Phil.mushnick@nypost.com ‘MAKING’ HISTORY
Expect King - Riggs film to ba latest to recast the past
THERE is a movie about the 1973 Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs match soon to be released. But first ...
Max Baer Jr., best known as the actor who portrayed Jethro Bodine in “The Beverly Hillbillies,” was furious.
In the 2005 Ron Howard movie “Cinderella Man” — about heavyweight boxer James J. Braddock, played by Russell Crowe — the heavy became Max Baer, the defending champ.
Five years before the 1935 BaerBraddock bout, Frankie Campbell died the day after Baer knocked him out, a death believed to have been caused by a ref who didn’t recognize that Campbell, against the ropes, was out on his feet.
Baer was disconsolate. He joined Campbell’s wife in her hospital vigil. He donated money and helped raise more for Campbell’s family.
But to help sweeten the plot, the movie depicted Baer as a savage, blood-thirsty, remorseless killer who was eager to do to Braddock what he did to Campbell.
Small wonder Baer Jr. was livid with the historical depiction of his father. But there was nothing he could do about it.
The film made lots of money and won a pile of awards and nominations, and if the world now regards Max Baer as evil, well, that’s show-biz!
The daughter of Fritz Ostermueller was as angry as Baer Jr.
In the 2013 movie about Jackie Robinson, “42,” Ostermueller was pitching for the 1947 Pirates, Robinson batting. Ostermueller ignited a brawl by hitting Robinson in the head with a pitch then shouting “N---er!” Got all that, kids?
Except nothing close ever happened. Not much seen in that biographical film actually happened. (Robinson did not immodestly pose at home plate after hitting home runs, no one did). Ostermueller, who died at 50, hit Robinson in the wrist with an inside pitch, Robinson took first base and that was that. There was no fight, not even an argument.
Furthermore, Sherill Duesterhaus, Ostermueller’s daughter, said she never heard her father speak the N-word because he wasn’t that kind of man.
But again, there is nothing she can do about it. That movie turned her dad into an immortal, racist, bad guy. And that’s that.
However, music attached to “42” included the work of Jay-Z — who has helped, far more than most rappers, to return the N-word, that ugliest of racial slurs, to the mainstream.
Billy Crystal claimed his 2001 movie, “61*,” about Roger Maris having to battle fans, media and Mickey Mantle’s popularity while hitting 61 home runs, is histori- cally immaculate. It wasn’t. Hardly.
The movie includes the significant, sorrowful scene in which a Maris homer triggers a riot in which fans hurled chairs onto the field.
Not only did that not happen, it could not have happened. By 1961 spectators’ chairs were bolted to cement floors.
“Battle Of The Sexes,” a movie about that King-Riggs match — Emma Stone as King, Steve Carrell as Riggs — is scheduled for re- lease in September. From the movie’s press release:
“The Battle of the Sexes tells the story of the iconic 1973 tennis match that transcended sports and has historically been viewed as a benchmark event in the women’s rights movement of the 1970s.”
I well recall that match. It was nothing of the sort. It was a madefor-TV novelty act — a goof with carnival trappings. King, as Cleopatra, was carried into the Astrodome by feathered, muscular male “gladiators” shouldering the sedan in which she sat. It was that kind of thing.
Riggs, once a top player, was a 55-year-old cartoon character who busted chops from behind thicklensed glasses. King, at 30, had won Wimbledon — defeating a kid named Chrissie Evert — then withdrew during the U.S. Open. So why not? It was a good payday. It was that kind of thing.
That match wasn’t taken seriously because it wasn’t intended to be, even if serious tennis was played. Only well afterward did people — including media and activists who weren’t yet born, too young to know or eager to apply wishful thinking — begin to apply deep meaning to the meaningless, did it become co-opted and corrupted to be portrayed as a monumental event in the feminist movement.
In 2001, a same-themed TV movie, “When Billie Beat Bobby,” led to reports that King’s victory immediately inspired young women to realize their full potentials!
At that time I interviewed Jim Spence, the ABC Sports exec who helped put Riggs-King together:
“To suggest that it held any social significance is absurd. I’m sure there are those who feel that it did, but it was not a serious event.”
In 2003, the Tennis Channel presented a Riggs-King documentary that called the match, “The most significant event in the history of sports,” one that held “profound civil rights implications.” Good grief.
And that’s how fiction becomes fact, remains fact.