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About this Episode
Back in 1973 a male chauvinist played tennis against champion Billie Jean King. This is that story.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck, it's just two of us, and that's great because I'll be playing
the role of Billy June King, and Chuck's going to play the role of male chauvinist pig Bobby
Prince.
Oh man.
Take it Chuck.
Hey, before we get going on this one, I have a quick shout out, and this is coming out
a couple of days after I did this because we're cutting it so close because of our week
off last week.
But that makes me happy because I was asked, a friend of mine's son, his name is Royce.
He is a student, a junior at Midtown High School here in Atlanta.
And he has a teacher, Ms. Smokow, who was a long time stuff he should know listener.
And when Royce told Ms. Smokow, like, hey, I know that guy, we're buddies, we got a hogs
games together.
She kind of flipped out and was like, oh my god, I wonder if like would he be interested
in helping us out with our podcast program?
Oh cool.
They set it up via email and I spent yesterday, which was in our world Monday at Midtown
High School addressing the junior class, about 200 kids.
And I got to say, man, it was an incredible experience.
The students were into it.
They were engaged.
They had great questions.
They had great answers.
They were, you know, a lot of it was sharing, you know, what they're doing with this
podcast project, which is based off of like stuff, you should know style stuff, which
was super cool.
Like these real philosophical questions that they're digging into and taking opposite sides
and debating and they were seeking advice.
And it was just, it was an incredible experience.
And I just, I left like on a real high about Gen Z and like, where our future is headed.
And it was just awesome.
Great.
The broad strokes are Gen Z got Chakai yesterday.
Yeah.
Yeah, they got me super high.
It was really cool.
They were all just amazing kids and Miss Moko was wonderful.
And the other teacher, I think his name was Alex, I can't remember his last name, but
he was super nice.
And they're just like hats off to these teachers.
Yeah.
What's going on?
And at least at Midtown High School is amazing and I just left feeling great.
That was awesome.
I think Royce is getting an A.
You know Royce wasn't even there.
He's, he's a, does like a late arrival thing because of like work study or something.
And so I was like, dude, I texted him, it's like, where were you?
And he explained the whole deal like he's not even allowed in school till later.
So he was just one of those things.
But everyone was super nice and it was just, it was so cool to see how into it everybody
was.
That's awesome.
Well, where you go, Chuck?
Oh, and real quick, there were a couple of students, I won't name them.
I have permission to name Royce because he's a pal, but there were two legitimate big
time stuff.
You should know listeners in the junior class that came up after and said hello.
And they were both like really, really nice.
Awesome.
Shout out thing one and thing two.
That's right.
Way to go, Chuck.
You were basically a teacher for that moment.
Yeah.
Kind of felt that way.
Nice.
Maybe one day when I retire, I'll just like go and teach for real.
I'll let you borrow my tweed jacket with the, the Swede Elbow branches.
The, the don't be dumb jacket.
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
That's, that's a big deal.
You have to overlook all the stains on it.
You're right.
So we are talking about the Battle of the Sexes today, which I guess, I mean, this is a
tough act to follow after your story, frankly.
No, this is a great fun sort of pop culture history story and sport story.
There was a movie about it just a handful of years ago starring Steve Carell as Bobby
Riggs and Emma Stone as Billie Jean King, where they portrayed the very famous tennis match
between a male show business pig and aging over the hill, hustler, tennis star that, you
know, basically came out and said, you know what, men are better at women than everything.
And an old me can beat a young champion in Billie Jean King.
And let's do it on national TV at the Houston Astardom in front of a ton of people.
Yeah.
And that's what happened the end.
That's right.
So this was a really big deal.
I mean, it sounds like just kind of light-hearted, maybe a bit of a joke.
This actually still happens today.
There are Battle of the Sexes, Tennis matches.
This was the first one and it was a very big deal for everyone involved.
In the one hand, you had Bobby Riggs, like you said, over the hill.
He was 55 and he was trying to, he was trying to figure out two weeks.
He was, oh, that's right, the eyes of March are coming up.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
So over the hill, I get it.
Okay.
Yes.
Although 55 in 1973 was a little different than 55 now, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't look like Bobby Riggs.
But he was over the hill, not just necessarily because of his age.
He'd just been so far out of tennis for so long.
He was an attention-hound and he wanted to get back in the spotlight.
So for him, this was a gambit.
It was a lot of work to do it, but it was something he was trying to do.
On the other side was Billie Jean King, who took this very seriously because to her, this
was symbolic of women's rights, which she was a tireless fighter for, not just before
this, but after for essentially her whole life still today.
Yeah.
She's great.
Love Billie Jean King.
She's a hero.
Bobby Riggs, we'll talk about him in depth.
We're not going to make excuses for the guy, but I will say Billie Jean King remained
very good friends with him and never came out and said like, you know, I mean, when they
were going at it, she was kind of playing him up as a male show in this pig, which he
was.
Right.
But she would end up saying like, Bobby Riggs was a man of his time and sort of a victim
of being a man of his time.
