The Battle of the Sexes with Julie Kliegman

I guess I feel ultimately like America was tricked into watching a woman do something other than suffer, and I like that.

Welcome to Your Wrong About.

I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking with Julie Kleekman, our tennis correspondent, about the battle of the sexes.

We are are so excited that our humble show now has a tennis correspondent and we are extra excited that 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 in 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 excitinger.

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 Your Wrong About will be at San Francisco Sketch Fest.

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 7 o'clock.

You can find more information about that at sfsketchfest.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 also excited that you are here with us.

So let's go play some tennis.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you the story behind the Ms.

magazine covers.

With me today, as I live and breathe, is Kuli Kleekman.

Hello, Sarah.

Hello, Kuli.

How are you?

I'm doing great.

How are you?

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.

Yeah, yeah, it's a bit of a struggle.

I think anyone who is going on

like actively dating in the darkest days of winter needs an award because I just like finish work and I'm like, time to prepare and consume a root vegetable.

I mean, what did I tell you?

I told you I took a giant nap after work and I think that's like the only thing there is to do besides consume a root vegetable.

Yeah, that's how you conserve your energy.

Yes.

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.

Yes.

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.

That is a great question, Sarah.

So sex is thought of as biological.

So sex is like kind of what you're working with.

And gender is kind of like how you see yourself and how society sees you and how those things mesh or don't mesh.

Wow.

I love that.

definition.

And I feel like, can I give you my kind of handed down pop culture understanding of this event, which is my favorite kind to 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.

It is 73.

Close.

Very close.

Bobby Riggs, who was

pretty old by tennis standards.

I'm not trying to be mean, but like he was

in his 50s at this time.

Yes.

Right.

And so his glory days as a professional tennis player had been like the 1940s.

His heyday was kind of like 1939.

He won that year when Wimbledon was still an amateur tournament.

He won singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at Wimbledon.

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.

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-50s, it does sort of strengthen your argument if you can beat somebody, you know, to the extent that you're making any kind of argument at all, which is debatable.

Right.

I mean, 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 like a degenerate gambler, all you want to do is like hustle people for different things.

And we won't get too far ahead of ourselves, but there is like, did he rig this kind of component to this?

Did he rig?

Ha, okay.

Yeah, it's like a JK rolling name.

You're like, well, his last name does suggest what he's going to spend his time doing.

Exactly.

What was your perception of this when you were growing up, if any?

Yeah, it was just sort of like the anything you can do, I can do better vibe, which I guess like my 90s version would have been like Mia Ham and Michael Jordan and that Gatorade commercial.

Here's a woman who is good.

Here's a guy who is like capital B bad.

Like 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.

You know, 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 like 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.

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

I was talking to friends recently about powder puff football.

Do you know about this?

Of course, yeah.

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.

Oh, yeah, no, this totally happened at my New Jersey school, yes.

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

Yeah, that's the extent of the idea.

Yeah.

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.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Where should we begin?

As you have already kind of alluded to, like 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 like extremely, extremely sincere.

And

to me, it's like, 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 like you don't, but if you did have to pick a tennis match, like

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 like a weird amount of meaning to like one silly circusy game, it might as well be this one.

And like, 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 Billy.

But there are so many in tennis alone.

And one of them involves like Trump wanting John McEnroe to play Serena Williams.

So you should definitely,

it's definitely worth looking up the whole

lot of them.

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.

Absolutely, yeah.

Unless John McEnroe's dead.

I don't think he is though.

He's not dead.

But like, I can see that being something he did while he was president.

Of course, yeah.

Well, I would love to know about kind of who are these people that we're talking about.

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.

Of course.

It's also like when you read Ms.

Magazine from the 70s and 80s, like it's other quite apparent problems aside, you're like, wow, a lot of cigarette ads.

It's like half cigarette ads some years.

They were doing what they had to.

Oh, yeah.

Magazines, not too often they turn away at a dollar.

So at this point, our friend Billy 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.

Like, 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 Billy.

Billy had finally beaten her in the semifinals of an Indianapolis tournament to snap Court's 12 tournament winning streak.

Court is really quite accomplished.

So are they like both kind of near the top of the rankings in their sport at the time?

Exactly.

It seems like the people who are at the top of a sport generally like have spent a lot of years kind of in the same very small community 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.

Yeah, that is the relationship I would say the two of them had, like congenial.

