September 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of “The Battle of the Sexes,” the memorable tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
In November 2017, when a film based on this story appeared, I wrote about it. https://susanjustwrites.com/2017/11/ . Much of what I wrote still holds true, and an edited version appears below. Thanks to Billie Jean King’s autobiographical memoir, All In, published in 2021, I can add a brief update.
Edited version of what I wrote in 2017
When Billie Jean King met Bobby Riggs at the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973, I was miles away in San Diego. I’d just finished teaching a class of law school students about Poverty Law, and I was blissfully pregnant with my first child. I was watching the clock, trying to judge the time it would take to drive from the beautiful campus of the University of San Diego to our recently-rented apartment in seaside La Jolla. Waiting at home was my handsome and super-smart husband (I’ll call him Marv), finished for the day with teaching math students at UCSD, the University of California at San Diego. We were both Professors Alexander that year, and it was fun to answer our phone and hear a student ask for ‘Professor Alexander.’ My silly response: ‘Which one?’
Marv had snacks and drinks ready to munch on and imbibe during the televised tennis match. The drinks included nothing alcoholic for me. Not because the medical profession had decided that alcohol harmed growing fetuses. That came a few years later. I avoided alcohol simply because I had no desire to drink while I was pregnant. Was it instinct or just dumb luck? When we later that year saw the film “Cinderella Liberty,” in which an often-drunk woman’s pregnancy ends in tragedy, it was clear that my choice to avoid alcohol was the right one.
I drove home from USD as fast as I could, arriving just in time to watch the much-hyped tennis match dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes.” In the 2017 film about the match, Emma Stone captured the Billie Jean King role perfectly. She portrayed not only King’s triumph over Riggs in that match but also her initial uncertainty over her decision to compete against him and her continuing struggle to ensure that women’s tennis be given equal status with men’s.
Steve Carell carried off his role as Bobby Riggs equally well, depicting the outrageous antics of the 55-year-old Riggs. But the focus had to be on Billie Jean, the Wonder-Woman-like heroine of her day. By accepting Riggs’s challenge, and then defeating him, she became the twentieth-century symbol of women’s strength and perseverance, advancing the cause of women in sports (and in American culture at large) as much as she advanced her own.
Marv and I were two of the estimated 50 million Americans who watched the match on ABC television that night. Watching it with my adored husband, my hoped-for child growing inside me, I was ecstatic when Billie Jean defeated Riggs before 90 million viewers worldwide.
As my pregnancy advanced, complete strangers would ask me, “Do you want a boy or a girl?” I liked to answer ‘a girl’ just to see the reaction on the faces of nosey parkers who clearly expected another response. I was in fact hoping I would give birth to a healthy child of either sex, but I knew I’d treasure having a daughter. When my darling daughter was born about seven months after the Battle of the Sexes, and when her equally wonderful sister arrived three years later, Marv and I were both on top of the world.
Maybe watching Billie Jean King in September 1973 sealed our fate. We really wanted her to win that battle. Did the endorphins circulating inside me as we watched her triumph produce a feeling of euphoria? Euphoria that later led us to produce two Wonder-Woman-like heroines of our own? Maybe.
Tennis, anyone?
2023 update
Fifty years later, I’m in awe of what Billie Jean King has been able to achieve in the field of tennis and in our culture overall. Throughout her career, she has faced all sorts of challenges. Significantly, in the preface to her book, All In, she recounts the gender-bias she confronted as a child. This was not only the gender-bias that permeated the overall culture that she and I both grew up with, but also the specific bias she dealt with in the tennis world.
In my forthcoming book, I plan to quote King’s description of what she was up against. “I didn’t start out with grievances against the world, but the world certainly seemed to have grievances against girls and women like me.” As she writes, “Pursuing your goals as a girl or woman then often meant being pricked and dogged by slights… It made no sense to me. Why would anyone set arbitrary limits on another human being? … Why were we constantly told, Can’t do this. Don’t do that. Temper your ambitions, lower your voice, stay in your place, act less competent than you are. Do as you’re told? Why weren’t a female’s striving and individual differences seen as life-enriching, a source of pride, rather than a problem?”
King points out that the famous Riggs tennis match “remains cast in the public imagination as the defining moment for me where everything coalesced and some fuse was lit. But in truth, that drive had been smoldering in me since I was a child.” What the match and “its fevered buildup proved was that millions of others were locked in the same tug-of-war over gender roles and equal opportunities.” She adds, “I wanted to show that women deserve equality, and we can perform under pressure and entertain just as well as men.”
King has gone on to achieve exactly what she aimed to do: Achieve equality for women in tennis, and push for equality in every other sphere of our lives.
When we look back at the “Battle of the Sexes,” let’s place that event firmly within the context of the lives American women like King have lived, beginning with her childhood and continuing up until today.
susanjustwrites
Susan Just Writes 