Battle of the Sexes

Bobby Riggs is 55, a hustler, and a former Wimbledon champion who has been telling America that a woman cannot beat a man. Billie Jean King is 29, already a champion, and tired of the joke. They play in the Houston Astrodome. Ninety million people watch on television. King arrives on a litter. Riggs arrives in a rickshaw. It is a circus with a scoreboard.

King wins in three straight sets. She does not play it as a joke. She plays it as a match she cannot afford to lose, because the argument is bigger than tennis: prize money, respect, Title IX’s first birthday, the idea that women’s sport is a real product.

The Battle of the Sexes is mocked and then studied. The result is the part that stuck. King won, on purpose, in public, and the next generation of women did not have to answer Riggs to get a court.