So she kind of went easy on him.
I'm not sure I'm going to go so easy on him.
Well, I saw, I saw in places that there's, it's questionable whether he actually like
even believed most of the stuff he was saying, but all again, all this was a gambit.
He figured out a really good way to get media attention was just be like the, the most
loudmouthed show in this pig, just saying the most offensive stuff and becoming loathsome
to women that this would, this would just generate more buzz and more height for what he was
trying to do, which I mean, just doing that is a good move.
But it's, it's not, it's not set in stone that he was someone who actually harbored these
feelings personally.
So you've got to bear that in mind while we're, we're telling this story because a lot
of people don't realize that like, like anti feminists, a lot of men don't realize it
and a lot of feminists don't realize it.
They took it, everything he was doing very seriously.
But like you said, Billie Jean King didn't, which is a huge signal right there.
Yeah, and, and, and I just hit, it's just hit my brain.
If I'm going to go hard on Bobby rigs, then I also need to do the same to Andy Kaufman
and his whole wrestling stick, which I think is one of the great funny kind of comedy
bits, but it was kind of the same thing, like playing a role to get women riled up, to
get attention.
Well, really, if we learned anything from this battle of sexist tennis matches, if you're
going to go hard on Bobby rigs, you need to go hard on Billie Jean King.
Should we go back to the early 70s and set the stage?
Yes.
All right, early 1970s was, it was a pretty volatile time.
It was a big time for women to start kind of standing up for real and saying like, hey,
we, we want attention, we want rights, we want the same rights as men.
Roe v Wade was decided in 73.
The equal rights amendment was all over the news.
The case of sports, certainly 1972 with Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, that
required schools to offer girls and women the opportunities to basically get equal funding
and participate equally in athletics as boys and men.
So it was a, it was a big time for women's advocacy and feminism and women's rights
in between like 19, certainly before that, but definitely between 1970 and like 1975.
Yeah, just as an aside, we did it, if I may say so, a pretty good episode on the equal
rights amendment in 2021 called, why is the ERA still not ratified, which is true.
Yeah.
So yeah, it was a big time.
There's a lot of momentum for women's lib for feminism.
It was also a big time for tennis, which was becoming really, really popular, especially
in the United States.
The number of Americans who played tennis tripled from 1970 to 1974, and one of the reasons
why is because the tennis world started holding opens.
I never knew this before, but the US Open, the Australian Open, the reason they're called
opens, because they're open to all players.
You can be an amateur, you can be a pro, and you can compete in these tournaments, an
open tournament.
That was brand new.
I think Wimbledon was the first one to start it.
I think in 1968, so a lot of really freaky, exciting stuff's going on in the world.
That's right.
Billie Jean King was, and we should also point out that, you know, as far as wage disparity
in 1968, if you were a professional tennis player, you earned two to three times as much
as a woman, and when the sport grew, that gap actually grew.
It didn't get more narrow, which was pretty startling at the time.
The Billie Jean King was born in 1943, and by the time this a bit rolled around, she
was huge.
She had one 10 grand slam titles by 73.
She was number one ranked tennis player six different times in 1973, was the 1972 Sports
Illustrated Sports Person of the Year.
Like you said, was a real feminist activist, kind of from the jump.
I think there was a story from when she was a kid, when she was 11 or 12, a junior player,
she was not allowed to be in a photo, like a tournament photo, because she wasn't wearing
the tennis skirt.
She was wearing shorts, and they said, you can't be in this picture.
Immediately, little 12-year-old Billie Jean King was like, what the hell?
Yeah.
She was like, these are scorts.
They said that doesn't count.
Right.
That's not a thing yet.
So yeah, and one thing about Billie Jean King from a bunch of stuff I read and saw about
is that she was tireless, and still she's a tireless activist for women's rights.
She didn't ever slow down, and when you kind of learn about all the side stuff she did
to promote women in tennis and women's rights in general, like on top of that, bear in mind,
she's one of the top tennis players in the world by dominating in tennis.
So that takes a lot of practice, a lot of dedication, and she's doing all this other stuff
at the same time.
So she's like basically the definition of tireless.
Yeah.
And she was doing this in the 1960s, because all those accomplishments I mentioned was
by 73, but in 1966, she was the number one women's tennis player in the world, and she
was making $100 a week as a playground instructor at Los Angeles State College.
So the money the athletes were making was not anything like it is today, and it was way,
worse for women.
I think that first open you mentioned it, Wimbledon, in 68, she won that tournament, and won 750
pounds, Rod Labor, the men's champion won 2000 pounds, and she was like in 68, she was
like, this is totally unfair.
What's going on?
Yeah, and money comes up a lot.
It was the reason why it's an easy shorthand to basically point out women's lesser treatment
compared to men.
It's also something that most people can just kind of wrap their minds around like, yeah,
750 pounds is a lot less than 2000 pounds, but they're both the champions.
Well, that doesn't make any sense.
