The Battle of the Sexes with Julie Kliegman

Sarah teams up with writer and editor Julie Kliegman—author of the hotly anticipated book MIND GAME—to look back at tennis's Battle of the Sexes, between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs (aka the Libber and the Lobber). No pigs were harmed in the making of this episode or in the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973.

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Transcript

Sarah: I guess I feel ultimately like America was tricked into watching a woman do something other than suffer. And I like that.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. And today we are talking with Julie Kliegman, our tennis correspondent, about the Battle of the Sexes. We are so excited that our humble show now has a tennis correspondent. And we are extra excited that correspondent is Julie Kliegman, who we last heard from in a wonderful episode about Renee Richards and the greater history and context of trans athletes and American sports.

We are continuing our exploration of gender and sport in this discussion of the Battle of the Sexes, the world-famous tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. This was an episode I was really excited to do because this is one of those totemic events in 20th century American history that I, for one, and I'm sure many of you grew up hearing about. And a story that to me has all of the elements that make sports narrative so fascinating, because we are watching Americans watching two people who are playing tennis, but are also representing the hopes and dreams and bigotry of everybody watching them. And I will go on record saying that tennis is a very exciting sport. But this made it even exciting-er. 

This was a really fun episode to record. I'm so happy to share it with you. And I am also so happy to tell you that You're Wrong About will be at San Francisco Sketchfest. It's coming up next month, and Chelsea Weber-Smith and I will be performing February 2nd, at the Great Star Theater in San Francisco at seven o'clock. You can find more information about that at sketchfest.com, and we'll have a link in the show notes for you. I hope we get to see you there. 

And by the way, Happy New Year's! This is our first episode of 2024. I am so excited to begin another year of stories and questions and terrible jokes. And we are all so excited that you are here with us. Let's go play some tennis.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you the story behind the Ms. Magazine covers. With me today, as I live and breathe, is Julie Kliegman. 

Julie: Hello, Sarah. 

Sarah: Hello, Julie. How are you? 

Julie: I'm doing great. How are you? 

Sarah: I'm well. We're recording this in December, so it's a little bit… it's literally mathematically difficult to get the stuff you need to do done in a day and also have outside daylight time.

Julie: Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a struggle. 

Sarah: I think anyone who is going on actively dating in the darkest days of winter needs an award, because I just finish work and I'm like, time to prepare and consume a root vegetable. 

Julie: What did I tell you? I told you I took a giant nap after work. And I think that's the only thing there is to do besides consume a root vegetable. 

Sarah: Yeah, that's how you conserve your energy. And I'm so excited today because we're talking about a topic that I can't even call by the name I put it in my calendar, because the name I think of it by is a name that gives away what happened in it. So we're calling it the Battle of the Sexes. 

For the record, what is sex versus gender? Because some people waited too long to ask, and now they don't want to ask. We should tell them

Julie: That is a great question, Sarah. So sex is thought of as biological. So sex is what you're working with, and gender is how you see yourself and how society sees you, and how those things mesh or don't mesh.

Sarah: Wow. I love that definition. And can I give you my kind of handed down, pop culture understanding of this event, which is my favorite kind of start the show with? At some point in the 70s, I couldn't say when. I would say ’74-ish. This feels like a 1974 thing. 

Julie: It is ‘73, close.

Sarah: Very good. Bobby Riggs, who was pretty old by tennis standards. I'm not trying to be mean, but he was like in his 50s at this time. And so his glory days as a professional tennis player had been like the 1940s. 

Julie: His heyday was like 1939. He won that year when Wimbledon was still an amateur tournament. He won singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at Wimbledon that year.

Sarah: Good for him. My understanding, and I have no idea how this idea happened or whose idea maybe it truly was, but he was like, “This women's lib thing, this fad, this has gone too far. We need to prove something by having me compete against one of the top women in tennis and prove that women are worse at tennis.” Which, I guess if you're in your mid-fifties, it does strengthen your argument if you can beat somebody to the extent that you're making any kind of argument at all, which is debatable.

Julie: You've got the basics down. I think it was more or less Bobby's idea. So he is all about the cash grabs. So I guess if you're retired and you're also a degenerate gambler, all you want to do is hustle people for different things. And we won't get too far ahead of ourselves, but did he rig this kind of component to this? Did he rig? HA!  Okay. 

Sarah: Yeah. It’s like a JK Rowling name. You're like ,his last name does suggest what he's going to spend his time doing. What was your perception of this when you were growing up, if any? 

Julie: Yeah, it was just ‘anything you can do I can do better’ vibe. Which I guess my 90s version would have been Mia Hamm and Michael Jordan and that Gatorade commercial. Here's a woman who is good. Here's a guy who is capital B bad. One time they did a sports thing and it meant a lot to a lot of people. That's probably the extent I knew of it growing up. 

Sarah: Tennis is a sport that, unlike most sports, I've actually played with apparent enthusiasm at one time in my life. Can't say that about softball. It feels like it's never quite caught on for Americans, or only for the rich ones. Which is weird because it doesn't seem like in the way it's constructed, exclusionary, and yet it appears that way socially. 

Julie: Yeah, I think sometimes the individual sports like that kind of do get siphoned off for the rich kids.

Sarah: I was talking to friends recently about powder puff football. Do you know about this? 

Julie: Of course. Yeah. 

Sarah: And I had never encountered it because I was like, oh, this must be a thing they only do in Washington. But it's because my school didn't have a football team because we just didn't have enough kids.

