On the changeover I’m up 2–1 and Bobby peels off his warm-up jacket, which he had kept on to give his sponsors an extra bump. On the air, Cosell notes that Bobby has discarded it and says that in addition to Riggs’s wardrobe, “Maybe the braggadocio is a little reduced too.” My coach Dennis sits to my right, looking calm. Marilyn is next to him, ready to pass me Gatorade and towels. Larry sits next to them, staring at his feet. As usual, he’s so nervous he can’t watch.
When Bobby comes out after the changeover I see that his blue knit shirt is darkened with sweat. I feel fresh. We go back and forth for the next few games. The champion shows up in Bobby and he hits some terrific shots. He breaks my serve in the fifth game, and leads, 3–2. I’m still not worried. I’m running him around, dinking shots back to make him bend over, depriving him of air as he has to jackknife down to dig out each low-bouncing ball. From the beginning of the match, I had noticed that Bobby couldn’t hit a backhand down the line, which forced him to play to my backhand—my strength. I remind myself to methodically construct each point, each game, each set. One ball at a time. I break him right back in the sixth game, blasting an overhead for another winner.
At 4–4 on my serve, Cosell remarks on television, “The comedy seems to have gone out of Bobby Riggs.” No curtsies here. I take the ninth game and lead 30–all. I hit a high backhand volley and Bobby lunges, shanking it to the right. Break point and set point. The crowd is roaring but I’m not paying much attention. I’m crouched in my stance, watching, waiting. Bobby’s first serve is a fault. Then…double fault.
I do soak in the crowd roar now. It’s deafening. He’s choking.
Winning the first set, 6–4, is huge psychologically. It was also vital strategically, because I had never played more than three sets in competition. I’m on the right track, but I also keep telling myself, Stay in the now. Don’t look around. Keep doing what you’re doing. I ignore what is happening on Bobby’s side of the umpire’s chair during the four-minute TV break. When I see the videotape later, I find out that Frank Gifford had come over between sets to interview Bobby, who was toweling off sweat and popping salt pills to try to stay hydrated. Bobby drops all the playacting and delivers an analysis of the match to Frank that is honest and smart.
“This is a net player’s court, and she’s very good at the net,” Bobby says. “She’s making a lot of wonderful volleys, and I missed a lot of first serves…She’s playing better than I am right now.”
To me, that showed who Bobby Riggs really was—not just a hustler, a dealmaker, but a champion. Then he added, “It’s just the first set. There’s a long way to go. All I can tell you is I’m going to have to pick the pace up or change my tactics or play a little faster. She’s awful quick.”
I start the second set by walking to the wrong side of the court, which was worth a laugh. It’s a good sign. I’m still locked in the zone.
Bobby and I exchange service breaks again to start the second set. I win the second game with a running backhand crosscourt, one of my favorite shots. I start the third game with a backhand half-volley that brings Bobby forward, and he hits the ball into the net. I’m mixing things up and forcing him out of his comfort zone. Where are those famous lobs? When he does lob, I kill him with my overhead, just as I practiced. I’m loosening up now, serving down the middle and then hitting behind him, wrongfooting him like Frank Brennan suggested. Between points, Bobby is panting. That’s what I want to see. I’m putting slice on the ball to make him run three or four extra steps. People around us are jumping up and down in their seats, but I’m still lost in what I’m doing, barely aware of anything beyond the court, just focused on the next ball. Early in my career I might’ve played to the crowd, but tonight the court is my only world. I have tunnel vision.
When I’m up 2–1 in the second set, I pass him with a topspin forehand I hit with both feet off the ground. I’m throwing everything I’ve got at him now. I’m taking in information and processing it, understanding fully what’s going on. Bobby is showing me that he can’t hit over the ball to generate much topspin and he has no speed, but he’s still got some fight in him. Up in the booth, Gene Scott observes, “When Bobby wins a point, he has to win it pretty much on Billie Jean’s error. When Billie Jean wins it, she wins it clean.” The pattern held all night. I was ending points with outright winners, meaning Bobby never got a racket on the ball.