So money is a big focus throughout this, but it's not just because everybody wants money,
you know?
Yeah, totally.
So in 1970, Billie Jean King was like, we need to do something sort of official and
sort of big here.
So she looked to a woman named Gladys Heldman, who was the founder of World Tennis magazine.
She was a very big prominent figure in the tennis world overall, obviously because of World
Tennis, and also because she was at the time the mother of a very high ranked player named
Julie Heldman.
That was her daughter.
So she was a good person to go to, and they said, here's what we can do to make a splash.
There's a tennis tournament coming up called the Pacific Southwest Open in LA, where they're
paying the prize purse for the men's champion is 12,500.
The purse for the women's champion is $1,500, which, I mean, looking back at the Wimbledon
disparity, that wasn't too bad compared to this, you know?
Right.
And this was even after that.
And they said, why don't we boycott this tournament?
And Gladys Heldman said, you know what?
Why don't we start our own tournament that competes with this tournament?
And everyone went, oh, this sounds exciting.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was a huge step beyond what they were originally thinking of.
And so the US tennis association, at the time they were called the US Law and Tennis
Association, also to, they were like, hey, go ahead and try that, but we are going to
suspend you.
You might ban you from tournament tournament play.
We're going to erase your rankings.
Like it's going to be a bad jam if you guys go off and form your own tournament.
And that, it took a lot of bravery because not all women, tennis players signed on for
this.
In fact, only nine, including Billie Jean King said, you know what?
We're going to go do this anyway.
And so they signed contracts with Heldman.
And so they became pros on this other tour, which protected them from getting punished
on the US LTA tour.
And they started their own championship, which eventually was, I think, supported and sponsored
by Virginia Slim cigarettes.
Yeah.
That's right.
And we should mention that contract was for a dollar each.
So they, they clearly were doing this to make a statement and not to make a ton of money.
Right.
But Philip Morris, yeah, they stepped in because they, there was a recent federal ban on advertising
on TV and radio for cigarettes.
And so they said, we got to get our name out there somewhere.
So let's call this the, you know, we've got these Virginia Slims with its quasi feminist
message.
You've come a long way, baby.
That was our ad slogan for a long time.
And tennis, you know, the original nine is what they were called, those tennis players
that went along or the eight that went along with Billie Jean King and said, you're like,
yeah, I mean, we're athletes.
It's a little weird to have a cigarette sponsor.
But we need a sponsor.
So we'll take it.
And that tournament went over really well.
And it was so successful that they said, hey, why don't we start our own circuit?
And they had the Virginia Slim circuit.
There were eight more tournaments that they sponsored.
The original nine, you know, they initially did follow through with their threat to like
ban them, the US LTA, yeah, the US LTA at the time.
But they said, oh, actually, they're doing so well over there.
We're in trouble now.
So we need to join forces and they gave up and they merged with the Virginia Slim events.
Yeah.
And I'm not usually one to defend tobacco producers, but I saw a PBS, I think American
Masters clip that was interviewing some of the original nine.
And they were like, Virginia Slim showed up like they knew how to market.
They knew how to get buzz.
They put a ton of money behind advertising and like, this was not like a, just a whatever
thing to them.
They were actually a really great sponsor for this.
So yeah, they, yes, these nine women and I think eventually more joined, they were,
they were like, if you won't include us, we're just going to go create our own thing.
And they worked at it like that and it actually paid off in, in ACEs.
Yeah.
For sure.
Uh, hey, you want to take a break?
Hey, yeah.
All right, we'll be back right after this.
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All right, so where we left off, the original nine went off and formed their own Virginia
Slim circuit.
They were, you know, endangered the USLTA such that they partnered with them eventually.
But money started flowing in a little bit.
1971, Billie Jean King was the first female athlete of any sport at all to make more
than $100,000, a lot of money in 1971 dollars.
There's still a lot less than her peers on the male side of the equation.
And so she was still, you know, banging that drum.
She wasn't like, all right, our work is done.
And in 1973, before Wimbledon that year, she got together in London, where Wimbledon is,
in a hotel room with 63, I guess it was probably a large meeting room, 63 other women tennis
players.
And they said, all right, we're doing this today.
We're going to form the WTA, the Women's Tennis Association.
We're going to have an actual Jungian in place where we can, you know, do what Jungians
do and stick up for ourselves.
Yes.
They threatened a boycott, like pretty much immediately after they formed the WTA, they
said that they were going to boycott the US open if we don't get equal prize money
for women and men.
And I believe that was successful.
They got the US open to agree.
This is like things are moving along for women's equality in tennis at this time, right?
So it's a huge focus of conversation with tennis.
Yeah.
I mean, it was all over the media, everywhere you looked, it was about sort of equal pay,
equal rights.
And that was in the regular world and all of a sudden it was now like in the sports world
in a big way.
Well put.
So now we can talk a little bit about our, I'm going to put it in scare quotes.
We're villain, Mr. Bobby Riggs, who was, I tell you what, man, I mean, if you, it is
very Andy Kaufman-esque.