Julie: Oh, yeah, no. This totally happened at my New Jersey school.

Sarah: And is it just like, let's have girls play football? 

Julie: Ha. Yeah, that's the extent of the idea. Yeah. 

Sarah: And as we talked about in our Renee episode, and we'll continue talking about forever, probably the way that we cannot sport in America without making it all about gender is really interesting. Yeah. Interesting. 

Julie: Where should we begin? As you have already alluded to, something about this whole thing feels so hollow. But I do want to acknowledge that at the same time, for a lot of people, it feels extremely sincere and genuine. To me it's, oh, we're diminishing the fight for women's rights to a single tennis match. Which I don't know, probably not the best idea, but at the same time, like if you had to pick a tennis match to do that with, which you don't. But if you did have to pick a tennis match, 90 million people watched it on ABC, 30,000 people watched it in person, which was a tennis record at the time. So if you're going to ascribe a weird amount of meaning to one silly, circusy game, it might as well be this one. 

And it's worth talking about because it's colorful and weird and cringy, and there's a lot to dive into. I guess we should also clarify that we're going to be talking primarily about two different so-called Battle of the Sexes. The main one being Bobby and Billie, but there are so many in tennis alone. And one of them involves Trump wanting John McEnroe to play Serena Williams, so it's definitely worth looking up the whole lot of them. 

Sarah: You know what the great thing about that, is that I'm like, that could have happened in 1999 and it could have happened this year. Unless we're John McEnroe's dead. I don't think he is though. 

He's not dead. 

Sarah: But I can see that being something he did while he was President. I would love to know about who are these people that we're talking about.

Julie: So Billie Jean King was 29 years old at the time. She was a consistently high-ranking member of what was then called the Virginia Slim Circuit, which was a women's tour with tournaments that she, herself, started with others to split away from the men so they could earn more prize money. 

Sarah: Of course. It's also like, when you read Ms. Magazine from the 70s and 80s, it's other quite apparent problems aside, you're like, wow, a lot of cigarette ads. This is like half cigarette ads some years. They were doing what they had to. 

Julie: Oh yeah. Magazines, not too often, they turn away ad dollars. So at this point, our friend Billie had won nine majors in singles. And she would end her career with 12. On the other side, we have Bobby, who was 55 and retired. He had six major titles in his career. Three of those were singles, including the one at Wimbledon from 1939 that I mentioned. 

He had always been a total showman. He had a history of gambling, including in tennis, and including on himself. He had been asking Billie Jean King to play him for ages. They met in 1971, as she tells it in her memoir, All In. He literally jumped a fence to talk to her in Queens after she wouldn't take his call about playing him, and she turned him down. 

That's when he approaches another player on tour, Margaret Court, who is an Australian woman. She is an incredible tennis player as well as Billie. Billie had finally beaten her in the semifinals of an Indianapolis tournament to snap Court's 12 tournament winning streak. Court is really quite accomplished. 

Sarah: So are they both near the top of the rankings in their sport at the time? 

Julie: Exactly. 

Sarah: It seems like the people who are at the top of a sport generally have spent a lot of years in the same very small communities as each other, and that there is often some degree of that you're competing against each other, but you're also going to have to keep competing against each other for a really long time. So you have to be congenial about it. 

Julie: Yeah, that is the relationship I would say the two of them had, congenial. I don't think they were the best of friends at any point, but they did have this awareness that they're together in the same locker rooms week after week. 

Sarah: God, I cannot imagine how many people listening to you describe this have also had a weird, creepy, tangential to their work older guy, literally or figuratively, jump a fence to bother them. 

Julie: Yeah, it's pretty unfortunate that it's so relatable, but it really is. He had done matches in all sorts of various setups. He had done matches with chairs on the court, he had attached himself to a dog on a leash.

Sarah: Doesn't seem very nice for the dog. 

Julie: No, not really. That is not the only questionable animal treatment in this story, surprisingly. I think the other story has a happy ending, and presumably this dog turned out fine too, so it could be worse.

Sarah: Gosh darn it, Bobby, don't involve dogs in this. 

Julie: He has also done at least one match in drag. That's the kind of troll he is. Having been rejected pretty clearly by Billie Jean, Bobby goes to Margaret Court. She is basically the anti-Billie Jean King of today in terms of women's rights and queer rights. Billie Jean King was outed in, I believe, ‘81 as a lesbian. Court today is anti-same sex marriage. Whereas Billie Jean King has really become a champion of queer rights across the board, including for trans people, trans athletes specifically. 

Sarah: That's so great. It's so rare that you're like, what is this person whose greatest fame happened decades ago? What are they saying now about trans rights? I bet it's great that never happens.

Julie: It really does never happen. She had, not to say she has never had questionable comments on anything. Like she appeared to at one point to support Women's Tour of Today playing in Saudi Arabia, or at least explore the idea of playing in Saudi Arabia. As you can imagine, it did not go over particularly well with people who value human rights.

But Billie Jean has done a ton of good. She has done a lot to make sports more inclusive of women and of queer people. Court, we cannot say the same for her. Though she is a tennis icon for better or for worse.

Sarah: This is my sense from reading a Nora Ephron essay about this a couple months ago. But because I know that Billie Jean King was fucking ripped at this time, like full Sarah Connor Terminator Judgment Day, just ready to start society anew. 

And was the perception of Margaret Court, a) I think Australians are always considered 20% nicer by Americans than they actually are, because the accent is so melodious. An Australian can really make you feel like you're getting a great compliment when they're actually nagging you about something. Was she considered more, not to be too deterministic about this, but even her name is pretty feminine. 

