I was not surprised when Bobby’s representatives phoned us before we could get to them. There had been nothing in it for our tour if I beat the 1939 champion of Wimbledon, but everything changed when he beat Margaret, one of the best, perhaps most physically imposing female players that tennis had ever seen. Now we had something to prove. 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. It wasn’t just about my pride or reputation. I imagined 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.
It was late June when we agreed to the basic terms for the match: a $100,000 winner-take-all purse from the promoter Jerry Perenchio, plus more from related ventures to be negotiated. I insisted that we play the men’s standard best-of-five sets so there would be no excuses.
I knew that announcing the match was on would create a nonstop avalanche of publicity and free Bobby to start yammering again, which he did, saying things like, “I don’t think women can stand up to the stress…Women’s tennis stinks!…Women who can, do. Women who can’t become feminists.” So I insisted that we hold off announcing the deal for a few weeks so that I could concentrate on Wimbledon.
That decision felt even better when the ATP, the men’s ten-month-old players’ union, decided to boycott the tournament because one of their members, Yugoslavia’s Niki Pilić, had been suspended by the International Lawn Tennis Federation for refusing to play the Davis Cup. I reached out to Arthur Ashe and the other men’s leaders yet again, to see if they wanted our support, and I reiterated my long-held belief that we would be stronger if we all banded together. As usual, the men wanted nothing to do with us, even though we’d now proved that we could attract big crowds and major sponsors on our own. Once again, their rejection ended up empowering us.
I had been trying to organize all the women players since 1964, and now I was determined to make my idea happen. The men were positioned better than ever to assert that they deserved most if not all of the prize money, and I knew we had to protect women’s interests as a group. I also knew that the decision of the top seventy male stars to boycott Wimbledon would help us and our women’s tour by shining an unprecedented spotlight on us for the entire fortnight.
During the Queen’s Club tournament the week before Wimbledon, I put in hours of meetings between my matches talking to other players. At first we were all over the place. Some of the women, including Frankie and Rosie, favored threatening our own Wimbledon boycott over the unequal prize money (£3,000 for the ladies’ champion versus £5,000 for the men’s champion that year). But a number of our top players, including Chrissie and Evonne, refused outright to join a boycott, so it would have been pointless.
As the women players started gathering in London in advance of Wimbledon, we benefited from a stroke of luck. The logistics of getting everyone together were simplified because the new Gloucester Hotel, which had ambitions of becoming an official tournament hotel, was providing free lodging to the women players in the main draw. We made the Gloucester our base of operations, and on June 21, 1973, we were able to round up sixty-five of us in a large meeting room at the hotel. Rosie, Ann Jones, and Val Ziegenfuss were among those highly involved. I asked Betty Stöve, who stood six feet one, to guard the door and told her, “Betty, nobody gets in and nobody gets out until we have an association. Got it?”
We had Larry draw up the organizational bylaws before we met so we could take a vote right then. In addition to his involvement in the Riggs negotiations, Larry was churning out so many business deals for the two of us I had trouble keeping track. We were into publishing, business management, event promotion, tennis pro shops, and TennisAmerica camps in fourteen locations with about two hundred instructors and three thousand students. Most exciting of all, we had just joined forces with a group of businessmen to start the team tennis league that Larry and I had been dreaming about for years. Now, Larry was in London to inform players about the league, in addition to trying to help us push through the women’s players association.
When the meeting began, Rosie joined me at the front of the room for a few remarks. Then we opened the floor for discussion. Julie Anthony, our Stanford scholar who played the tour part-time while studying for her psychology PhD, asked, “Why do we need an organization?” I love Julie, and we still laugh about this today, but the glare I gave her said everything. I felt like screeching, Are you kidding me?
Instead, I took a deep breath and patiently laid out one more time the benefits of having an association. The most important aspect was that we would have the power to call the shots on our own tour, and not be dictated to by the national associations or the ATP. We could speak as one voice. I explained the suggested bylaws Larry had created, and there was some discussion about why we had to pay 10 percent of our prize money to fund the new organization. I noted that we had already paid that much to Gladys; it was just the cost of doing business. Then we talked a long while about what we should call ourselves. It could’ve gone on forever, and so I said, “You guys, this is it. If we don’t get this done now, I give up.” I asked everyone who wanted to vote yes to raise their hands. The tally was nearly unanimous. We were now the Women’s Tennis Association.
There were some whoops and scattered applause around the room, and then a small rush to the door, but Betty continued to block the way as I said, “Whoa! Whoa! We’re not done yet. We still have to elect officers.” Frankie was voted secretary, Betty was chosen treasurer, and I was made president. Virginia Wade, a USLTA and ILTF loyalist who had been our most reluctant recruit, was elected vice president. She resigned two weeks later. To promote unity, I had advocated for someone from the USLTA’s women’s tour to be one of our officers. Like Chrissie and Evonne, who weren’t at the Gloucester meeting, Virginia was not playing our Slims tour yet.
