Battle of the Sexes takes center court and center stage
In June, Billie Jean King, the famed tennis champion, gave the commencement address at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
She offered some general insights about aspirations and success before driving home her hope that millennials can lead a charge for change and create an “equal pay for equal work” without a gender gap. She cited a study that suggested that pay gap could close in developed countries by 2044.
“I was hoping I was going to see this in my lifetime,” King said. “But I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Anyway, what a bummer.”
A particular bummer since King found herself in the middle of a national cultural debate in Houston in the famed Battle of the Sexes tennis match against Bobby Riggs. And last week that event had its 44th anniversary.
Much has changed in that time, and plenty hasn’t. Which might explain why the KingRiggs match hasn’t faded into obscurity like wooden tennis racquets.
The match and surrounding debate are at the heart of “Battle of the Sexes,” a feature film opening this week, and “Balls,” a play making its world premiere in Houston at Stages Repertory Theatre next month.
“All the same issues came back out during the election,” says Nick Flint, artistic director of the One Year Lease Theatre Company, a New York company that is co-producing the play with Stages. “We were in workshop on the play in New York when the election happened. Every female on the team was in tears that morning. It was poignant, a really important time.”
Four-plus decades later, much of the assumed cultural knowledge about the Battle has been reduced to its most basic structure: man versus woman on the tennis court. “Battle of the Sexes,” the film, naturally frames the actual match as its climactic moment, from a camera swooping over the Astrodome to the back-and-forth of the match itself, from comic pageantry to a serious test of ability, agility and wills.
But “Battle” also takes its time getting there. King’s efforts for equality didn’t end with the match against Riggs, nor did they start there.
Directed by the husband-andwife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (“Little Miss Sunshine”), the film opens with King on the cusp of being usurped as the top women’s player by Margaret Court. When King complains that the International Lawn Tennis Federation operates with a sizable gender pay gap, her concerns are ignored. So she helps form the independent Virginia Slims Tournament, which would get its start at the Houston Racquet Club in 1970 and eventually transform into the Women’s Tennis Association.
The film and actor Steve Carell also admirably handle Riggs, who has been consigned to a cultural scrap heap as a pointless relic of the patriarchy.
The Riggs of “Battle of the Sexes” is an opportunist, for sure, but he doesn’t necessarily believe anything he says. He’s a former champ well into middle age seeking both money and attention. He’s aware of the effect words and actions can have on the masses, and he’s willing to play the villain with a dog whistle to stir up a base because it fills his vanity and his coffers.
His addictions — to attention and gambling — are heartbreaking as presented.
“Balls” — which was written by Kevin Armento and Bryony Lavery — also will present Riggs as more than caricature.
“One thing I find so interesting is that the two of them were friends,” Flint says. “And they agreed to do this together. Something I found interesting about him: The coach who really taught him how to win professionally was a woman. All the bluster was just a publicity stunt.”
Riggs was smarter than he let on. Before facing off with King, he devoured the top-ranked women’s player, Court, who was two decades younger and utterly unprepared for his antiquated but canny manner of play.
Even in his prime, Riggs wasn’t a tall power player, but rather a guy who played angles and worked the entire court, rather than firing shots from the baseline and trying to overpower in a rally. That approach allowed Riggs to make short work of Court in two sets.
On Sept. 20, 1973, King showed up to the Astrodome better prepared than Court had been. When Riggs broke her serve in the first set, she blocked out the caricature-ish trimmings around the match and focused on defeating an opponent before about 30,000 attendees with tens of millions of viewers watching on TV.
Where “Battle of the Sexes” takes a fairly linear approach to telling this story — old sports event as contemporary allegory — “Balls” is more abstract: part play, part dance, with each point of the three-set match providing the rhythm for a larger piece. Flint calls it “without a doubt the most complex project I’ve ever undertaken. That’s why we have two directors and a movement director.”
He refers to the match as “the physical spine to hang all these meandering narrative lines off,” including perspectives from King, Riggs, as well as a ball girl and ball boy from the match.
Though “Battle” was a more traditional telling of a biographical story, it picks at the veneer of King’s life. At the time of the match, she was married to Larry King while also having an affair with a woman, a revelation that would’ve cost her a fortune in sponsorships at the time.
“Balls” likely will work the theme of professional facade and life’s reality further.
“We wanted to explore pulling back the skin of the match and look underneath,” Flint says. “The play doesn’t make any judgments, but I think it does raise all the questions and puts them under the microscope. What has changed? What was achieved?
“It’s such an important moment culturally. But what did it do, and what didn’t it do? Hopefully, it will make people wonder what more we have to do.”
The King-Riggs tennis match and surrounding debate are at the heart of a feature film opening this week and a play premiering in Houston next month.