Julie: Yeah. And a large part of her identity at the time was she did have a kid. And she did make it clear that her family comes first, and stuff like that. So I don't think you're wrong. She was seen as more feminine, or stereotypically feminine, at least. 

So in the Nora Ephron essay that you mentioned, in Crazy Salad, this essay is all about the battle of the sexes between Court and Riggs. And the way she put it was that she knew Court was going to leave something to be desired, in terms of being a heroine for the entire female population.

Sarah: Which is pretty tough, yeah. 

Julie: Also, it feels worth pointing out that Ephron was the only female writer covering the Riggs versus Court match, at least in her memory, which I believe. That's remarkable. The coverage of both of these matches left a lot to be desired, I felt. 

Sarah: What did that look like? I can only imagine the kind of language that might have appeared.

Julie: For Billie's match with Bobby, they had a male perspective commentator and a female perspective commentator. And one was a man and one was a woman, and they did commentate along those lines. Like the dude was making a lot of comments about how Billie Jean looked. It was something that rankled her when she watched it back later even though I'm sure she wasn't surprised.

Sarah: Yeah, and so with the Court match, what was the kind of patter leading up to that, and what were people claiming that this was going to accomplish exactly? 

Julie: I guess I'll say first to set the stakes that Riggs proposes $10,000 go to the winner of a match with Court. Billie Jean King is, as she recalls in her memoir, in disbelief that Court quote “fell for it and took up the challenge”.

And I think part of it was that Court was a little bit like, “Oh, Bobby's been talking about Billie as the best player in the world. I think I'm the best player in the world.” So maybe that was a motivating factor for her. This match, to your question about the patter kind of leading up to it, this match was literally set for Mother's Day, 1973. With all the meaning that comes with it, that's how the conversation was trending. 

And CBS decided to double the payday. This took place in Ramona in San Diego County. There was, I think, a lot of anxiety around this. I don't know if people knew at the time that it was going to turn into this giant thing. I don't think Court knew at the time that it was going to turn into this giant thing. But I guess if you're a woman, you can't really just expect to play a male chauvinist for funsies and hope that the news goes away 20 minutes later. 

Sarah: I was thinking about this yesterday, because it feels like the scandal,, outrage public obsession cycle moves so much faster now, you'd think that it would go easier on people. But what really seems to be the case is that even if you're only in the public eye on the news for one morning, then people flock to your Instagram page or whatever. And you have your own personal slice of the public to deal with for years.

Julie: Oh yeah, and then you milkshake duck and it's a whole thing. 

Sarah: Yeah, God, I wonder where Ken Bone is right now. Anyway. God bless. You weren't ready. No one is. 

Julie: So Billie, for her part, is listening to this Mother's Day match on a portable radio in Honolulu. She was traveling. What she hears is that Court loses 6-2, 6-1. That's a pretty glaring defeat, I would say. 

Sarah: That's what we call getting thrashed. 

Julie: I believe that's the technical term, yeah. That doesn't sit right with Billie or, I believe, she's with other players watching at the time. She seems to know the stakes, or at least in her memoir, she positions herself as having known the mistakes.

She knew after that she had to play Bobby after the quote “Mother's Day Massacre”, as that match is now known pretty widely. She says, “I confess that there were moments, once the negotiations for our match began, when I'd get a churning in the pit of my stomach as I imagined the increased hype, the pressure, the responsibility that was coming if I played Riggs. I'd think, oh my god, I have to win.” She says, “It wasn't just about my pride or reputation. I imagine that our tour could be threatened or might disappear, Title IX could be damaged, and so many causes that we were still working for, starting with equal prize money and equitable treatment, would falter.” 

Sarah: It feels so strange to hear how your involvement in a sport that you as a large segment of humanity are just by definition going to be playing, is treated as a conditional privilege somehow.

Julie: Yeah, you see this in the media all the time with think pieces about the WNBA now, but also with the NWSL, the Women's Soccer League, can they survive? It's been more than 10 years. They're gonna survive. But it's treated as something that the rug could be pulled out from under you at any time.

Sarah: Yeah, and so it also reminds me of Sally Ride going into space as the first American woman in space and having to, which we'd already had a Russian woman in space, so I feel like that should have carried over, but whatever. But yeah, my understanding of the language around that was that it was if Sally doesn't do amazing in space and not make a single mistake, then we just can't send women up there. They're too fragile. 

Julie: I mean, yeah that is how everyone acts anytime anybody picks up a tennis racket or does anything. It's wild. It's really strange. 

Sarah: Women did laundry in the 1800s, women can do anything, it's fine. For real.

Julie: Billie gets in touch and gets things going with Bobby about setting up the next Battle of the Sexes. Which is the definitive Battle of the Sexes, as it would turn out. So he wasn't happy with that one.

Sarah: He was like, “I've proven I can beat this other woman, but I want my true adversary”, or whatever. 

Julie: Yeah, even if you had played Billie first, I think he still would have wanted to play Court. I think he had a particular fascination with Billie, and they had a sort of relationship that eventually morphed into a friendship. But there's something resembling a friendship. That's where this is headed. In general, he just can't resist a spectacle. If something's going on, Bobby Riggs is going to be part of it. 

Sarah: Maybe there is, but if there isn't, there should be a musical about all this.

Julie: I love that. You should get started writing that. 

Sarah: Okay, I will. 