I don't think they were like the best of friends at any point, but they did have this awareness that like they're together in the same locker rooms like week after week after week.

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

Yeah, it's pretty unfortunate that it's so relatable, but it really is.

He had done matches like in all sorts of various like setups.

Like he had done matches with chairs on the court.

He had done attached himself to a dog on a leash.

Doesn't seem very nice for the dog.

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.

Gosh darn it, Bobby.

Don't involve dogs in this.

He has also done like 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 like 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 like queer rights across the board, including for trans people, trans athletes specifically.

It'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.

It really does never happen.

She has, not to say, she has never had like questionable comments on anything.

Like, she appeared to at one point support women's tour of today playing in Saudi Arabia, which

or at least explore the idea of playing in Saudi Arabia, which, as you can imagine, 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, though she is like a tennis icon for better or for worse.

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

Yeah.

And was the perception of Margaret Court?

I mean, A, I think Australians are always considered like 20% nicer by Americans than they actually are because the accent is so melodious.

Like an Australian can really like make you feel like you're getting a great compliment when they're actually nagging you about something.

Was she all was she considered kind of like more,

not to be too deterministic about this, but even her name is pretty feminine, you know?

Yeah.

Well, and a large part of her identity at the time was like she did have a kid and she did make it clear that her family comes first and stuff like that.

So I think, I don't think you're wrong.

Like she was seen as more feminine or stereotypically feminine, at least.

Yeah.

So, in the Nora Efron essay that you mention in Crazy Salad, this essay is, you know, 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, which is pretty tough.

Yeah.

Also, it feels worth pointing out that Efron 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.

What did that look like?

I can only imagine the

kind of language that might have appeared.

For Billy's match with Bobby, they had like a male perspective commentator and a female perspective commentator, and one was a man and one was a woman.

And they kind of did commentate along those lines.

So like the dude was making a lot of comments about like 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.

Yeah.

And well, and was, and so with the court match, what was the kind of pattern like leading up to that?

And what were people claiming that this was going to accomplish exactly?

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 is kind of like 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 Billy 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 pedder kind of leading up to it, this match was literally set for Mother's Day, 1973.

So

with all the meaning that comes with that,

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 like a woman, you can't really just expect to play like a male chauvinist for funsies and hope that the news goes away 20 minutes later.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's, 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, like, even if you're only in the public eye, like on the news for like one morning, then people like flock to your Instagram page or whatever, and you have like your own personal slice of the public to deal with for like years.

Oh, yeah.

And then you milkshake duck, and it's all, it's a whole thing.

Yeah, God.

I wonder where Kenbone is right now.

Anyway,

God bless you.

You weren't ready.

No one is.

So Billy, 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.

That's what we call getting thrashed, I believe.

That's the technical term, yeah.

That doesn't sit right with Billy, or you know, I believe she's with other players watching at the time.

She kind of 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 Rigs.

I'd think, oh my God, I have to win.

She says, 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 money and equitable treatment, would falter.

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 kind of a conditional privilege somehow.

Yeah.

I mean, you see this in the media all the time with like think pieces about like,

less so with the WNBA now, but so with like the NWSL, the Women's Soccer League, like, can they survive?

I mean, it's been like more than 10 years.

They're going to survive.

But it's, yeah, it's treated as something that could be, the rug could be pulled out from under you at any time.

Yeah.

And just, I mean, 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 like, well, if Sally doesn't do amazing in space and not make a single mistake, then like, we just can't send women up there.

They're too fragile.

I mean, yeah, like that is how everyone acts anytime anybody picks up a tennis racket or does anything.

It's wild.

It's really strange.

It's like, you know, women did laundry in the 1800s, you know?

Women can do anything.

It's fine.

For real.

So Billy gets in touch and.

gets things going with Bobby about setting up the next battle of the sexes, which is kind of the definitive battle of the sexes, as it would turn out.

So he wasn't happy with that one.

He was like, I've proven I can beat this other woman, but I want

my true adversary or whatever.

Yeah.

Even if he had played Billy first, I think he still would have wanted to play court.

Like, okay.

Like, yes, I think he had a particular fascination with Billy, and they had like a sort of relationship that eventually morphed into a friendship, but

or something resembling a friendship.

Yeah, that's where this is headed.

Fascinating.

In general, he just can't resist the spectacle.

So, like, if something's going on, Bobby Riggs is going to be part of it.

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

I love that.