When I pull ahead 4–3 in the second set, I know the next game is crucial. If I win this set Bobby knows he has to endure five sets to beat me. Bobby serves. I chase down everything. He can’t offset the ground I cover. I break his serve by passing him with another backhand. I own that shot. It’s 5–3, and in the TV booth Rosie is dryly saying, “Looks like I’m going to win some money on this match.”
Riggs is wiped out and showing it. I don’t need to look at him, I can sense it. It’s a boost to know I’m making it happen. I’m generating all the energy and force now, and he can feel it too. These are crucial points coming up, but I say to myself, Play each ball like any other. At 40–love, triple set point, I get my first serve in and Bobby flops a backhand into the net. Second set: 6–3.
Frank Gifford comes up to me during the break and asks me if the match has been easier than I expected. “I didn’t know what to expect,” I said. “I never think it’s won until it’s over.”
Bobby comes out for the third set with a different attitude. I didn’t expect anything less. He finally realized that hitting to my backhand was a mistake and tries probing my forehand. Doesn’t work. I break his serve in the opening game. Then I tell myself, Now is the time to turn up the flame. End it. Finish him off.
For the rest of the match, the effort both of us are expending—me to finish it, and Bobby to stay alive—results in some occasionally ugly tennis. Again, I don’t care. My only job here is to win fair and square, period. I just have to win. That’s what people will remember.
From the start of the match I had made sure to switch my racket to my left hand between points. That’s a tension-busting trick that Margaret Osborne du Pont taught me to give your racket hand a rest. Bobby doesn’t do that. I’m up 4–2 in the third set when I see that he’s pulling his fingers, rubbing his hand. Cramp. It’s a bad one. We’ve all been there, and I actually start feeling sorry for him now. I have a flashback to all those times I was so conflicted about beating men or boys that I lied to protect their egos, and I start ruminating. What happens to Bobby when I beat him in front of millions? Then: Stop it! What happens if he beats you? Think of the pain that you’ll feel for years. Get back to one point at a time. One ball at a time. Nothing else. Execute!
Bobby asks for a ten-minute injury timeout for his hand cramp, and though a cramp is not technically an injury I let him have it. I don’t look, but over on his side, Bobby gulps down another handful of salt pills and gets a hand massage from his coach, Lornie Kuhle. I’ve got to make sure I stay loose and avoid cramping during the long break myself, so Dennis stands up and I put my feet up on his chair. What I didn’t expect was that Marilyn, without being asked, starts massaging my calf. Oh boy, is this inappropriate. What is she doing? I want her out of my space. I’m not happy with her. But I don’t want a scene so I let it go on for a little and then pull away. I want to get out of this relationship, but I can’t deal with it now. I have to play. I swig some more Gatorade. I get my mind back to the match.
The last few games are tormented, which often happens when so much is at stake. I fault on a first serve and chew myself out. What are you doing, Billie? Hit it! Then I drive a topspin shot into the net. Lord have mercy on my soul. Bobby breaks me to win the game. I break right back, and I’ve got him in trouble again. One game away from a straight-set victory. Bobby can barely move. He can barely serve. On my first two match points I can’t put him away. At 30–40, we fall back to deuce because I miss a forehand. I look calm, but I’m screaming at myself inside, That forehand was the embarra
ssment of the world! Enough is enough! This game has already lasted fifteen points.
Third match point for me, Bobby winds up and his first serve is a fault.
When I went to Australia as a young woman to learn how to be No. 1, one of the first things the Aussies taught me was to just get the ball back in these situations. Make them play, no matter what. So that’s what I’m going to do now. Just get the ball high over the net to his backhand. Give him a chance to miss. Make him play.
Fans are on their feet screaming, but all my senses are trained on Bobby as he rocks back to serve again. I don’t even hear my dad booming, “Close him out, Sissy! Close him out!” Bobby serves to my forehand, and I hit it up the middle. He tries a backhand volley, but he can barely lift his arm anymore. My racket is already flying through the air when I see his ball is floating weakly into the net. I cover my face for a second—happy it’s over, ecstatic I won—and Bobby has already jumped the net and come to my side of the court to congratulate me. How the heck did he summon that? I hug him and throw an arm around him as we walk off the court. It’s bedlam, but I can hear him anyway as he leans in and tells me “You’re too good. I underestimated you.”