Julie: I just assigned it to you. You're welcome. I think the most positive and unquestionable thing I have to say about this match is that I love that it features two people who wore objectively giant pairs of glasses to play sports. It just makes me so happy. I think it's inspiration for glasses wearers everywhere. 

Sarah: That's so nice. Yeah, we, it really compensates for what happened to that guy in the mummy. Yes. Yes. A.k.a., the reason I wore contacts for 20 years. 

Julie: So our friend Nora did not write about this match, unfortunately, so we will have to plow forward without her commentary. But she did put money on Billie Jean.

Sarah: Oh, nice. 

Julie: Yeah. We're past Mother's Day now. Obviously by late June of 1973, they have agreed to terms. We're really upping the stakes this time financially. It's a $100,000 winner takes all purse. And it is being promoted by the guy who promoted the Ali Fraser match at Madison Square Garden.

Courtside seats were $100 a pop in ‘70s money. When you could go to college for that amount. People are hyped. There's a series of press conferences that Billy and Bobby do, and they really are both like gamely playing into the narrative as well. Two months before the match, he says pretty directly in a press conference that it's ridiculous women want the same money as men.

He also says of Billie Jean King, quote, “I can kill her”, which makes me think he just needs to calm down a tiny bit. 

Sarah: Exactly. It's just never a cute look to threaten to kill your opponent in a sporting match, and it's scary. 

Julie: Yeah, he has this whole bit of being sexist as a joke or just for attention or money. There's this question of, is he really sexist? And I would argue that it's not super harmless to threaten to kill your opponent as a joke. Like you said, it's not very cute. It doesn't make you seem like a better competitor even. It just is kind of weird.

Sarah: The thing with men where they're like, am I an incredibly virulently sexist person who hates women, or is it a bit? And it's like, well, it kind of doesn't matter to me. I really, whatever you're doing, I really don't like it and I don't feel good around you.

Julie: Right. What makes you think it's a funny bit? King continues to be aware of the significance of the match for her. She's talking about in her book of women being tired of seeing themselves as second class citizens. She talks about sexism and racism, not only in sports, but more broadly. Yeah, this broadcast was a really big deal. The advertising for it apparently cost $90,000 a minute.

Sarah: I have no idea what standard advertising costs are in 1973, to be fair, but that's just a lot of money. 

Julie: It is. Yeah, I'm famously like not a businessperson, but it does seem like quite a bit of money. 

Sarah: And ironically, the only way you can get that kind of advertising money played into a sporting event involving a female athlete, is by pitting her against a man, as if we're proving something. Which is like... That's just rich. It's rich in information. 

Julie: Absolutely. At this point, in the 70s we’re a long ways away from having a Women's National Soccer Team. We're obviously an even longer ways away from having the WNBA. In the 70s, a lot of people are very unconvinced that women deserved to play sports, let alone that they should be watching them in person or on TV.

Sarah: My favorite revealing fact about that, that I'm sure I learned because my best friend in high school's mom subscribed to Runner’s World, is that Catherine Switzer in ’68-‘69 jumped into the Boston Marathon to run it, because women weren't technically allowed in a race, and an official attacked her. 

Julie: Normal stuff. 

Sarah: I really can't get over that, that the same time period that we were putting men on the moon – men, to be specific - we were like, women can't run marathons. It's because their uteruses will just drop right out. A society can only understand facts to the extent that we're ready to accept them.

Julie: Yeah. That's so true. And I want to say around the ‘30s, there was a lot of conversation and debate about whether women could run much shorter distances and have their uteruses and everything be okay.

Sarah: Oh my god. Throughout history, human beings of all genders have been engaged in a mad dash to somehow survive. And that often involves chasing someone or something, or being chased, and just everybody has mostly just dealt with it.

Julie: Somehow. Yeah, the uteruses have lived on. 

Sarah: It's also so funny because the very people who historically have been like, women can't do this, can't do that, anybody with a uterus you just gotta protect the uterus. You can't do this because of your uterus. You can have a baby with it, though. Stop whining. You simply must carry to term an entire pregnancy. 

Julie: At least one. 

Sarah: It's not dangerous in any way, and it shouldn't affect you mentally or physically or hormonally. It's fine.

Julie: If it does, you're hysterical. Yeah. 

Sarah: Truly, one of the most violent things that can happen to your body is having a baby. And men throughout time have been like, “I'm not worried about that one.” Don't run.

Julie: It's natural. Having a baby is natural. It's normal. It's supposed to happen. 

Sarah: And as I say about this, sepsis is natural. A lot of things are natural. That doesn't mean we should do them. Nothing against babies, but if your only argument for something is that it's natural. 

Julie: Eh. Correct. On play by play, because of course they have a man on play by play, it's Howard Cosell. They have a woman giving a woman's perspective of the match, who is Rosie Casals, a friend of Billie Jean's. And they're going to have Billie's mortal enemy, Jack Kramer, giving the men's perspective. But she made that pretty clear that was a deal breaker for her, so he was eventually replaced by Gene Scott.

Sarah: And we gotta ask, how did they become mortal enemies, if we know? 

Julie: Most of my knowledge on this comes from the movie, the 2017 Battle of the Sexes movie, which obviously is gonna be questionable, factually. But It seemed like Kramer had shut down opportunities for women to get equal prize money, which kind of prompted the Virginia Slim circuit existing in the first place.

The last press conference before the match gets weirdly tense. It definitely has elements of that showmanship and the barbs going back and forth and all that. But then Billie says something interesting. She says, “That creep runs down women. I like him for many things, but I hate him putting down women, not giving us credit as competitors.”