You should get started writing that.

Okay.

I will.

I just assigned it to you.

You're welcome.

So.

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 like objectively giant pairs of glasses to play sports.

It just makes me so happy.

I think it's inspiration for glasses wearers everywhere.

So nice.

Yeah.

It really compensates for what happened to that guy in the mummy.

Yes.

AKA, the reason I wore contacts for 20 years.

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 Gene.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

You know, 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.

Oh, Lord.

And it is being promoted by the guy who promoted the Ali Fraser match at Madison Square Garden.

Wow.

Courtside seats were $100 a pop in 70s money.

When you could like go to college for that.

Yeah.

People are hyped.

There's a series of press conferences that Billy and Bobby do, and they really are both sort of 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 Kang, quote, I can kill her, which makes me think he just needs to calm down a tiny bit.

Say,

exactly.

It's just never a cute look to threaten to kill your opponent in a sporting match, you know?

Right.

And it's scary, but you know.

Yeah, he has this whole bit of being like sexist as like a joke or just for attention or money.

So there's this question of like, is he really sexist?

And like, I would argue that like it's not super harmless to like threaten to kill your opponent as a joke.

Like, I really agree.

Like you said, it's not very cute.

It's not, it doesn't make you seem like a better competitor even.

It just is kind of weird.

the the thing with men where they're like am i an incredibly virulently sexist person who like kind of 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 right like what makes you think it's a funny bit right king continues to be aware of the significance of the match for her.

She's talking about 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 costs $90,000 a minute.

I mean, I have no idea what standard advertising costs are in 1973, to be fair, but that's just a lot of money, you know?

It is.

Yeah, I'm famously like not a business person, but it does seem like quite a bit of money.

And ironically, the only way you can get that kind of an advertising money played into a sporting event involving a female athlete by pitting her against a man as if we're proving something.

Which is like...

Right.

That's just rich.

It's rich in information.

Absolutely.

I mean, at this point, like 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 deserve to play sports, let alone that they should be watching them in person or on TV.

I mean, 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 like 68, 69, like jumped into the Boston Marathon to run it because women weren't technically allowed and a race official attacked her.

Normal stuff.

I really can't get over that.

That like the same time period that we were like putting men on the moon, men, to be specific, we were like, women can't run marathons.

You know, it's because their uteruses will just drop right out.

Oh, yeah.

A society can only understand facts to the extent that we're ready to accept them.

Yeah.

I mean, that's so true.

And it's like in, I want to say like 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.

Throughout history, human beings of all genders have just been engaged in a mad dash to somehow survive.

And that often involves chasing someone or something or being chased.

And you just, and just everybody has mostly just dealt with it.

Somehow, yeah, the uteruses have lived on, yeah.

It's also so funny because like the very people who historically have been like, women can't do this, can't do that.

Anybody with a uterus, you just got it.

You got to 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.

I mean, at least one.

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

It's fine.

Well, if it does, you're hysterical.

Yeah.

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.

It's natural.

Having a baby is natural.

It's normal.

It's supposed to happen.

And as I say about this, you know, 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,

correct.

So on play-by-play, because of course they have a man on play-by-play, it's Howard Cassell.

They have a woman giving a women's perspective of the match who is Rosie Casals, a friend of Billie Jean's.

And they were going to have Billy'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.

And we got to ask, how did they become mortal enemies?

If we know?

I mean, most of my knowledge on this comes from like the movie, the 2017 Battle of the Sexes movie, which, you know, 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 like it Definitely has elements of like that showmanship and the barbs going back and forth and all that.

But then Billy 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?

Oh my God.

Do you feel like there's any Trump DNA in this guy?

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

Yeah.

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

Uh-huh.

So frightening in this way.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, I mean, I wish Bobby were still with us because I have so many questions about, 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 like 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 you know yeah well and I think that the roles we perform that come naturally to us represent the the truth of who we are often in some way

Yeah, so Billy refuses to take back the creep comment, by the way.

She said, no way, baby, creep stands.

Good for her.

This is a big period for creep because we also have Watergate going on.

That is a great point.

Wow.

So they head into this pre-match environment that was total chaos.

There were dancing pig mascots, there were cheerleaders wearing hot pants.

Billy Jin King is presented with a litter to enter on top of, like Cleopatra style.

So she's carried by bare-chested athletes from Rice University

as the band plays I Am Woman.

Just like in Sex in the City 2.