People are rushing at me from all sides now. The first to reach me is Dennis, and I kiss him on the cheek. Then comes Dick Butera, and I kiss him too. What the hell. Finally there is Larry, and I throw my arms around his neck and collapse against him for a moment. My relief is so great, the satisfaction so complete.
With Larry’s arm still around me and friends forming a scrum to keep me from being crushed, we make it to the award area. George Foreman has muscled his way there, too. He presents me with the winner’s check for $100,000 and a towering gold-plated trophy. Larry lifts me onto a nearby table so I can hoist it to the crowd. At one point I stick out my tongue and laugh, feeling absolutely giddy. That’s when I finally see my mom and dad, and so I tilt the trophy at them and scream, “Thank you!”
“Way to go, champ!” Dad yells back at me. My mom is nodding and absolutely beaming.
On the way to the locker room I could only think of two things I’d given up for training but wanted desperately now—cold beer and ice cream, in that order. I was still so wired when I arrived at my post-match press conference that I paced the dais in my bare feet with a beer in my hand. As we waited for Bobby, I took some reporters’ questions and someone told me the final count of outright winners I hit was 70 of the 109 points I won—a remarkable 68 percent.
So much for the rap that all women choke. Curry Kirkpatrick emphasized the same point in his article, writing that my play was “a brilliant rising to an occasion; a clutch performance under the most trying of circumstances. Seldom has there been a more classic example of a skilled athlete performing at peak efficiency in the most important moment of her life.”
“This is the culmination of nineteen years of work,” I told the press that night. “Since the time they wouldn’t let me be in the picture because I didn’t have on a tennis skirt, I’ve wanted to change the game around. Now it’s here.”
After the press conference I swung by Jerry Perenchio’s hotel suite at the Astroworld for a few minutes. Dick was showing everybody the $10,000 check that Bobby had just written him to settle their bet. Right away, a few of the old male pros started griping that Bobby must have thrown the match on purpose. I heard that was a hot topic at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, too, where Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzalez, and a bunch of other male players had watched the telecast. Some of them couldn’t believe Bobby had lost to a woman. But Arthur Ashe wasn’t among them. After playing doubles with me in Hilton Head a few weeks before the Riggs match, Arthur wrote in his diary that he had gained a greater appreciation for my game, and he won an $80 bet on me as he watched the Battle of the Sexes in a crowded bar.
Forty years later, ESPN broadcast a bogus story reviving the tanking question and suggesting that Bobby lost to pay off mafia gambling debts. The charge never made sense and Bobby always denied it. First of all, he bet heavily on himself for the match. Dick’s check was just one of many Bobby had to pay out. Second, Bobby’s coach, Lornie, who knew him better than anyone, says the allegation that Bobby tanked is preposterous because Bobby had plenty of money and he was never in debt to any mobsters. Lornie insisted that Bobby’s greatest undoing was his ego. Bobby admitted that too. Before the match he told New York magazine, “I’m overconfident and undertrained. I’m completely ridiculous.”
Most important, Bobby thought he had a lucrative franchise going if he beat me. It wasn’t widely known, but Jerry Perenchio was already angling to put together an astonishing $1 million winner-take-all match between Bobby and Chrissie, and there was talk that perhaps Bobby would play Rosie after that. That alone should’ve killed any talk of a fixed match.
Years later, Bobby even took a lie detector test on the attorney F. Lee Bailey’s talk show, hoping to prove once and for all that our match was legitimate. In 1990, he told World Tennis magazine, “I didn’t let Billie Jean win. I bet on that match and I bet on Bobby Riggs and I lost. It was a bitter, bitter defeat. Throwing the match couldn’t be further from the truth. Losing to her was the most disappointing, disheartening experience of my life.”
Besides, a pro tennis player knows when a fellow player tanks. I knew this wasn’t a tank. Bobby wanted to beat me; he just couldn’t. “She was too good—she was never extended,” he said, classy in defeat. “She was playing well within herself. It was over too quickly.”