When Betty opened the doors, we spilled out into the lobby and I announced to the waiting press, “We have an organization!” Judging from their questions, it didn’t seem like they cared. They were more interested in knowing whether we were supporting the men’s boycott of Wimbledon. But word spread somehow. A year earlier, one of my heroes, Marvin Miller, the groundbreaking executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association and an avid tennis player, had led the baseball union’s first-ever strike against the owners and won better pension funding and salary arbitration for the players. Now Miller sent us his congratulations in an interview with United Press International. His endorsement meant the world to me.
We still needed someone to run the WTA’s day-to-day operations. I met with Gladys and offered her the job as our first executive director. I thought she would want to run our association.
“Absolutely not,” she said.
I was surprised and disappointed. But Gladys was used to running her own show and she didn’t want to work for anybody else. It felt like the end of an era. Her work to make women’s tennis viable had been indispensable, and she’s a historic, sometimes underappreciated giant in our sport’s lore. The Original 9 honored Gladys’s memory at our fiftieth-anniversary celebration in 2020.
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I was extremely grateful that we had our players’ association organized when Wimbledon began four days later, because I was chasing my fifth career Wimbledon singles championship, a milestone that hadn’t been reached since Helen Wills Moody in 1932, and my mind felt so much lighter. I’d walk through the gates at the All England Club every day thinking, We have an association! It’s done! We all knew that it was so important for our future.
Because of the men’s boycott, the top men playing were the Czech star Jan Kodes and Romania’s Ilie Nastase, both of whom were
following orders from their Communist-run tennis associations. Sweden’s Bjorn Borg, then only seventeen, made his All England Club debut that week and quickly achieved rock star status, especially among the hordes of young girls who shrieked at him the way others did for the Beatles. Borg soon needed security just to walk across the grounds.
Otherwise, the women were the unchallenged stars of the show. People wanted to see us. The total attendance of 300,172 was the second highest in the championships’ history to that date. We had all our best players in the draw and our top four seeds—Margaret, Chrissie, Evonne, and me—advanced to the semifinals. Better yet, both of those matches were terrific. Chrissie knocked out Margaret in three sets that were decided 6–1, meaning Margaret pried away a total of just two games in the two sets she lost. Chrissie called it the best match of her life—all eighteen years of it so far.
I played Evonne the same day, and it was one of the most exciting matches of my life. Evonne fought off seven match points before I won in three sets. I couldn’t believe some of the trouble spots she escaped. In the end, I just had a better day, but Evonne reminded the world of her grace and the caliber of player she was.
When Chrissie and I played our rain-delayed final two days later, I shut her out in the first set in only seventeen minutes. She had still never beaten me on grass, but there were some tense moments before I closed out the second set, 7–5, to take my fifth title. As happy as I was, I had to stay focused because my tournament wasn’t done. Rosie and I then won the doubles title by defeating Frankie and Betty in three sets, and Owen Davidson and I beat Raul Ramirez and Janet Newberry for the mixed-doubles title, giving me my second triple crown at the All England Club.
I was too exhausted to attend the Wimbledon Ball that night. And anyway, my mind was already racing ahead to Bobby Riggs.
A few days later, I found myself sitting side by side with Bobby at a press conference at the Town Tennis Club in Manhattan. Jerry Perenchio, who had had enormous success staging the 1971 Fight of the Century between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, told the press the Ali-Frazier bout “was ‘The Fight’ ” and “this is ‘The Match.’ ” Then Bobby and I traded banter like we were prizefighters at a weigh-in.
“She’s fighting and carrying the banner for women’s lib,” Bobby said, “and I’m carrying the male is supreme, the male is king, no matter what the difference in age is. We can beat the girls on and off the court in almost anything…I can kill her.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “The one thing I can’t stand is what Bobby has to say, that men are supreme. First of all, people are people, and people are supreme in different things. It’s not ‘men are supreme in everything.’ ”
“They want the same kind of money as us…It’s ridiculous,” Bobby said.
“Without women, you wouldn’t have these opportunities,” I told him. “Since 1939, you’ve never had it so good.”
Our two-month buildup toward the Battle of the Sexes had begun.
Chapter 17
At the remove of a half century, it might be difficult to understand why so much import and hype was centered around a tennis match like the one that Bobby and I played. But the significance was real, and the aftereffects were seismic. Knowing the context explains a lot.
The America I returned to from England that summer was gripped by live television coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings that eventually led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. American troops pulled out of Vietnam that year, but the feeling that we had lost the unpopular war and the suspicions that our government had lied to us were sobering. There was soaring inflation, a roiling stock market, and a looming energy crisis. People waited in long lines to fill up their gas tanks and they were worried about their jobs. In short, American exceptionalism was being challenged on many fronts and so were gender roles—specifically, white men’s unquestioned superiority. For the first time, the U.S. government approved using the appellation “Ms.” as a substitute for Miss or Mrs. in official government documents.
