Ann Killion: Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’ Battle of the Sexes was one big step in women’s struggle for equality.
It was a time and a place. Sitting on green shag carpet. (What were my parents thinking?) Eating a post-school snack of Triscuits and Tab. (What was I thinking?)
Watching Billie Jean King play Bobby Riggs in the futuristic-looking Houston Astrodome.
I don’t remember all the details of that Thursday evening in 1973. But I knew, as a young girl watching the world and the role of women in it change before her eyes, that I was fascinated.
I had no idea how my life would unfold. That I would become a sports journalist. That I would have the chance to interview King. That I would spend much of my career writing about the issues she brought to the nation’s attention on that
Thursday night. That I would see women athletes continue to be drivers in changing perceptions of what it means to be a powerful, successful female.
And I had no idea that — 44 years later — during the same week I would see a preview of the movie “Battle of the Sexes,” our country would be engulfed in a heated conversation about equality and rights and what athletes should and should not be allowed to do.
But what I did realize, even as a kid, was that sports had a power and a purpose. That even in a goofy, circus-like atmosphere, like the one that night at the Astrodome, a real-world message could be sent.
What I knew then, even as a kid who had watched the Mexico City Olympics five years earlier and watched every Muhammad Ali fight with my dad, was that sports could change views and shape reality.
The movie, starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell, is very good. It’s very timely. And it’s a reminder that as much as we think the world has changed, in some sad ways, it really hasn’t changed much at all.
A highly successful and accomplished woman has to prove her worth against a buffoonish, condescending man? Stop me if you’ve heard that story line before.
“You’ve come a long way baby,” the slogan for King’s tour sponsor, Virginia Slims, proclaimed. Maybe. The film is fairly accurate, though it condenses the timeline for dramatic effect. King, 29 at the time of the match, had been part of a breakaway tour of women players, in a quest for more equitable purses. Eventually, the Slims Tour was successful enough that it merged with the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association, which earlier shunned the players. Riggs, 55 at the time of the Battle of the Sexes, was indeed a hustler, a clown, a former player who wanted to put the “show back in chauvinism.”
Tour promoter and former champion Jack Kramer, the villain of the film, really did belittle women and laugh at the concept of equitable prize money.
In the film, when King complains about the men making eight times what the women made, Kramer — played by Bill Pullman — says, “The men are simply more exciting to watch. It’s not your fault; it’s just biology.”
King really did threaten to pull out of the nationally televised event if Kramer served as a commentator, believing he couldn’t provide fair commentary. So he was canned.
Australian Margaret Court did lose to Riggs in the first “battle of the sexes” known as the “Mother’s Day Massacre” after King had turned down his initial proposal. And Court truly was a homophobe as she has proven in the rest of her public life.
San Francisco’s Rosie Casals was an instrumental part of the breakaway tennis movement. And Howard Cosell really did drape his arm around her and call her “little Rosie Casals,” during commentary for the match.
Cosell really did say King walked “more like a male than a female.” He also said, “Here comes Billie Jean King: a very attractive young lady. If she ever let her hair grow down to her shoulders and took her glasses off, you’d have someone vying for a Hollywood screen test.”
King was involved with her hairdresser Marilyn Barnett at the time, while married to Larry King, who was her manager. What isn’t shown in the film was the acrimonious end of that relationship, when Barnett sued King for palimony and outed her publicly several years later, causing her to lose endorsements.
There is now equal prize money for women in all four Grand Slams, but it has been that way only for the past decade. Sloane Stephens gasped, “Oh my God” when she received the $3.7 million check for winning the U.S. Open this month. Venus Williams, inspired by King, fought hard for equal prize money at Wimbledon and the French Open, which finally came in 2007.
A documentary about that fight — “Venus Vs.” — is one of the films scheduled for the second annual Women Sports Film Festival, which will be held this weekend in Oakland, at the New Parkway theater. The films and panel discussions will celebrate female athletes and the filmmakers who bring their stories to the screen.
These stories are not historical; they are also about current fights. Just three months ago, Venus’ sister, Serena, was pulled into a new battle of the sexes when John McEnroe said she would be ranked “like 700th in the world” if she played on the men’s circuit. Despite all the advances in women’s sports, some still want to compare female athletes to males in a Riggs-like measuring contest.
The Battle of the Sexes, which King won in straight sets, took place one year after Title IX was passed. Fortyfive years later, women athletes are still fighting for equality around the country, just as they are still fighting for equal footing in work places, boardrooms and congressional chambers.
I was one of thousands — millions? — of young girls sitting and watching on a shag carpet in 1973, who didn’t know how the future would unfold. But we all knew who we were rooting for.
And we understood that sports had the power to change things.
What I did realize, even as a kid, was that sports had a power and a purpose. That even in a goofy, circus-like atmosphere, like the one that night at the Astrodome, a real-world message could be sent.