncing one that would favor a dashing volleyer over a geriatric lob machine, especially over the course of a best-of-five-set match. Riggs had coasted through his preparation, chugging vitamins but letting his overall fitness sag from its Mother’s Day peak. Billie Jean had Margaret’s loss to learn from, and she’d know exactly what to expect.

Expert predictions were, well, predictable. Few pundits broke ranks with their own gender. The New York Times ran side-by-side pieces presenting each player’s case, by Neil Amdur and Grace Lichtenstein. Pancho Segura, one of the finest tennis minds in the game’s history, sided with his buddy Bobby, producing the X’s and O’s to explain why the veteran would pull through. No less a figure than Althea Gibson picked Billie Jean, who would “run Bobby’s little legs off.”

King said over and over again that it wasn’t (just) about the money. She was ready to put half of the human race on her back and carry them to victory.

Could Bobby muster the motivation to counter Billie Jean’s sense of responsibility? Long-time pal Lornie Kuhle couldn’t imagine the Happy Hustler losing what was, at its core, the greatest tennis hustle of all time. “That’s why Bobby’s going to win,” he said. “There’s really too much money on the line for him to lose.”

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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

Hold the presses–we have a final result. Riggs beat King, 6-3, 6-4. Bobby barely broke a sweat.

Okay, the victim wasn’t Billie Jean. It was her husband, Larry King. On September 18th, just two days away from the main event, Bobby Riggs hustled Mr. King for $300. Larry wasn’t much of a tennis player, though he did enter a few husband-and-wife doubles events with Billie Jean in the mid-60s. Bobby spotted him three games in the first set, four games in the second. You can do the math: The man of the hour won twelve games in a row.

In fairness, Larry was probably exhausted. The public knew him as Billie Jean’s “husband and business partner”–not necessarily in that order. He ran interference for Madame Superstar, handling travel arrangements and ferreting out business opportunities for his wife. The job was never more demanding that it was this week. Everyone wanted a piece of Billie Jean, and the woman herself was hiding out.

The Kings had spent years turning over every leaf, identifying sources of funding and promotion for women’s tennis. Now, the phone never stopped ringing. Jerry Perenchio, the producer staging the match, had taken to calling Thursday night’s spectacle a $2 million operation. Nominally, it was winner-take-all, for $100,000. In actuality, each player was guaranteed another $100,000 for broadcast rights. Sponsorships went up from there.

Way up.

“If this were a Broadway show,” wrote Grace Lichtenstein in the New York Times, “the title would be ‘Money!'”

Television advertising spots had sold out almost instantly. Billie Jean would earn $25,000 for appearing in one of them, a hair-roller commercial for Sunbeam. Riggs was getting $75,000 from Hai Karate, the official cologne of the Happy Hustler. Nabisco paid him $20,000 to flog its Sugar Daddy candy bar. The Kings got a cut of sales from the ubiquitous pro-Billie Jean pins and t-shirts.

“Don’t feel sorry for the loser,” said Perenchio.

He meant Bobby or Billie Jean, of course. But Larry King, one of Riggs’s many victims in the days before the Battle, would also do just fine.

* * *

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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email: