by Glenn Stout
As Riggs lived the high life on the West Coast, King trained in South Carolina with the focus of a boxer preparing for a prizefight. Larry Riggs was so sure his father was going to lose to King that he refused to accompany him to Houston for the match. “You’re going to embarrass yourself,” he told his father before he left. Larry Riggs says he bet $500 on King. King says she told her brother “to bet the house” on her.
On the eve of the match in Houston, Mulloy, the tennis legend who was Riggs’s close friend, visited him in his leopard-patterned Tarzan Room at the AstroWorld Hotel. A party was raging. Riggs looked heavier to Mulloy; he had gained 15 pounds in the four months since the Court match. “Bobby was in his pajamas,” Mulloy recalls, “and I looked around at a half a dozen cuties there, and they’re all having their drinks and laughing.”
Mulloy asked, “Bobby, what the hell are you doing? You got to play tomorrow.”
“Oh, there’s no way that broad can beat me,” Riggs replied.
The next morning, Mulloy was scheduled to warm up Riggs on the Astrodome court for one hour, but Riggs quit after 10 minutes. Mulloy was stunned. He was even more astonished to find Riggs that afternoon in a nearby practice facility, standing on a court with a brown dog tied on a leash to his left ankle and an umbrella in one hand. People off the street with tennis rackets were lined up to play Riggs. If they won a game, they played for free; if Riggs beat them, they owed him $100. Riggs’s brother, John, was collecting fistfuls of cash.
Mulloy says Riggs urged a millionaire friend named Jack Dreyfus not to bet on him against King. “Prior to the match, Jack Dreyfus had called him and said he wants to make a bet, how do you feel, where should I get odds,” Mulloy recalls. “Bobby says, ‘Don’t bet on me.’ That made me believe he was going to tank it.”
Moments before the match at the Astrodome, some spectators say Riggs appeared sullen, almost angry—the opposite of the happy hustler. “He wasn’t having any fun,” says Cliff Drysdale, a 72-year-old tennis broadcaster and former top-ranked pro who attended the match. With the first serve, Billie Jean King attacked aggressively in a bid to send a message to Riggs that this would not be another Margaret Court cakewalk. When one of King’s early forehands rocketed past him, Riggs told King, “Atta girl.” Still wearing his Sugar Daddy warm-up jacket, Riggs moved as if he were underwater. “I was surprised,” King says. “He was extremely nervous. So was I.”
“He was in slow motion,” says Donald Dell, a 75-year-old lawyer, former Davis Cup captain, and one of the first professional sports agents. “It was as if he had taken a sleeping pill.”
“Well, as I watched the match, I was surprised that he wasn’t attacking more,” says Stan Smith, a 66-year-old two-time major winner and a former number-one men’s player in the world.
King was ahead 2–1 in the first set. During a break, Riggs finally peeled off his Sugar Daddy jacket. His blue shirt was soaked with sweat.
At the LA Tennis Club where Riggs had won tens of thousands of dollars hustling its members on the tennis court, the golf course, and at the card table, the members watched the match on a large television. Riggs looked nothing like the spry, dominant player who had crushed Margaret Court four months earlier. During the first set, says tennis broadcaster Doug Adler, a friend of Riggs’s since they met at the club, someone shouted, “Looks like Bobby bet on Billie Jean!”
Riggs lost a game late in the first set on a double fault, something he rarely did. After losing the first set, Riggs told Kuhle to offer a friend of King’s, named Dick Butera, a $5,000 bet that he’d come back to win, at 2–1 odds. Prior to the match, Riggs had bet $10,000 with Butera that he’d beat King. But Butera, who was sitting courtside, refused this midmatch bet, apparently assuming Riggs was once again keeping his game “in the barn.”
From across the net, King says, Riggs looked “a little bit in shock” by his first-set loss. And she says she is certain he wasn’t tanking: “Bobby Riggs wanted to win that match. I saw it in his eyes. I saw it when we changed ends, and there is no question. I have played matches where players have tanked, and I know what it feels like and I know what it looks like, and he did not. He just was feeling the pressure.”
Riggs played even worse in the second set, moving around even more listlessly.