If you watch interviews with this guy, he's enough, if he's nothing, he is entertaining.
For sure.
He was a true great tennis player at one time shortly after World War II.
I think he was the number one men's player in 1946 and 1947 and not just from like December
to January, like both of those years.
Right.
So he had, you know, the goods to back up like this.
It wasn't just some, some dude who had a tennis racket.
But after the late 40s, he essentially like left the tour and he started hustling and
taking bets from essentially anybody who would, who would play him in tennis pool.
I think you saw a 60 minutes clip where he was gambling on throwing cards into a waste
basket.
Like he would bet on anything.
There was a quote in that 60 minutes clip where he said, he likes to play for big money.
If he can't play for big money, he'll play for small money.
If I can't play for small money, I won't get out of bed that day.
Like that's just what that guy did.
He gambled the hustle and he was known as a loudmouth too.
But he also seems to be fairly loved essentially.
He was like one of those people that you just kind of, you couldn't help but like even though,
yeah, he was a loudmouth and trying to get you to bet him some money.
Yeah.
He was a troll.
Livia called him a pre-internet troll and that's exactly what he was.
It seemed like a bit of an act and a bit of a stick to get attention, like we said.
But he would say things, you know, a woman's place is in the kitchen in the bedroom and
not necessarily in that order or women played 25% as good as men.
So they should get 25% of the money men get.
I was reading, I think it was a, oh, was it a square or something, an article about him
and the whole idea of playing Billie Jean King was birth when I think a reporter was just
talking to him about, you know, can men beat women or who could beat Billie Jean King
and tennis.
He said, I think any guy in the top 100 could beat Billie Jean King and he went, in fact,
I think I could beat her and that's sort of when he seemed to hatch this idea for publicity
and money.
Yeah.
He was like, oh, but there's good action there.
Yeah, totally.
So, yeah.
So like, he said these things actually, at least one of those quotes is from one of his
autobiographies.
Yeah.
So like, he wrote the stuff down, he wasn't, this wasn't just stuff he started saying
when he decided to play Billie Jean King.
He was already known as a male chauvinist, but yes, he was an attention hound and this
was, again, a way that he figured out how to do this.
So he started publicly challenging Billie Jean King.
He's like in his mid fifties.
She's in her late twenties prime and she's like, no, that's okay, I'm too busy.
And again, remember, she was genuinely tireless organizing the Virginia Slim circuit and like
creating the Women's Tennis Association all the while waiting all of these championships
and grand slams.
So she had a legitimate excuse, like I'm too busy.
The thing is, there was also like a case you could make that she saw very clearly, like
I don't know if I have that much to gain by playing this and I have a lot to lose for
the women's movement.
I could easily set it back if I lose.
So there was, she had good reason to kind of avoid this as long as she could.
Yeah, it's sort of a lose, lose proposition for her.
If she beat some, everyone's like, well, of course, she beat this old man.
Right.
And that's how he probably would have played it up as, and well, we'll see what happened.
But, and if she loses, that's of course, like, looks terrible to be beaten by the old
man.
Right.
So she was wise to avoid it, I think.
But there was another woman, in fact, she was the, I think she was the number one player
in the world, the women's player in 1973, named Margaret Court and Ozzy.
And she was like, she wasn't super active in the politics of women's sports.
And she was like, yeah, sure, I'll play him.
She stepped right up.
And in May of 1973, this was in San Diego or outside San Diego.
They played a three-set match, were $10,000 and about 10 million people, a lot of people
tuned into the first one on CBS, 3,500 people were there live.
And he beat her.
He beat her 6261 by playing, I want to say a certain thing, but I can't, he was playing
like a punk.
Oh, yeah.
He was playing junk shots and like drop shots and he wasn't playing like sort of real
tennis.
He was playing sort of joke tennis.
And when you're playing against a player that can hit aggressive, strong shots and you're
just plunking him over the net, like, it's going to, you can't play tennis that way if
you're a real player.
And through, through her offer game, she got in his head.
I think the moment was a little too big for her.
I don't think she realized how much attention there was going to be and she ended up getting
beat pretty badly.
Yeah.
He got in her head, right?
Yeah.
So, yes, it's called the Mother's Day Massacre because it was held on Mother's Day.
And I mean, it was really bad.
But there's a point that I want you to hang on to for later.
As much of a punk as he played, he didn't play actual serious tennis.
He was playing joke tennis to win.
He took that match very seriously.
He trained for months ahead of time.
He was playing or training like 10 to 12 hours a day every day.
He really trained.
And by the time he was, by the time the game came around, he knew he was going to beat Margaret
Court.
So just keep that in mind.
How hard he trained for that, okay?
Yeah.
And also, we should point out, like, at the very beginning of that match to open it up,
he presented her with a bouquet of roses and she curtsied back to him.
The Billie Jean King is watching this just like, you know, furious inside.
Like she's like, and she, in fact, said later that she played right into his hands there.
And I would have grabbed him and kissed him.
If he gets dirty, I can get tough too.
So she hated the fact that Margaret Court went out there and sort of curtsied to him and
took the roses and then lost on national TV, I guess, international TV.
And so she was like, all right, you know what?
I'm going to do it.
I'm going to step up and I'm going to play Bobby Riggs.
It's my turn.
Yeah.
So she agreed to do this and it became immediately buzzworthy.
I guess is what you would call it if you're into that kind of thing.
That's right.
The liver versus the lava is how they dubbed it.
Yeah.
So like I said, it's immediately generating buzz.
Bobby Riggs starts giving television interviews to any camera that will stay in still long
enough.
And he's a magnet for that kind of stuff.
He's, again, he's a loud mouth.
He's saying horrible things about women.
He's accepting like the male show venous pig, moniker, like with pride or whatever.
And he's just like one of those, like he would talk a mile a minute.
He had so much energy.
It was just a little, a little kind of squirrely guy kind of like Richard Simmons.
Did you ever see Richard Simmons when he would go on Letterman?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
So it's great.
The way that Letterman kind of regarded Richard Simmons affectionately, but also like
this guy's he's moving around a lot.
Yeah.
He was like that, but amped up on like speed essentially.
So he was a magnet for cameras and he was giving interviews all over the place.
Yeah.
And he was also, you know, he's adding hype for the event obviously by saying things
like, you know, she's a woman.
They don't have the emotional stability.
She'll choke.
He added more stakes.
He said that he would jump from the London Bridge in Arizona or the Pasadena Bridge if
he lost.
And, you know, he was all over the place.
He was on the cover of Time magazine that year in September.
It was a caricature of him wearing a male showbizness badge and then there was a picture
of a pig and a banner that said the happy hustler.
So it was all working exactly as he planned, but Billie Jean King, like if he took that
first match seriously, he didn't take this one seriously and Billie Jean King was really
taking it seriously.
Yeah, I'm not sure if he was just, you know, resting on his laurels because of how badly
he beat Margaret Court that he just assumed that that was going to translate into playing
Billie Jean King, but he did not train nearly as much as he did for Billie for Margaret
Court.
Essentially, he was out partying in the lead up to all of this.
He was also really, really getting more and more offensive as things went on, right?
Oh, you're going to leave this one for me.
Yeah, one of the things he did was he showed up to practice one day with the cameras there
with holes cut out in his shirt.
So his nipples could show and he said that Billie Jean King would look better in this.
And she came out in public and she was like, this guy is a creep, which was, you know,
about as tough as you could be in language back then.
Yeah.
And he was at a press conference with them together and he said, well, you should take
that back.
And she said, nope, creep stands.
And she said later I saw in an interview, she said that like she didn't take him seriously,
but she knew that there were men out there that took him seriously in that area across
the line.
And she needed to make sure that that was demonstrated that she was not okay with that
one.
Yeah.
I think she kind of played it all just right.
It was really pretty savvy stuff on her end for sure.
So I say we take, is this our second break?
Yeah.
Second break.
The gun is going to go off when we come back.
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I wonder how many people are like, what is he talking about when he keeps saying the gun
is going to go off whenever act three comes around?
Well I would say, study your check-off friend.
That's right.
Not your check-off friend, your check-off comma friend.
Right.
Not the friend that you're like, I've got to hang out with him and then you do real quick,
you check him off or to do list, not that guy.
Yeah.
We all have check-off friends.
Yeah.
I'm sure I'm a lot of people's check-off friends.
No, no, no, no.
All right.
So where are we?
Are we at match time basically, which was turned into a complete circus, by the way?
Yes.
This is September 20th, 1973.
Is that the Houston Astrodome?
No, man.
30,000 people showed up in person to see this.
I saw all over the place, including Britannica, that 90 million people watched it around the world.
That's, yeah.
I think Olivia had 50 million people, but I watched an interview with her with, I mean,
serious journalist.
It was, it was Kathy Lee and Hoda.
And they said 90 million and they were just drunk on white wine at nine in the morning
or whatever.
So I trust them.
So the weird time, wasn't it?
That was a very weird time.
I did want to point out that I looked up, I was like, well, how many people see a tennis
tournament at like the grandest age?
And center court at Wimbledon is about 15,000 people, so this was double that.
Wow.
Yeah.
Plus it was in the beautiful new Astrodome, so.
Oh, yeah.
So great.
So the odds were very much in favor on Bobby Riggs.
Odds were six to one that Riggs would win.
And this was like the whole thing was kind of presented in the media as like the battle
of the sexist thing, the man versus woman, and every juvenile joke or, you know, quip or
whatever, you could make out of that.
That is how the whole thing was being promoted.
That's how it was being played up in the media.
It was not like, this is a very serious thing that they set women's, women's rights back
or move them forward.
It was right.
Right.
It was all just this almost tongue in cheek approach to it.
And that's how the whole thing, if you were a viewer, that's what you were kind of shown.
Yeah.
For sure.