Bobby comes in on a Rick Shaw pulled by, quote, bosom buddies who apparently were chosen based on their breast size.

They exchange gifts.

Bobby presents Billy with the Sugar Daddy lollipop.

Sugar Daddy is one of his like endorsers.

And Billy totally outdoes him by...

Not that this was her plan, like it was definitely like 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, like, ridiculous stuff.

And I think that's fun.

Like, I don't think this match, like, decided women's liberation, but I do think, in a sense, like, she had fun doing it.

And I think there's something to be said for that.

Totally.

I guess hope we find out what happened to the pig.

Of course.

Yeah.

I'm not going to keep you in suspense on that one.

The pig gets lost in the astrodome.

What?

Well,

I hope it was fun for the pig.

I think it was probably a nice little rom.

Nice.

He was found eventually in a corner.

So no pigs were harmed in the making of the battle of the sexes.

That's really, you know, aside from all the ones we ate that day, but that's different.

I mean, I guess that, you know, the simple fact is that feminists aren't really pig and hold as being fun.

Yeah.

But I've had fun at least twice, and I'd like to attempt it again.

So 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.

Like she rolls with all this nonsense.

She kind of humors Bobby a lot.

Like she laughs at his jokes, but in like a smirky kind of way.

It seems like she's in her element, which is nice.

So Cassell's introduction of Billy is

sometimes you get the feeling that if she ever let down her hair to her shoulders and took off her glasses, you'd have someone vying for a Hollywood screen test.

Wow.

That's such a weird way to call someone attractive, technically.

Isn't it?

Well, it's because there's something so kind of historically weird about the way men talk about the attractiveness of women.

And actually, I was like

doing an audiobook of a Christmas carol for the Patreon and stuff for You're Wrong About.

And there's like weird sections where Dickens will out of nowhere get horny for a character he's writing.

And it's like, you gotta calm down, Charles Dickens.

Like, this is at least he's not negging 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.

Yeah, that's a little much.

You know, I'm not against it.

It's just like, it didn't make it into the Muppet version for a reason.

Keep that in your diary.

I don't know.

You know, like, I don't know.

The way heteronormativity and masculinity reflect on the attractiveness of women historically is very weird because they have these dual ideas of like, I am totally overpowered by anything I find attractive, which is like, cool.

That's often literally not true at all, but I understand that you do feel led by a higher, you know, power.

B, that like the only way to combat that sense of submissiveness is to be incredibly judgmental about what is and is isn't attractive and therefore give everyone a complex.

Right.

And I think that's unproductive, but boy, do we do it a lot.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people would disagree with you.

You know, at long last, we'll get into the actual match here.

Bobby has the audacity to start it in a warm-up jacket.

So

is that like a tennis burn of like, I'm not even working hard.

I'm wearing

nice.

I mean, 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.

Straight strategy, Bobby.

Yeah, he wears this warm-up jacket.

He takes it off after Billy 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 I mean, 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.

That's great.

So she wins 6-4, 6-3, 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 Billy by George Foreman.

That's what happens.

He should present every sporting event award.

Oh, my God.

He really should.

She just, you know, played like...

a star in her prime and he played like a 55 year old.

She had him pretty tired throughout and it showed.

Can we watch a clip?

Yeah, so here's a taste of like what Billy and Bobby were like leading up to the battle of the sexes.

I believe this was a day before the match.

And it's, 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.

Nice.

Okay.

This is from the Texas Archives.

What have you, because

they know, as I know, and as Billie G knows, that there's no way a woman can play tennis with a good man tennis play.

But what makes this match a credible match, and what makes it contraction that it is, and because, 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.

Oh, it's great.

Yeah.

I love that he's just like going on and on and on and kind of building this like great oracular whatever.

And she's just kind of like,

just like sitting there smiling about it.

I love her.

It's definitely like the look of someone who knows she can probably win.

Yeah, and kind of let him wear himself out.

Right.

What do you think about, you know, what 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 kind of what we're going to call a true showman of whatever kind, then like the attention itself also seems like its own reward.

It's a little bit hard for me to like 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 seems like a great reward for him.

He goes through all these lengths to do it in such like 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, I mean, this is going to be like paragraph one in her obituary one day, but not in a bad way even.

Like, I think she's so much more than this match personally, but I also think that, like, she's probably pretty satisfied with that outcome.

Well, and 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 like pretty comfortable and in control the whole time.