And then Bobby responds, completely missing the point, “Please don't call me a creep. You don't mean that, do you? Won't you take that back?”

Sarah: Oh my god. Do you feel like there's any Trump DNA in this guy? 

Julie: I feel like it's hard in our world to talk about a showman like this who says over the top bigoted things without seeing a little bit of Trump in him. Yeah. 

Sarah: The area around the ego becomes so inflamed that it's this giant pulsating hangnail.

Julie: So frightening. Yeah. I wish Bobby were still with us, because I have so many questions. I want to know how much of this was a joke to him and how much of it became real. Because I think certain times, if you do see this as an act, I think that bleeds into reality at some point, and you yourself could get confused about what you believe anymore. 

Sarah: Yeah and I think that the roles we perform that come naturally to us represent the truth of who we are often in some way.

Julie: Yeah. Billie refuses to take back the creep comment, by the way. She said, No way, baby. Creep stands. 

Sarah: Good for her. This is a big period for creep, because we also have Watergate going on.

Julie: That is a great point. Wow. They head into this pre-match environment that was total chaos. There were dancing pig mascots. There were cheerleaders wearing hot pants. Billie Jean King is presented with a litter to enter on top of, Cleopatra style. So she's carried by bare chested athletes from Rice University as the band plays, I Am Woman. 

Sarah: Just like in Sex and the City 2. 

Julie: Bobby comes in on a rickshaw pulled by, quote, “bosom buddies who apparently were chosen based on their breast size”. They exchange gifts. Bobby presents Billie with a Sugar Daddy lollipop. Sugar Daddy is one of his endorsers. And Billie totally outdoes him, not that this was her plan, it was definitely her camp's plan, but not her specifically. She presents him with a live pig named after him. 

I think a certain kind of person would assume that Billie Jean King did not have a sense of humor about this match. But the reality is she totally did, and she was game for all this ridiculous stuff. And I don't think this match decided women's liberation, but I do think in a sense she had fun doing it. And I think there's something to be said for that.

Sarah: Totally. I just hope we find out what happened to the pig.

Julie: Of course, yeah. I'm not gonna keep you in suspense on that one. The pig gets lost in the Astrodome. 

Sarah: What? I hope it was fun for the pig. 

Julie: I think it was probably a nice little romp. He was found eventually in a corner, so no pigs were harmed in the making of The Battle of the Sexes.

Sarah: That's really, aside from all the ones we ate that day, but that's different. I guess that the simple fact is that feminists aren't really pigeonholed as being fun. But I've had fun at least twice, and I'd like to attempt it again.

Julie: That's great. I love that for you. I do want to get back to this, but I also want to say the pig was seen at the after party eating shrimp and roast beef. The pig has a great time. 

But yeah, to your point, Billie Jean seems to have a great time. She rolls with all this nonsense. She kind of humors Bobby a lot. She laughs at his jokes, but in a smirky kind of way. It seems like she's in her element, which is nice. 

So Cosell's introduction of Billie is, sometimes you get the feeling that if she ever let down her hair to her shoulder and took off her glasses, you'd have someone vying for a Hollywood screen test.

Sarah: Wow. That's such a weird way to call someone attractive, technically. Isn't it? It's just, there's something so historically weird about the way men talk about the attractiveness of women. And actually, I was doing an audio book of A Christmas Carol for the Patreon and stuff for You're Wrong About, and there's weird sections where Dickens will out of nowhere get horny for a character he's writing. And it's like, you got to calm down Charles Dickens. At least he's not nagging them. But there's one where he's like, “Oh, if only I were one of her children and could caress her hair” and blah, blah, blah. And you're like, stop it. 

Julie: Yeah, that's a little much. 

Sarah: I'm not against it. It's just, it didn't make it into the Muppet version for a reason.

Julie: Keep  that in your diary. I don't know. I don't know the way. 

Sarah: Heteronormativity and masculinity reflect on the attractiveness of women historically is very weird. Because they have these dual ideas of, I am totally overpowered by anything I find attractive, which is cool. That's often literally not true at all, but I understand that you do feel led by a higher power. Be that the only way to combat that sense of submissiveness is to be incredibly judgmental about what is and isn't attractive, and therefore give everyone a complex. And I think that's unproductive. But boy, do we do it a lot. 

Julie: Yeah. I think a lot of people would disagree with you. At long last, we'll get into the actual match here. Bobby has the audacity to start it in a warmup jacket. 

Sarah: So it is. And is that like a tennis burn of I'm not even working hard. I'm wearing exactly. Okay. 

Julie: Nice. Bobby throughout this whole process, like he makes a point of kind of showing that he's not practicing in the run up to the match. 

Sarah: Great strategy, Bobby.

Julie: Yeah, he wears this warmup jacket, he takes it off after Billie goes up 2-1 on him in the first set. He eventually leads 3-2 in the first set, but Billie Jean doesn't panic. They hit 4-4 and it feels like more of a turning point for her. She admits that the match is occasionally ugly tennis for her, but Bobby doesn't really pose too much of a threat in the end.

So one thing that's important is that they played best of five. And I think that's because Billie Jean didn't want any excuses. Court and Riggs played best of three, as women typically do. But Billie was like, let's go for the men's tradition. I think she didn't want any question marks or excuses left on the table or anything like that.

So she wins 6-3. They have a moment at the net where they're talking and he says, “You're too good, I underestimated you.” And then the check and the trophy are presented to Billie by George Foreman. That's what happens. He should present every sporting event award.