And that's a good thing to point out.
There was Hollywood was involved.
There were a lot of actors and singers and stuff that were in a celebrity tournament beforehand.
They were really milking it.
They when they came in, the University of Houston band performed the song Conquest, which
is an anthem from the 1947 movie Captain from Castile.
That's when Bobby Riggs came in.
They played Helen Reddy's I Am Woman when Billie Jean King came in.
Livia pointed out that John Wayne, Bill Cosby and O.J. Simpson were in attendance.
And I had probably 13 different comments or jokes written out for that.
But I'm just going to let that trio stand without comment.
Stand on its own.
Yeah.
I think so.
We see made a fat $1.2 million off of ads for this match.
Astridome got about half that and people paying admission price.
And so with the Margaret Court Mother's Day Massacre game that was played under women's
rules in that there were three sets.
That's how women's tennis matches are played three sets.
Men's tennis matches are played five sets.
Billie Jean King was like, no, we're going to play five sets.
Best of five.
Essential.
I love it.
So there were five sets.
Which is smart.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For sure.
Yes.
Another thing that you'll see that's happened recently is sometimes so a woman's court
might be smaller than the man's court, which makes it harder for the man to land a ball
in in bounds.
Like in a battle of the sexist match.
Yes.
Thank you.
There was nothing like that.
Women's match.
That Billie Jean King was playing against Bobby Riggs.
Oh, yeah.
Well, she was like, I got this 55 year old guy like he wants the the three set match.
So we're going to go five because I'm in great shape.
Right.
Bobby Riggs enters on a carriage pulled by women that are outfitted as Bobby's bosom buddies.
How did Billie Jean King come in?
She came in on a basically a platform carried by men and togas.
I also saw as Egyptians, like Egyptian servants, they were shirtless essentially and they were
brawny dudes.
So like, both of them are not her idea.
No, but she was going along with it, right?
Yeah.
She played along.
Yeah.
Well, you were saying that she was taking it seriously and she was, but she was also like
willing to play along with this too.
Sure.
She wasn't just some like stick in the mud, you know?
Yeah.
Totally.
So just very appropriately, Bobby Riggs was sponsored by Sugar Daddy Candy.
Right.
And he presented Billie Jean King with a two foot long sugar daddy.
Remember those?
They would just pull these fillings right out of your head.
Totally.
And so King was like, I have a gift for you too.
It was a piglet that she named Bobby Riggs because he was a male show venous pig.
And don't worry about the pig.
She coordinated with the promoter Jerry Perenchio, very legendary promoter, that the pig would
not be eaten or harmed.
It would go to live on a farm afterward.
And it did.
That says everything you need to know about Billie Jean King.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She thought of everything.
She did.
She crossed her teeth and dotted her oinks.
That's right.
So of course, it's 1973.
So you want to get the best in the business at the time to do the play by play.
So they got none other than Howard Cosell.
Initially, they had a tennis promoter and anti-feminist named Jack Kramer, who was going
to do, they were going to do sort of a he versus she commentary and he was going to be
on Riggs side.
And one of the original nine, Rosie Cosell was going to be on Billie Jean King side.
But Kramer, and this also speaks to Billie Jean King, he was one of the guys behind that
original tournament that they, that they protested and wouldn't play in the Pacific Southwest
open where they said, oh, yeah, well, we're going to ban you then.
So she was like, hey, this is all fun and games and everything.
If that jerk is involved, I'm not even going to do this.
So they pulled Kramer off the broadcast.
Yeah.
And they didn't have Rosie Cosell speak to and I'm really glad they didn't do that.
That's, I mean, that's, it's a gimmick and it's understandable, but it would have made
the whole thing suck.
They brought in Jean Scott, who was the publisher of tennis week and he just gave commentary
like it was a regular tennis match, which is kind of what he wanted in this one.
Agreed.
So I mean, imagine Dennis Miller and Dennis Miller calling a tennis match.
You don't want that.
Yeah.
I mean, think about it.
Whose idea was it to put them on Monday night football on the one hand?
It's brilliant.
On the other, it's like, what?
Yeah, that was weird.
But it was elastered for years too.
It's not like it was a couple of games.
Yeah.
No, he, I think it was a full season, wasn't it?
I think it was more than that.
That was it.
Yeah, that was weird.
Yeah.
The game is on essentially, that's the point we've reached here.
That's right.
So Bobby Riggs takes the three to lead in the first set.
And later on, Billie Jean King would say, like, I was in trouble.
I knew I was making some mistakes.
I was in my head a little bit and I knew that I could not give this first set away basically.
Like he needed to get that set for his psychological standing.
And so that first set was so, so important for her.
So she knew that she had to win it.
She was down three to and she came back and beat him and won that first set six to four,
which was a huge blow to his psyche.
Yeah.
She said that she could tell that that had gotten to him when they switched sides.
So she also changed her playing style.
Normally, she would be like, she'd want to win the point as quickly and efficiently as
possible.