Riggs wasn’t the only man saying that women belonged in the home, or that we were constitutionally incapable of handling tough jobs and stress. By the mid-1970s, only 9 percent of the physicians in America were female because medical school admissions had been withheld from them for years. Women’s representation was also abysmally low in law, politics, CEO positions, piloting a passenger airline plane, and countless other endeavors.
Bobby’s male chauvinist pig act tapped into anxieties about men’s changing status in a transformed world. A lot of what he said wouldn’t be tolerated today. When I agreed to try to avenge Margaret’s loss, I became a symbol for people who were tired of seeing women dismissed en masse, demeaned as second-class citizens and shut out of opportunities everywhere, not just sports. Women were still earning only 56.6 percent of what a man earned for the same job by 1973, the biggest difference since the government began measuring the wage gap in 1960, and the gap was worse for women of color. The roles men and women occupied were in flux, but men still had the upper hand and the power. Sexism and racism abounded. The glass ceiling was real.
“We’ve kept those women where they belong,” Bobby said in one of our press conferences.
“I like the idea that I’m playing for someone besides myself—and I feel I am in this particular case,” I said.
In the two months after we announced the match, we were able to settle on the rest of the terms and payments. Jerry booked the Houston Astrodome for September 20, 1973. The ABC network won the auction for the broadcast rights, paying $750,000, and the Astrodome paid another $300,000 to host the event. That was an unbelievable amount of money for tennis.
Bobby and I didn’t share in any of those windfalls, but Jerry helped us both get additional endorsements to make sure the loser didn’t go home empty-handed. Bobby signed individual deals with Hai Karate aftershave, American Express, and Nabisco, the maker of Sugar Daddy lollipops, a play on his chauvinist pig shtick that earned him $50,000. He was even chasing a deal with Clairol because he had been using Miss Clairol hair coloring to hide his gray hair for years. (His shade was Sunlit Brown, Nora Ephron reported in New York magazine.) I got an endorsement for Sunbeam curling irons. I also made a point to wear the special blue suede sneakers that I convinced Adidas to make for me the year before. “We’re on color TV, let’s do something that stands out,” I told them.
ABC assigned Howard Cosell, the most famous sports announcer in the business, to call the play-by-play. Rosie would provide color analysis from the women’s perspective. ABC wanted Jack Kramer to provide the male point of view, but there was no way I was going to give him such an enormous platform to run down women’s tennis; I had Larry tell Jerry that weeks before the match. When Jerry balked, Larry flew to New York to tell Roone Arledge, the head of ABC Sports, that I’d refuse to play if Jack stayed.
“When I delivered the message,” said Larry, “I could see the blood rise from Roone’s collar to the roots of his hair. I’ve never seen a human being turn that crimson in my life.”
“No one tells ABC who their network talent is!” Roone said.
Larry remained calm and said, “Roone, Billie Jean isn’t saying who your talent is. Just who it isn’t.”
Once Larry explained my background with Kramer and my reasons for wanting his removal, Roone simmered down. Larry walked out of the meeting thinking he had convinced Roone to make a change.
In the eight-week run-up to the Battle of the Sexes, I made a concerted effort to avoid the press and stay away from Bobby. Tennis is in significant part a head game, and Bobby was an expert at getting into his opponents’ psyches. It worked with Margaret, who was always susceptible to nerves anyway, and Bobby repeatedly tried to plant the idea that his mind games would work on me, too. “I’m not Margaret,” I’d answer him with a smile. “I love pressure.” Still, I lay low while he ran all over the pl
ace promoting himself and whipping up attention for the match by spouting more sexist things: “The best way to handle women is to keep them pregnant and barefoot…I love women—in the bedroom, and the kitchen, in that order.” His remarks made me wince. The media lapped it up.
One show I did agree to appear on was The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on July 31, nine days after we announced the match. Johnny loved tennis and I had been on his show before. He asked about the Battle of the Sexes and Riggs. The actor Tony Randall, Johnny’s previous guest, sat next to me on the couch and interjected little jokes here and there about women’s tennis. It was all in good fun, and a few months later Bobby and I taped a guest appearance on Randall’s hit TV show, The Odd Couple. A few months after that, Tony and Bob Hope handed me a check for $5,000 as an award winner of the Gillette Cavalcade of Champions—money that I announced I would use to start the Women’s Sports Foundation, in part to protect Title IX. The chain of events was a reminder of the power of relationships. You never know when or where a significant one will begin, or new allies will appear.
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I played only three tournaments in the two months between Wimbledon and the Battle of the Sexes and my health became an on-again, off-again issue that left people speculating that the pressure of the Riggs showdown was getting to me. They were wrong, but that didn’t stop the chatter.
I strained my right knee at a tournament in New Jersey in mid-August and dropped out after the first round. Luckily, I felt healed enough to play the U.S. Open, which was a big deal because we would be playing for equal prize money for the first time. Some of the men gave the tournament director, Billy Talbert, grief about it. Billy was asked by a reporter if he had anything to say to them, and I loved it when Billy said, “I’ll just tell the men to go sell their product better.” How great was that?
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