Sarah: Oh my God. He really should.

Julie: She just played like a star in her prime, and he played like a 55-year-old. She had him pretty tired throughout, and it showed. 

Sarah: Can we watch a clip? 

Julie: Yeah. So here's a taste of what Billie and Bobby were like leading up to the the Battle of the Sexes. I believe this was a day before the match. And I think it's just a good representative example of what these people were both like, and what the rhetoric surrounding this event was like, and what the hype was like.

Sarah: Yes, okay. This is from the Texas Archive of the Movement Image. 

*recording*

“Because they know, as I know, and as Billie Jean knows, that there's no way a woman can play tennis with a good man tennis player. But what makes this match a credible match, and what makes it the attraction that it is, and why the eyes of the world are on it, is that this isn't just a tennis match, this is a Battle of the Sexes. And the gladiator for the men happened to be me. I happened to be cast into that role. A 55-year-old guy with one foot in the grave that hasn't played tournament tennis for 15 or 17 years.” 

Sarah: Oh, it's great. I love that he's just going on and on and building this like great oracular whatever. And she's just sitting there smiling about it. I love her.

Julie: It's definitely the look of someone who knows she can probably win. Yeah, and let him wear himself out.

Sarah: What do you think about what his motives were going into all this? Because I can see there's money involved, quite a lot of it. But also that maybe if you are what we're going to call a true showman of whatever kind, then the attention itself also seems like its own reward.

Julie: It's a little bit hard for me to get inside his head. But it certainly seems to me like attention is a great reward for him getting to just play the sport he loves, that seems like a great reward for him. He goes through all these lanes to do it in such kooky ways. He loves antagonizing, and that is ultimately a part of sports for a lot of people. So I think he had a good time. 

The legacy of this match, this is going to be paragraph one in her obituary one day. But not in a bad way, even I think she's so much more than this match personally. But I also think that she's probably pretty satisfied with that outcome. 

Sarah: I don't know, it's so interesting to encounter a media frenzy of this scale where the two people at the center of it actually seem to feel pretty comfortable and in control the whole time.

Julie: I think that's an interesting difference from the Court match, and probably what also makes this match more memorable in a sense. Other than obviously the outcome is just how involved they both were in their interactions together. They both made it what it is in the immediate aftermath of this match. Sexism is solved forever. Obviously. 

Sarah: Yeah,  I remember that. Yeah. 

Julie: At Smith College, apparently 500 women streamed out of their dormitories, unlocked the school tower to ring the bells, and marched across campus with victory signs. One of them apparently read, “Today tennis, tomorrow the world.” 

Sarah: That's so Smith in every way. And on the one hand, you could be like, here's an example. Yesterday, I think a lot of people in different cities protested in solidarity with Palestine. And there were protesters on the Burnside Bridge in Portland, so you could see people grumbling about. What's the use of stopping traffic across a bridge in Portland? Who cares? How is that going to affect Palestine? 

And yeah, that's not literally going to protect Palestine to block traffic on a bridge in Portland, Oregon. But on the other hand, the nature of protests is that it's not an insult to call something a performance, right? Because it's through performance of some kind or disruption of some kind, in many cases, that we're forced to think about things that we might otherwise not. 

Julie: Yeah, no, that's a really interesting way of framing it. 

Sarah: Yeah, I feel like there's also the fact that 90 million Americans watched a lesbian do something.

Julie: Sure, yeah, some of them didn't know it. I'm sure some of them had guesses, but yeah pretty magical. And yeah, this was good for Billie's career and her activism. She really, I think, did do a good job to the extent she was capable in capitalizing off of this match.

The following year, she started the Women's Sports Foundation to support inclusion of women in sports and trans athletes in sports. As the years have gone on, that foundation still is going today. She also started something I love, which is the Women's Sports Magazine. It was short lived, but it was supposed to be a feminist answer to Sports Illustrated. She knew all these years ago that there was an audience and an interest in women's sports, and that mainstream sports publications were not getting the job done.

Title IX had passed the year before the match. It wasn't clear at that time, famously, what the impact would be on gender equity in sports. That was not the reason the law was passed. But this match really jump started the thought process for the general public of, maybe we should let women play sports, even though it wasn't part of the Title IX conversation at the time. 

Another delightful bit of their immediate legacies was that Riggs and King were both showing up in peanut strips around that time. I'll send you a link if you want to peruse. 

Sarah: I really appreciate that. Oh my god, there's a strip where Peppermint Patty and Marcy are talking to Linus, and Marcy says, “In 1978, the average budget for intercollegiate athletics for men was $717,000, but for women it was only $141,000.” And then Linus says, “sigh.” 

I mean, just the idea of this being an event with such wide reach and this happening in a time when Women's Lib is legible to different extents to people depending on what their social circles are, where they are in the country, how available different publications are to them, or their media diet. And that this was something that maybe transcended all that because it took this conversation America was having and put it in the language of a sporting event.

Julie: Absolutely. It's so accessible, if nothing else. You can fast forward their legacy to today. To this day, literally this past Halloween, I was seeing Billie Jean King tweeting about Bobby and Billie costumes for people's babies that she was being sent online. Babies and glasses, really fucking cute. People still are passing down this story and whatever incomplete, maybe garbled, maybe oversimplified version they remember it. And I think that's pretty fun. 

Billie Jean King is also now the kind of person who goes on the Masked Singer, I guess. She was a squash buckling hen in the most recent season. 