Instead, she started drawing ballies out and basically put the ball in one corner and
then put the ball in the other corner.
So she had this old man running back and forth chasing down these balls to purposefully
tire him out.
I mean, that's just so cool that people are capable of doing that.
You know, like, I want the ball to go right here.
So I'm going to make it go right there with this racket, even though the ball is coming
at me at 70 miles an hour.
Yeah, for sure.
So she wore him out by the end.
He was talking about hand cramps.
The levity had kind of lessened because, like you said, this 55-year-old was an old, old
man.
Right.
So remember, we saw old.
Right.
Not 54 or 55.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
I got a couple more weeks.
So Billie Jean King won and she won, like convincingly, six four, six three, six three.
So remember, best out of five, she beat him in three straight sets.
Yeah.
And she got her 100,000 check from no less than George Foreman, who I read had hoped to
use Bobby Riggs the pig to demonstrate his new type of indoor grill.
That was just a point that he wasn't allowed to know.
And so this was just an immediate splash.
Remember, this is a media spectacle.
Everybody knows about this.
90 million people are watching.
So the media just got right in on it again to let everybody know Billie Jean King won
and let's celebrate her as a pro tennis player.
And that's it.
That's right.
I think we know Josh's coy voice by now.
That's not at all how it was reported, of course.
They kept reporting it sort of in the lowest common denominator way.
The AP said that screaming delirious women's libers lit up more brightly than the rocket shooting
Astridone scoreboard.
Even my beloved New York Times said, King collapsed, tears in her eyes and her husband's arms,
saying later, all of a sudden, she was a champion, a woman, and a little girl all at
the same time.
That one brings like my eyes water from that one.
Yeah, that's tough.
That's so much worse than the Astridone scoreboard, right?
I mean, neither one are great.
Yeah.
That one is just like they meant that.
They were trying to like really be poignant there and it's just like, good God.
Yeah.
They missed the mark.
The thing about Bobby Riggs is he wasn't like, well, she, you know, she obviously is
some freak woman who beat me, that's the only woman who could beat me.
He did the opposite.
He accepted the defeat with dignity and grace.
He had a thing where he hopped over the net winner lose after the end of every match.
And he did.
He hopped right over the net and went up to her and he said, confidentially to her that
he underestimated her.
Yeah.
And then in the press conference, he went on to basically say the same thing like she beat
him very clearly.
Yeah.
He said she was too strong for me.
There have since been rumors that he threw the match as a gambler with six to one odds
against that he threw the match and bet against himself.
There was a report in I think 2013 ESPN dug into that and that there were like mafia figures
he was working with to rig the odds.
We'll never know the truth.
Bobby Riggs said he didn't throw it.
Billy Jean King said that I don't think he threw it.
She could tell what was going on emotionally on that court and could tell that he wanted
to win and that he was losing.
He might not have prepared like he should have and I guess we'll never know the truth.
But my money's on cheap.
She beat him.
Yeah.
Mine too.
But that rumor does have legs like he did hang out with mob guys.
He was a huge gambler.
The idea was that he was indebted to the mob like a hundred grand for in gambling debts
and they would wipe it clean if he threw this and that he was also betting on himself.
And his son said it's possible.
I don't really think that's true but it's possible.
Although his best friend is like I won't even entertain that that's possible.
Like he just didn't do that.
Yeah.
But one of the things that people point to is he was making some terrible mistakes during
the game.
Either she got in his head and she was rattled or he was throwing it.
It just seems like the general consensus is that now he seems pretty fringe that to
genuinely believe that he threw the match.
Yeah.
I agree.
Which I saw a bit to that movie.
I never saw the whole thing.
The casting was incredible like Steve Carell and Emma Stone were kind of perfect.
I don't think the movie was reviewed like super favorably but it looked okay.
Supposedly very true to life actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Billie Jean King or at least she told Hoda and Kathy Lee that it was pretty true to
life.
She said that she said they got the essence of it.
She said it's a movie of course but they nailed the essence.
Man, have you seen Bagonia?
Oh boy.
Yeah.
That is one of my new favorite movies.
That is so good.
I did not like I can never remember his name.
What is it?
I'm glad you watched that.
Oh, Jesse Plyments?
No, no, no.
The director.
Oh, oh, oh.
Uh, Yorgas Lathamos.
Thank you.
Let me try saying it to Yorgas Lathamos.
I don't think I've ever tried it because I've always been like I'm going to screw this
up.
Well, I might have screwed it up but that's what I said.
I don't think so.
I think you got it.
Anyway, I did not like poor things and I was like, I don't know because I liked everything
leading up to that but not this.
And then I saw this.
I'm like, he's back.
Yeah.
It's a great movie.
Yeah.
I told you I texted you to see kinds of kindness.
Do you see that one?
I still have not.
No.
I've been watching just tons of riff tracks.
Yeah.
It's hard to get out of the cycle.
What'd you get in?
Sure.
All right.
So back to this after the back to the battle of the sexes after this, he wanted to kind
of keep the media spotlight on him.
