Fifty years after sport’s ‘Battle of the Sexes’, what’s really changed?

The notorious 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs was a straight-sets victory against ‘male chauvinist pigs’. Claire Cohen looks back on one of the most-watched sporting events in history, and asks: why are women still being underestimated?

Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973 (Alamy)

You’ve got to hand it to 1973. At least, back then, the “male chauvinist pigs” boasted proudly about believing that “women belong in the bedroom and kitchen”. We knew what we were dealing with a lot of the time, because it was glaringly obvious.

At least, Billie Jean King did. Fifty years ago today, then 29 and already a 10-time grand-slam champion, King took on former American number one Bobby Riggs – who spoke the charming words above – in a tennis match dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes”. It remains one of the most-watched sporting events in history, with 90 million TV viewers and more than 30,000 people on the court.

Riggs, then 55, had criticised the women’s game for being inferior. Even a retired male player like him, he insisted, could defeat a female player in her prime. King annihilated him, in straight sets, winning the $100,000 prize money – but she knew that the cost of losing would be far, far higher.

This was an era in which working women still faced Mad Men-like office politics: being patronised, patted on the backside and chased around desks. We couldn’t apply for a credit card without a man’s signature or open our own bank accounts – and don’t even mention the gender pay gap.

Female athletes competed for pitifully low prize money. All that running around and sweating? So unfeminine. But King had drawn the battle lines in 1970, setting up the all-women’s tennis tour with a group of fellow rebels – something one panicked male journalist of the time described as “bubonic”.

The Battle of the Sexes organisers played up to all of this. You’ve probably seen the footage or a movie version of it: Riggs entering the Houston Aerodrome atop a ridiculous carriage pulled by his “Bosom Buddies” – local women chosen for their ample cup size – his kit emblazoned with the “Sugar Daddy” logo. King being carried onto the court by shirtless male “slaves” as a band played Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman”, and commentator Howard Cosell said, “Sometimes you get the feeling that if she ever let her hair grow down to her shoulders, took her glasses off, you’d have somebody vying for a Hollywood screen test.”

“I’ll tell you why I’ll win,” Riggs, who died in 1995, insisted in a press conference ahead of the match. “She’s a woman, and they don’t have the emotional stability. She’ll choke... the man is supreme.”

His views hardly stood out at the time – only a year earlier, the 1972 Wimbledon champion Stan Smith had said, “A woman should stay home and have babies, that’s what she’s for. This women’s lib thing could go too far.” Think on that when you next wear your white trainers.

Two hours and four minutes after Riggs and King entered the court, the world looked different. For all its over-the-top publicity stunt pomp, the Battle of the Sexes was a milestone in women’s rights, upending the notion that they belonged at home, rather than in sporting arenas in front of millions of people. It’s not an exaggeration to say that they were seen and valued differently – King, who secured equal prize money at the US Open that same year and paved the way for the Women’s Tennis Association, says that people still approach her to talk about the match every single day.

As Riggs told King on court, immediately after her victory: “I underestimated you.”

Hers wasn’t the first victory of 1973: that January, abortion rights had been written into the US constitution and Congress passed Title IX, protecting women from sex discrimination in educational programmes that received federal funding. The second wave of the feminist movement had momentum, but King’s victory would give it a populist figurehead. She was the right woman, on the right court, at the right time.

“It gave women self-confidence to ask for what they want and need because we’re taught not to,” King has said. “They ask for raises. I’ve had so many women tell me how it changed their lives or their grandmother’s life or whoever; just the different generations it’s covered.”

Yet shots are still being fired in the battle of the sexes, on court and off.

Only this week, Spanish player Jenni Hermoso accused the country’s football federation of trying to “manipulate and intimidate“ its female players in the wake of president Luis Rubiales’ resignation, after he was seen forcibly kissing her on the World Cup winners’ podium.

And we need BJK moments in sport, politics, entertainment, business, medicine and so many other arenas in which women are now included, but treated as inferior.

One thing is clear: half a century on, they’re still underestimating us.