Sarah: Of course she was. 

Julie: Yeah, why not? 

Sarah: If you're gonna be a hen, it's the right kind to be. 

Julie: Sure. Yeah, I agree. And to back up a bit again, even as Billie's reputation was soaring, I don't think Bobby's suffered all that much. It's not the kind of thing where no one hated him, really. I don't know. He was just like, this was an act. The perception was that this was an act, and Bobby's gonna do what Bobby's gonna do. 

And he was reportedly depressed for six months after the match. I don't know how seriously to take that, but that's out there. He died of prostate cancer in 1995, after having it for seven years. His Sports Illustrated obituary was written by Billie. She wrote, “Bobby was a hustler and a showman, but he was honest. He took his defeats and paid his debts without complaint, and he expected others to do the same. He had honor and he had humor.”

Before he died, they had the opportunity to say they loved each other. Billie has since called him one of her heroes. This all feels like a little too pat for me, but I guess it's cute for them. If it made them feel good, sure, who am I to interfere in their personal relationship and the way that everything played out between them. Clearly they had some sort of bond forged. 

Sarah: I guess for me it touches on a question of one of the things we're talking about as a culture currently is, do we need to be nostalgic for the old days of American politics when as a liberal, you would just be like, best friends with a sexist and you would agree to disagree and whatever?

Julie: For me their friendship feels a little bit like Michelle Obama hugging George Bush. It's just, did we need that? Did we need to see that? I don't know, but I can't invalidate their personal feelings. 

Sarah: It’s weird, right? It's because there is the sort of within any social change in America historically is the idea of, but you have to be able to hug people who disagree on basically everything with. And we should, that shouldn't be the standard though.

The idea of civility in American political life is so often a way of just avoiding having difficult conversations or being confronted with realities that we don't want to think about. Ignoring somebody because they're angry, but that allows you to ignore what they're angry about, which you need to hear.

Julie: I do wonder if Billie truly believed that all of the male chauvinism was an act, and he was a secret agent for Women's Lib. I wonder how much of her bought into that and then was influenced in their friendship. 

Sarah: What it makes me wonder about is, whether there was some element for her of, I have beaten this person, and he has accepted being beaten by me. And I'm very impressed by that. 

Julie: Yeah. So he was a gracious loser, even if he continued kind of playing matches like this. Like he'd play with and against Renee Richards a lot. He would just, the man loves a stunt. 

She wrote in a pretty, little, red book of hers from 2014 called, Spy Night and Other Memories, that she was there when he was on his deathbed and he said, “Don't feel sorry for me. I played golf and tennis my whole life.”

Sarah: That's so great. 

Julie: He sure did. She seems to have a great fondness for him as well. 

Sarah: That's very interesting. I feel like I'm left with a sense of, who was this person? And I still feel like I don't know. But it also feels like he didn't want us to know.

Julie: I think that's right. So yeah, in this sort of public quest to understand who Bobby really was, there's this ongoing conversation about whether he rigged the match. The TLDR version of it is maybe. Who knows, we'll never know. But it's obviously worth keeping in mind that to his core, Bobby was a gambler and a hustler. And if he was in need of cash, people have suggested he could have easily bet on himself losing the match. 

In 1983, he took and passed a lie detector test on a TV show about the match. Then in 2013, this whole conversation reignites big time, because ESPN runs a whole feature called, The Matchmaker. What it essentially boils down to is an assistant golf pro named Hal Shaw shared a story with ESPN about having overheard gangsters talking about Riggs setting up the matches with both Court and King, because he owed $100,000 to those gangsters from lost sports bets. So it's kind of, no one else was in the room at that time, we'll never really know if what he overheard was correct or if he really did overhear that in the first place.

Sarah: I tend to feel that if something is true about something on this large of a scale, then more than one person will usually know about it.  

Julie: I think that's a good instinct. His son, Larry, has said that the match against Billie was the only one he'd never seen his father train for, which has always perplexed him. There were people in the ESPN story who said Riggs has wink, denied the fix, but Billie Jean has adamantly denied it. Maybe it delighted him to keep people guessing, or maybe he really did rig it. 

And then you have men's rights activists on Twitter who got so excited by this. One of them was hilariously so close to getting the point of, “All this about gender in sports?” They said this is all nonsense. If they thought they were equal, they would just desegregate the leagues. If people thought that men and women were equal competitors in tennis, they would just desegregate the tours. So I'm like, great idea, buddy. 

Sarah: Want to follow through on that? And I feel like if you're claiming certainty, then that's colored by desire, right? Because if you want, you believe that it had to be rigged despite some interesting evidence, but nothing particularly decisive, then that proves that you don't believe a woman could win without all the assistance.

And then if you believe that she had to have won without any kind of interference, then if she didn't, then it's nothing against her, and women can still play tennis.

Julie: And what about this entire match screamed professionalism, or serious endeavor.

Sarah: Remember the pig?

Julie: Yeah. The pig! The pig eating shrimp at the afterparty, yeah. 

Sarah: Ugh. Love that pig. On some level, it's like you can't enjoy watching somebody play a game unless you can identify with them. And you can't identify with them unless you can see their humanity, maybe. That's too simplistic, but it feels generally true.

I guess the idea that there's no money in women's sports and nobody wants to watch it, is based on the idea that the people who are making these financial decisions don't understand that women watch TV as well. I have eyeballs. Thank you for noticing. And if you can't watch the sports, you can listen to them or whatever. 

