Court ‘Battle’
Stone trains hard to play tennis great King
WEST BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — To play Billie Jean King, one of the most beloved and influential athletes of the past century, in “Battle of the Sexes,” Emma Stone began in the gym.
“It was amazing. I’d never played an athlete before and had never been athletic. I’d danced, but that’s exercising a different way than a weight-lifting tennis player,” said Stone, 28.
“The beginning of the process was pretty brutal. But you get to understand someone who is strong enough to do whatever they want to execute. My dogs have 60-pound food bags and I could now lift that. It’s so empowering.”
King, added the Oscar winner, “realized tennis was a great platform for her to change the world. Physicality has everything to do with that.
“If you can change the world through tennis, physical strength helps further quality.”
“Battle” depicts a notoriously controversial 1973 tennis match between King and ex-Wimbledon champ Bobby Riggs. Televised from Houston’s Astrodome, an estimated 90 million watched on ABC-TV.
Riggs was 55 and King was 29 and at the top of her game, yet the odds were that Riggs, who promoted the event as the triumph of “a male chauvinist pig” over bra-burning feminists, would have no trouble trouncing his opponent.
That meant Stone had to cut it as a world-class tennis pro.
“I had never played tennis. I had an incredibly professional double, Kaitlyn Christian, who was phenomenal, and great trainer bulking me up, and Billie Jean let me mirror her,” Stone said with her usual candor.
“I had a massive sport team who were able early on to decide where we could move for a novice tennis player to become number one in three months.
“Early on we planned these shots and I learned choreography and hey! I could do a lot out there.
“But,” she said with a smile, “if this had been ‘The Billie Jean Tennis Movie’ I never would have been in it.”
Had Stone seen Sloane Stephens receive $3.7 million this month for winning the U.S. Open — the same amount men’s champ Rafael Nadal received?
“I was at the U.S. Open with Billie Jean King at that moment and it was pretty unbelievable. This was what these women were fighting for — for the next generation to have moments like that.” (“Battle of the Sexes” opens Friday.)