And I think that's like 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 and their interactions together.

They both made it what it is.

In the immediate aftermath of this match, sexism is solved forever, obviously.

Yeah, I remember that.

Yeah.

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.

That's so Smith in every

way.

And it's like, on the one hand, you could be like, well, I I mean, here's an example.

Like, there was like yesterday, I think a lot of people in different cities protested in solidarity with Palestine.

And there was, you know, there are protesters on the Burnside Bridge in Portland.

So you could see people grumbling about, you know, what's the use of stopping traffic across a bridge in Portland?

Who cares?

Like, how is that going to affect Palestine?

And it's like, yeah, that's not literally going to affect, it's not going to protect Palestine to block traffic on a bridge in in Portland, Oregon.

But on the other hand, it's like, you know, 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.

Yeah.

No, that's a really interesting way of framing it.

Yeah.

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

Sure.

Yeah.

They some of them didn't know it.

I'm sure some of them had guesses, but yeah, like, yeah, pretty magical.

And yeah, this was like good for Billy's career and her activism.

She really, I think, did do a good job to the extent she was capable and capitalizing off of this match.

The following year, she started the Women's Sports Foundation to support the inclusion of, you know, women in sports and trans athletes in sports as the years have gone on.

And 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 kind of like supposed to be a feminist answer to Sports Illustrated.

She knew like all these years ago that there was an audience and an interest in women's sports and that like 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, huh, 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.

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.

Oh my God.

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 sort of legible to different extents to people sort of 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 kind of transcended all that because it took this conversation America was having and put it in the language of a sporting event.

Absolutely.

You know, it's so accessible, if nothing else.

I mean, you can kind of like fast forward their legacy to today.

I mean, like, to this day, literally this past Halloween, I was seeing Billie Jean King tweeting about like Bobby and Billy costumes for people's babies that she was being sent online.

Babies and glasses, really fucking cute.

You know, people still are passing down this story in 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 mass singer, I guess.

She was a squashbuckling hen in the most recent season.

Of course she was.

Yeah, why not?

I love, I mean, if you're going to be a hen, you gotta...

It's the right kind to be.

Sure.

Yeah, I agree.

And so to back up up a bit, like again,

even as like Billy's reputation was kind of soaring, I don't think Bobby's suffered all that much.

I mean, it's not the kind of thing where, like, I don't know, no one like hated him really.

Uh, like, 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 you know, that's out there.

Um,

He died of prostate cancer in 1995 after having it for seven years.

His Sports Illustrated obituary was written by Billy.

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.

Billy has since called him one of her heroes.

This all feels like a little like too pat for me, but I guess it's cute for them.

Like if it made them feel good, like sure, like who am I to interfere in their like personal relationship and the way that everything played out between them?

I mean, clearly they had some sort of bond forged.

I guess for me, it touches on a question of like, you know, one of the things we're talking about as a culture currently is like,

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.

Right.

For me, like their friendship feels a little bit like Michelle Obama hugging George Bush.

Like

it's just like,

did we need that?

Did we need to see that?

I don't, I don't know, but I can't invalidate.

their personal feelings.

It's weird.

Right.

Because it's like, because there is the sort of within any any social change in America historically, is the idea of like, but you have to be able to hug people who you disagree on basically everything with.

And it's like, we should, that shouldn't be the standard, though.

Right.

You know, the idea of like civility in American political life is, you know,

so often a way of just avoiding having difficult conversations or being confronted with realities that we don't want to think about.

Yeah.

Ignoring somebody because they're angry, but that allows you to ignore what they're angry about, which you need to hear.

I do wonder if Billy truly believed that all of the male chauvinism was an act and he was like a secret agent for women's lib.

Like,

I wonder how much of her bought into that and then was influenced in their friendship.

What it makes me wonder about is, you know, whether there was some element for her of like, I have beaten this person and he has accepted being beaten by me.

And I'm very impressed by that.

Yeah.

So he was, I guess, a gracious loser, even if he like

continued kind of playing matches like this.

Like he'd play with and against Renee Richards a lot.

Like he would just, the man loves a stunt.

She wrote in like a pretty little red book of hers from 2014 called Spy Night and Other Memories that, you know, 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.

That's so great.

He sure did.

She seems to have a great fondness for him as well.

It's very interesting.

I feel like I'm left with a sense of like, who was this person?

Right.