But also, it feels like there's this unspoken thing, of course it would be incredibly boring to watch women play soccer because nobody cares about them. I don't care about them, and therefore nobody cares about them.

Julie: Yeah, there's a lot of that happening all the time to this day in women's sports, and it's so frustrating. And it's why endeavors like Billie's magazine really interests me, because she understood something that so many people still don't. That there is an audience, that people will consume content about women athletes, that they can make money in that process. That we can learn stuff from watching women play sports. So it's not just a cute fantasy for the women themselves, but that it might be culturally important. 

Sarah: Yeah. But people might actually like it. I would literally rather die than go to a soccer game, but I will also passionately defend the right of women's soccer to be considered as interesting as men's soccer, which is a low bar.

Julie: Wow. Portland Thorns can't be happy about what you just said. 

Sarah: I know. I really am so proud of them. And I'm not gonna be proud of them anywhere but in my own home.

Julie: Totally fair. This all became a movie in 2017. The movie does not address the rigged element at all. 

Sarah: Also, the incels are like, “interesting silence on your part.” 

Julie: I do find it curious that the movie didn't go into that though. Not from an incel perspective, just from an it would have been a more interesting movie perspective.

Sarah: It adds some depth for sure.

Julie: Yeah. The movie, which by the way, starred Emma Stone and Steve Carell as our main characters. 

Sarah: That is pretty good casting. 

Julie: I think it was incredible casting. Unfortunately, the movie is just, here's what happened in the order it happened in. It also focuses a lot on Billie Jean's affair at the time. And it's just, I get it. She was gay. It was the 70s. That's pretty shocking. But that's also not what the Battle of the Sexes was about. 

Sarah: Was she cheating on another lesbian? Because I don't care if she's just cheating on a marriage. I'm not, whatever.

Julie: Yeah, she's married to Larry King at the time. 

Sarah: To be clear, a different one, right?

Julie: I hope for all our sakes.

Sarah: Yeah, good point. My feeling about if we're going to depict affairs and stuff in a Battle of the Sexes movie, I want to see her doing lesbian stuff. But only if the message is, “Boy, is it fun to be a lesbian. I am having a great time.” 

Julie: Yeah. As I think about this match today, it's frustrating to me how many problems there still are in women's tennis that have nothing to do with the professionalism or the ability of the athletes themselves. 

We just had a WTA Finals, that's the Women's Tour Finals, in Cancun that sounds like it should be delightful, but it was such a logistical, under resourced mess, in conditions that were unfit for professional tennis players. But then again, another option for holding the finals was in Saudi Arabia. So maybe just no one wins. 

You also still have people like Novak Djokovic, arguably the greatest men's player of all time, who is famous for, among many other things, wanting to unionize without the women. And historically, at least, hadn't necessarily believed they deserve equal pay and treatment. He has since apologized for that, but he can't often be taken seriously. He's an anti-vaxxer, but he calls it being pro-choice about the vaccine. So he has a lot of questionable views. 

And then I think most importantly maybe, there still isn't equal pay offered at many of the tournaments on the women's tour. That's an ESPN report from this past September saying that at the non-majors, there often isn't equal pay. So I think King and a lot of other people have a lot to be proud of with the progress in women's tennis, but it's not like beating one 55-year-old man magically did much of anything. 

Sarah: It hardly ever does, unfortunately, it turns out. But we're now 51 years after the fact, just barely. But if we were to have a Battle of the Sexes again, that people would bring a lot of the same baggage to it.

Julie: I don't know. It's really interesting how much and how little this one three-set match actually did. 

Sarah: And I guess I feel like to me the central thing about sports that this feels like it reveals, is that they're one of the places we go to express who we consider worth paying attention to. And also maybe sometimes to be taught something new, but that the shouting is easier than the listening as always.

Julie: Yeah, it's all in the eye of the beholder. If you're ready to accept that maybe women's uteruses will be fine, maybe you got something out of this match. Or maybe you were a woman's liber watching and you got something out of this match in the sense that hey, there's this really high-profile woman in America who believes what I believe, and is cool and fun, and also really fucking good at tennis. But, if you watched it expecting her to lose, hoping for her to lose, I'm not sure necessarily that you learned a lesson from her winning. 

Sarah: Yeah. How many people were like, damn, that really makes me question my learned chauvinism. I guess I feel ultimately like America was tricked into watching a woman do something other than suffer. And I like that. 

Julie: Sure. 

Sarah: Julie, it's been a joy. This polyester is really making me start to sweat, so we should probably leave 1973 soon. But for people who want more of your work, of course, first they should listen to the Renee Richards episode you did with us. But after that, what should they do?

Julie: Yeah, I am a writer and a forthcoming author. You can find my book for pre-order about elite athlete mental health. It's called, Mind Game. It's out in March. 

Sarah: I'm really excited about that one because I find it more fun to think about mental health if I can pretend I'm an elite athlete while I'm doing it.

Julie: It's a good way to relate. But yeah, so you can find Mind Game available for pre-order. You can find me at juliekliegman.com or at @JMKliegman on social media. I'm in Sports Illustrated, The Ringer, The Washington Post, etc. 

Sarah: Thank you so much for everything. I'm so happy to start the year doing this battle with you.

Julie: Yes! Likewise, thank you.

Sarah: And that's our show. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for going to the 70s with us. Thank you to Julie Kliegman for being the most wonderful guest. Thank you to Billie Jean King for everything. Thank you to Colin Fleming for editing. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing. Go get some electrolytes. We'll see you in two weeks.