Bobby Riggs spent five months telling reporters that no woman alive could beat him at tennis, filled the Houston Astrodome to settle it, and lost to Billie Jean King in straight sets — the loudest boast in sports that year met the quietest correction.

Bobby Riggs had a pitch, and by the late summer of 1973 he had given it to nearly every reporter in the country: he was 55 years old, he hadn't played serious tennis in decades, and he could still beat the best woman in the world. He said it on talk shows. He said it in locker rooms. He said it so often that a Houston promoter built him a stadium match to prove it.

He lost. Not narrowly, and not after a fight that could be spun into a moral victory: in straight sets, on national television, in front of the largest crowd ever to watch a tennis match live.

A hustler picks his opponent

Riggs had been a serious player once. He won Wimbledon's singles title in 1939 and swept all three of that event's titles the same year, then spent the decades after as a promoter and proposition bettor, the kind of man who would wager on anything if the odds could be talked into his favor. By the early 1970s he had reinvented himself as tennis's most public chauvinist, arguing loudly that the women's game was inferior and that even an aging man could dominate it.

He tested the pitch first against Margaret Court, then the top-ranked woman in the sport. On Mother's Day, May 13, 1973, at a country club outside San Diego, Riggs beat Court in straight sets, 6-2, 6-1, in under an hour. The match drew only a few thousand spectators in person, but CBS broadcast it, and the press nicknamed the rout the "Mother's Day Massacre." Riggs had his proof of concept, and Billie Jean King, the woman who had turned him down the first time, no longer had the option of staying out of it.

King was 29, the reigning face of the women's professional tour and a founder of the Women's Tennis Association earlier that same year. She agreed to play him under different terms: a nationally televised prime-time event, a winner-take-all purse reported at $100,000, and a stadium instead of a country club.

Why did the entrances get so strange?

Houston's Astrodome sold out on September 20, 1973, and the tennis almost had to compete with its own pageantry to be noticed.

Riggs entered pulled in a rickshaw by a group of young women he introduced as his personal "Bobby's Bosom Buddies." King answered by arriving on a feathered litter carried by four bare-chested men, a Cleopatra entrance built for cameras rather than a locker room. Both competitors then exchanged gifts at center court: Riggs gave King a giant lollipop, and King gave Riggs a piglet, a jab at his self-declared status as a male chauvinist pig.

ABC's broadcast team included Howard Cosell, whose commentary has aged badly by any standard; he introduced King on air as "a very attractive young lady" and mused that she could pass for a Hollywood screen test if she grew her hair out. An estimated 90 million people watched worldwide, more than 40 million of them in the United States, and 30,472 fans packed the Astrodome itself, a live attendance record for a tennis match that has never been broken.

What actually happened on the court

Once the show ended, the match was not close.

King broke Riggs's serve repeatedly, kept him running with drop shots and lobs, and closed it out 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in a little over two hours. Riggs, who had spent the buildup calling women's tennis a "joke" and predicting an easy win, looked visibly gassed by the third set; he jumped the net to congratulate King, and told the crowd, "I underestimated you." King later said she had trained specifically for Riggs's spins and junk shots, unlike Court, who had been unprepared for a style closer to a hustler's game than a champion's.

The result mattered beyond the scoreboard. It arrived barely a year after Title IX became law, while schools and courts were still fighting over what the statute actually required of women's athletics. King had spent years pushing for equal prize money on the professional tour; a defeat here, in front of tens of millions of people, would have handed her opponents a talking point that no amount of organizing could have out-argued.

Here the record gets less tidy. In 2013, ESPN reporter Don Van Natta Jr. and the network's "Outside the Lines" published an account built around Hal Shaw, a retired golf pro in Tampa who said he had overheard mob figures (among them Santo Trafficante Jr. and Carlos Marcello) discussing a plan for Riggs to lose the match deliberately to settle gambling debts, after first building the odds by beating Court. Shaw said he stayed silent for nearly four decades out of fear. King rejected it flatly, saying she would bet her life Riggs never tanked a set, let alone a match; Riggs himself died in 1995 and never addressed the specific allegation. No other witness or document has surfaced to confirm Shaw's account, and it remains exactly what it started as: one man's uncorroborated memory, reported by a credible outlet, disputed by the person best placed to know.

Does any of that argument still need settling?

Not in the way it needed settling in 1973. Women's professional tennis now runs alongside the men's game on comparable footing at the sport's biggest events, and King's own foundation still tracks the pay gaps and sponsorship gaps that persist in sports where that comparison hasn't caught up.

What has held up is the shape of the spectacle itself: an athlete using a stunt to force a real argument into a stadium, betting that the crowd would show up for the theater and stay for the substance. The 2017 film "Battle of the Sexes," with Emma Stone and Steve Carell, retold the match for an audience that had mostly forgotten Riggs's name and only vaguely remembered King's; the retelling is a decent measure of which side of that Astrodome scoreboard turned out to matter fifty years on.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Battle of the Sexes (tennis)"
• History.com, "Billie Jean King triumphs in 'Battle of the Sexes'"
• CNN, "When Billie Jean King won the 'Battle of the Sexes'" (September 2023)
• Tennis Majors, "May 13th, 1973: The day Bobby Riggs 'massacred' Margaret Court"
• NPR, "Was 1973 'Battle Of The Sexes' Tennis Match Thrown?" (August 2013)
• Texas Monthly, "The 'Battle of the Sexes' Sparked 50 Years of Sports Progress"