And I still feel like I don't know, but it also feels like he kind of didn't want us to know.

I think that's right.

So yeah, like in this sort of like public quest to like understand

who Bobby really was, like there's this ongoing conversation about whether he rigged the match.

Uh-huh.

The TLDR version of it is like, maybe, who knows?

We'll never know.

But, you know, 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, like people have suggested, he could have easily bet on himself losing the match.

1983, he took and passed a lie detector test on a TV show about the match.

Then in 2013, this whole conversation sort of 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 like, you know, 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.

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

Right.

I think that's a good instinct.

His son Larry has said that the match against Billy 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 kind of said like

Riggs has like wink-wink denied the fix, but Billie Gene has adamantly denied it.

Maybe it delighted him to keep people guessing, or maybe he really did rig it.

And then you have like men's rights activists on Twitter who got so excited by this.

One of them was hilariously so close to getting the point of like all this about gender in sports.

They said, this is all nonsense.

If they thought they were equal, they would just desegregate the leagues.

Like, if people thought that men and women were equal competitors in tennis, they would just desegregate the tours.

I'm like, oh, great idea, buddy.

Want to follow through on that?

Well, yeah, and it's interesting.

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 like that proves that you don't believe a woman could win without all the assistance.

And then if you believe that like she had to have won without any kind of interference, then it's like, well,

you know, if she didn't, then it's nothing against her.

And women can still play tennis.

Right.

And like, what about this entire match like screamed professionalism or like serious whatever?

Remember the pig?

Yeah.

The pig, the pig eating shrimp at the after party.

Yeah.

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 that's too simplistic but it feels generally true i guess the idea that like 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 yeah 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, Argus, you know, it feels like there's this unspoken thing of like, well, of course it would be incredibly boring to watch women play soccer because, you know, nobody cares about them.

I don't care about them and therefore nobody cares about them.

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 Billy's magazine really interest 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, that it's not just like acute fantasy for the women themselves, but that it might be culturally important.

Yeah.

that like people might actually like it.

Right.

You know, 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, you know, which is a low bar.

Wow.

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

I know.

I really, I'm so proud of them.

And I don't, I, I'm not going to be proud of them anywhere but in my own home.

Totally fair.

So this this all became a movie in 2017.

The movie does not address the rigged element at all.

I think they were just like, let's kind of.

Oh, so the incels are like interesting silence on your part.

Right.

I do find it kind of curious that the movie didn't go into that, though.

Not from an incel perspective, just from like a...

It would have been a more interesting movie perspective.

Right.

It adds some depth for sure.

Yeah.

Like the movie, which, by the way, starred Emma Stone and Steve Carell as our main characters.

It was pretty good casting.

I think it was incredible casting.

Unfortunately, the movie is just kind of like, 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 like.

I get it.

She was gay.

It was the 70s.

Like, that's pretty shocking, but that's also like not what the Battle of the Sexes was about.

Right.

Was she cheating on another lesbian?

Because I don't care if she's cheating on a marriage.

I'm not, whatever.

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

To be clear, a different one, right?

I hope for all our sakes.

Yeah, good point.

My feeling about like if we're going to depict like affairs and stuff in a Battle of the Sexes movie, like I want, I want to see her doing lesbian stuff, but only if the message is like, boy, is it fun to be a lesbian?

I am having a great time.

Yeah.

As I think about

this match today, it's kind of 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 horror finals, in Cancun that were 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.

Yeah.

You also still have people like Novak Jokovich, 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.

Novac does.

And then I think like most importantly, maybe

there still is an 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 is an 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.

It hardly ever does, you know, unfortunately, it turns out.

But, you know, we're now like 51 years after the fact, just barely, that if we were to have a battle of the sexes again, that people would bring a lot of the same baggage to it.

I don't know.

It's really interesting how much and how little

this one like three set match actually did.

Yeah, right.

Well, 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.

Yeah, it's all kind of like in the eye of the beholder.

Like 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 women's liber watching and you got something out of this match in the sense that, like, 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 you know, 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, right?

Yeah, I, right.

How many people were like, well, damn, 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.

Sure.

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 episode you did with us, but after that, what should they do?

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.

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.

Right, 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 JM Kliegman on social media.

I'm in Sports Illustrated, The Ringer, The Washington Post, etc.

Thank you so much for everything.

I'm so happy to start the year doing this battle with you.

Yes.

Likewise, thank you.

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.