Chapter 20
It was nearly midnight in Northampton, Massachusetts, when the news that I’d won 6–4, 6–3, 6–3 flashed on television screens all over Smith College. News reports said five hundred women streamed out of their dormitories, unlocked the school tower to ring the bells, and marched across the campus with victory signs. One read, “Today, tennis—tomorrow the world.”
Other celebrations happened all over the country. Millions of women—and quite a few men—applauded my victory. I knew it would be big if I beat Bobby, but it really sank in when I flew to Philadelphia a few days later on a promotional tour for the city’s new World TeamTennis team, the Freedoms, who had made me the first player taken in the league’s inaugural draft. As soon as I stepped out of the limo in front of my hotel, a city worker popped out of a manhole and shouted, “Way to go, Billie!” Then a police officer apologized for asking for my autograph and added, “If I didn’t, my wife would kill me.” The Philadelphia fire department made me an honorary chief, complete with a white fire chief’s hat. When I walked into the newsroom of The Philadelphia Bulletin, everybody applauded. Then a group of women ran across the office to greet me, and one of them said, “Billie Jean, we’ve been wanting to ask for a raise for ten years. But we never had the courage to do it.” Another said, “After you won that match, we decided to go for it.”
“That’s great, but did you get the raise?” I asked.
“Yes!”
“Well, right on!”
The phenomenon the match created surpassed my wildest expectations. Remember, by the time Bobby and I played, I had already marched for women’s liberation and the world had found out I had an abortion, I’d carved out a path on my terms as a new kind of career woman and wife, I’d endured questions about my “unconventional” marriage, battled with powerful men like Jack Kramer and the tennis establishment in very public standoffs, and helped lead a breakaway movement to build the first all-women’s tennis tour despite threats and predictions that it couldn’t be done. Taking stands was nothing new for me. But Bobby was mocking women across the board, and it was as if I was every woman’s stand-in that night at the Astrodome when I backed up what I said. In America, especially, I think we’ve always had a romance with mavericks who call their shots or engage something on principle, and then deliver. I think that’s partly what happened with me after I played Bobby. Even people who didn’t agree with me nonetheless respected the way I performed. Skeptics were wi
lling to give me another look. And the fans who already liked me now seemed to like me far more.
Suddenly I was catapulted to the forefront of social justice movements that were effecting great change. I found myself with influence that leaped the firewall of sports and spread into the worlds of entertainment, business, and politics. This was the biggest platform I had ever had, and I intended to keep championing the cause of equality. I wanted any little girl to have the same dreams as any little boy. I gave interview after interview to newspapers and magazines for months. I cohosted with Mike Douglas for a week on his popular TV talk show, I did a cameo on Sonny and Cher’s variety show. There were many other invitations. I sometimes got standing ovations now before I played a match or said a word at public appearances. It started to feel like I was on a victory lap that showed no sign of ending anytime soon.
Of course, the flip side of the massive attention was an almost total loss of what privacy I had left, an even crazier schedule, and a flood of requests from folks asking me to personally deliver them from whatever challenge they might be facing. That was new. It was as if people thought I had a magic wand. I’ve always had a difficult time saying no—I want to be kind and good, I understand that yearning not to feel erased or invisible, and I probably said yes too often. Chrissie used to joke that I had become a “mother to millions.” Girls and women, moms and dads, school administrators and coaches, people from all walks of life would contact me to see if I could personally intervene in their lives to right some wrong, slay another dragon. It still happens. I do as much as I can.
In the five decades since, it is not an exaggeration to say not a day has gone by without someone talking to me about the Battle of the Sexes match. Women still tell me about where they were when they saw it, how happy and empowered they felt when I won. So many women approach me choked with emotion to say, “Thank you…You made things possible…You changed my life.” They tell me they finally felt it was okay to compete and win, how much self-confidence it gave them to think that they didn’t have to be one of the boys to beat the boys. Some women tell me that for the first time they believed that anything was possible for them.
All In Page 29