So he tried to jump off the London bridge in Arizona, but the sheriff there so like you
can't do that.
So he had his picture taken on the lake, blow it in a raft.
Billy Jean King went on to just keep being Billy Jean King in 1974.
He founded the Women's Sports Foundation, which is a nonprofit for women's and girls
and athletics.
And she would end up sort of very publicly coming out of the closet after being married
for a long time to a guy not the Larry King, but her Larry King in 1981.
Her long time manager and assistant Marilyn Barnett, it was very sad what happened.
She filed a lawsuit against her, which revealed their affair that she had from they had
from 72 to 79 because she had fallen from a balcony of Billy Jean King's house in Malibu
and lost the use of her legs and said that, Hey, Billy Jean King promised to give me
that house and support me financially.
So she took her to court and it got really messy.
Yeah.
So the fall from the house in Malibu, I saw was an attempted suicide and that she had
black, Marilyn Barnett had blackmailed Larry King and Billy Jean King before the lawsuit
basically said, Hey, if you don't want us to come out, let's settle before I actually
go public with it.
They didn't.
She went public with it.
And then two are great credit after being outed in 1981, Billy Jean King said, You know
what?
We never promised her the Malibu house, but yes, I'm gay, Larry and I have an open marriage
and we're actually going to stay together for the time being and they stayed together
until 1987 and they divorced because Billy Jean King fell for Ilana Kloss, a fellow tennis
player and they ended up getting married in 2018.
So this is enormous.
She was outed.
She hadn't outed herself.
She had her choice to do so was removed, but she stayed behind it.
She didn't deny it.
She didn't deny who she was.
You said it.
Yep.
I'm gay.
Yeah.
It was pretty great.
As far as equality and pay and pro sports, that's obviously still the thing.
It was 2007 when all the grand slams agreed to pay women equally in tennis and they still
don't and some of some of the other big events.
I think just a couple of years ago, the 2024 Canadian open, there was a $5.9 million pool
for the men and $2.5 million pool for women.
And if you come back with an argument of like, yeah, well, the men's events are, they
get more viewers and more advertising because they're in those better time slots, then you
kind of just set it yourself.
It's a lot of it has to do with the fact that they're in those better time slots and they
tend to schedule the women's events in lesser time slots and so they don't get as much advertising.
They don't have a great maternity leave and professional tennis for women.
It's, you know, there's still battles to be fought, but Billie Jean King is still out there
fighting them.
One last little thing, Chuck, that always struck me before he died in 1995, I think like
the night before he died, Billie Jean King visited Bobby Riggs to say goodbye.
Yeah.
It was pretty great.
They had a lifelong, you know, tie in friendship.
So that's it.
That's the battle of the sexist.
It was, it was great.
How about that?
Yeah.
I feel like, I feel like Tim Robbins in Anchor Man.
Remember the Pete, he's like, you know, we at PBS are really down with women's lit.
Yeah.
Also, Steve Perot was in that.
Yeah.
He loves lamp.
He loves lamp.
Since Chuck said he loves lamp, I tricked him into it.
He just unlocked listener mail.
Yeah.
This is a listener mail where I'm going to apologize to EFA from Ireland, because apparently
we have here and there, dabbled in Irish Erasure in our show, which is something that is
a total accident and something that I'm going to be more aware of moving forward, and here's
the email.
Hi guys.
Long time listener here.
I'm so sad to hear two Irish Erasure moments in one episode.
In the third band syndrome episode, you use the example of the endurance expedition to
show how it works.
You called Ernest Shackleton, British.
If I'm not wrong, also Tom Kreen, but both men were reborn in Irish.
Shackleton was born in Kilkie County, Kilder, did I say that right?
I think I did.
You said Kilkie.
Yeah.
Kilkie County, Kilder, just under an hour from Dublin City.
Kilkie Kreen was born in Anna Skull County, Cary.
This is a sore spot for Irish people as we are often so often called British, and we don't
take it so well.
Example, look up Killian Murphy also being called British.
But we will forgive you, however, and that is from EFA.
And EFA, that is me being an ignorant person.
And I certainly know there's a difference, and I have a hard time keeping track sometimes,
but I need to do better at that.
So apologies.
Nice work, Chuck.
I'm sure I've done that before too, so I want to apologize too.
Great.
Two apologies.
In one.
Yes.
And who is that from?
That was from EFA spelled A-O-I-F-E.
Beautiful.
Thanks a lot, EFA.
And if you want to be like EFA and call us out on something, we stand for that.
You can send it in an email to stuffpodcast.
TheDiHeartRadio.com
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Hey, this is Wellz Adams with By Order of the Faithfuls podcast alongside my fellow
Faithfuls and co-hosts, Tamra Judge and Dolores Catania.
The three of us have been watching the season of the traders, and we've been inside that
castle, so we have insight unlike many others.
This season of the traders may be the best we've ever seen.
Listen to By Order of the Faithfuls on America's number one podcast network iHeart, followed
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