9/26/2017 Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better

Bobby Riggs was 21 when he won Wimbledon in 1939, but like many in his sport,
Riggs’ peak was brief (though he was formidable enough for top contender Jack
Kramer to pen “How I’ll Beat Bobby Riggs” in our pages in 1948). He is best
remembered for his reemergence in the 1970s when he challenged Billie Jean King,
then the best woman tennis player in the world, to a battle of the sexes contest, with
a $100,000 winner-take-all prize. This after he dispatched—and humiliated—
Maragret Court on Mother’s Day in 1973.

As Nora Ephron noted:

Every so often you turn a corner and Life, or the times, or the public-
relations mechanism that makes the world go round throws out a hero you
have to live with for a while. The point here is not about heroes but
heroines. And long before the Bobby Riggs-Margaret Court tennis match

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took place near San Diego last May, it was clear to me that Margaret
Court, the heroine who had been thrown not just my way but at the entire
female population of the world, was going to leave something to be
desired. The symbolism of the match was haywire enough to begin with
—Riggs has always played a woman’s game, Court a man’s—and it was
to get even more muddled before the actual confrontation.

But beyond that, it seemed quite likely that of all the big women players
now on the circuit, Margaret Court would be the one least likely to come
through. I’m not just talking about winning the match—although God
knows that would have helped. But there were the nerves. Margaret had
nerves. Muscle spasms under pressure. She, of course, insisted they were
simply magnesium deficiencies and potassium deficiencies; everyone else
insisted they were nerves. Just like a woman. And then there was her
style. I suppose it’s not really fair to bring up style, style has nothing to do
with tennis, nothing to do with anything really, but it mattered to me. I
mean, here is Bobby Riggs, the Lip, the hustler, saucy Bobby Riggs with
his dyed red hair and his never-ending monologue and his relentless
promotions (the copperbracelet promotion, the Head tennisclothes
promotion, the 415-vitaminpills-a-day promotion, the land development
that sponsored the match promotion, the building project where Bobby
lived promotion), here is Bobby Riggs, clown prince of the Old Boy
tennis circuit, great copy, and he is standing on the court of the San
Vicente Country Club in San Diego Country Estates posing for
photographs with Margaret Court.

It is Friday afternoon, two days before the Mother’s Day match, and he is
whispering to Margaret, taunting her about the weight of the tennis balls
and the question of her nerves and the despicable quality of women’s
tennis and the pressure of having all the women counting on her on
Sunday. And here is Margaret. Nervous. Smiling uneasily. Occasionally
offering a demure reply to Bobby or the press. “I like a challenge,” she is
saying. “I love the game. It’s been very good to me.” Like that. I didn’t

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want that. I wanted some lip. I wanted some aggression. I wanted some
fight. I wanted satisfaction. And what I got, what all of us got instead, was
a lady.

It was a prelude to the Main Event against King who was very much up for the
challenge. More than anything, Riggs was a hustler who lived for the action, and
played only when money was involved—cards, golf, basketball, tennis, you name
it.

Oh, by the way, King dusted Riggs in straight sets. Dan Wakefield was there and
wrote about the whole spectacle in “My Love Affair with Billie Jean King”:

However many male masochists may have seized on the image of Billie
Jean and her racket as a stimulating symbol of their favorite fetish, I really
doubt that it was a sudden surge of flagellant fervor that made so many
men root for Billie Jean to beat (at tennis) Bobby Riggs in the Astrodome
extravaganza last year. Some of the news reports tried to make the story
into a men-for-Bobby and women-for-Billie atmosphere, but the case was
not nearly so clear-cut, either at the Astrodome or throughout the country.
In the highly scientific, socioeconomic private poll I conducted before
going down to Houston, I only found one man who was backing Bobby.
He was a Harvard graduate who was temporarily unemployed, and
perhaps he feared that a King victory would mean more women taking
potential jobs from him. God knows. I do know my private poll was not
merely conducted among male writers or intellectuals, a kinky and
unrepresentative group at best, but I discovered that Billie Jean’s staunch
male supporters included my local druggist, my neighborhood banker, the
building manager of The Atlantic Monthly Company (he had recently
bought his own tennis racket) and my retired father in Indianapolis.

The King-Riggs event drew a bigger crowd than any other tennis match in
the history of the world (30,000 in the Astrodome made it the biggest, not
even counting national TV and piped-in television to forty other countries

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throughout the world) ; at this pinnacle of the sport’s all-time crowd

appeal, the pregame talk was not primarily about tennis. The match was
billed as “The Battle of the Sexes” and the talk in the bars and restaurants
and lobbies, the talk among fans and handicappers and hangers-on and
reporters, was mainly about Sex. The Battle of the Sexes. Sexism. Male
Chauvinism. Women’s Liberation. And just sex, plain and fancy.

Riggs and King are the subject of a new movie featuring Steve Carrell and Emma
Stone which concentrates on their personal lives and adds depth to the cartoonish
legend of Riggs as the ultimate male chauvinist pig. Although sports movies, never
mind biopics, are often cringe-worthy, this looks like it could be fun.

[Photo Credit: Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, via The Sporting News/Getty
Images; Riggs by Jerry Cooke/SI/Getty Images]

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