In the broadcast booth, Howard Cosell and tennis analysts Rosie Casals and Gene Scott repeatedly sounded puzzled by Riggs’s soft, erratic play. “He doesn’t look right to me,” Casals said. After Riggs hit a weak return right at King, Casals said, “That’s pretty unusual for Bobby.” And later, she asked, “Where is Bobby Riggs? Where did he go?”
Scott said Riggs was “just nonchalant with the forehand.”
Riggs was well known for a nearly flawless service game, but he missed on nearly half of his first serves. Four times, he double-faulted, all on critical points. The level of play hardly lived up to all the hype and the anticipation. King was grinding down the old man, who was the same age as her father. “Funny, with this match I guess we all expected some high humor involved in it,” Cosell said. “Instead, it’s become a very serious, serious thing because the comedy has gone out of Bobby Riggs.”
When it was finally over, fans stormed the court and engulfed King, and Riggs hugged her. “You could just see he wanted it so badly and couldn’t get it going,” she says. “I think he got so nervous—it exhausted him.” He just “choked,” she says. “We’ve all done it. I’ve choked. Everybody chokes.”
At the postmatch news conference, a subdued Riggs saluted King’s performance. “Billie Jean was too good, too quick,” he said. “I know I said a lot of things she made me eat tonight. I guess I’m the biggest bum of all time now. But I have to take it.” Prior to the match, King says she told Riggs, win or lose, she would never play him again. But before the assembled reporters, Riggs quickly called for a rematch. “I would’ve given Billie Jean a rematch if I had won, so I want a rematch.”
“Why should there be a rematch?” she said. Billie Jean King had nothing left to prove.
Nearly 40 years later, “The Battle of the Sexes” is one of the most iconic sporting events in American history. The match’s value is especially cherished by tennis people because it proved the game, like King, was a trailblazer for society. King planted a flag for women’s equality. Gradually, America followed.
“I think it wasn’t just for women,” says King. “It was really about both genders. Men come up to me constantly, many times with tears in their eyes, and tell me their story, like ‘Oh, I was 12 years old when I saw that match, and now I have a daughter and I have a son, and I really want both of them to have equal opportunity.’
“So I think for men, it changed them to think differently about things. For women, also, they thought differently about themselves—they were much more empowered to ask for what they want and need to have more self-confidence.”
This past July, King and several hundred members of tennis’s elite gathered at the International Tennis Hall of Fame, in Newport, Rhode Island, for the annual induction ceremonies. On a Sunday evening, they watched a new documentary film that will air September 10 on PBS that salutes King’s victory. Afterward, Martina Hingis, a Hall of Fame inductee who wasn’t alive in 1973, appeared awestruck by what she had just seen on the big screen. “This was bigger than anything probably anyone can go through . . . so, congratulations,” Hingis told King. “I mean—amazing.”
In attendance were the aging male members of tennis’s old guard, who applauded for King. None of these men knew about Hal Shaw’s allegations, and only a few knew about Bobby Riggs’s mob friends. Still, the men remarked among themselves that there wasn’t a single word in the film about the belief by some that Bobby Riggs had thrown the match for a big payday.
Across nearly 40 years, some of the men who knew Riggs best have wondered: was “The Battle of the Sexes” nothing more than a cultural con job?
“A lot of my tennis friends immediately suspected something was up, and many of us still believe something was u
p,” says John Barrett, the longtime BBC tennis broadcaster. “It wasn’t so much that Bobby lost. It was that he looked as if he had almost capitulated. He just made it too easy for Billie Jean King. We all wondered if the old fox had done it again.”
“Everything was different,” says Adler. “If you were a tennis person that knew Bobby Riggs, the first thing that comes to your mind is he threw the match.”
Steve Powers, who owned the guesthouse where Riggs stayed prior to the match, says, “If Bobby had an opportunity to fix the match, he would have jumped at it. Ethics wouldn’t have stopped him.”
Tennis great Gene Mako, who died in June, had insisted for years that Riggs had thrown the match. “You have to know Bobby,” Mako told author Tom LeCompte in the 2003 Riggs biography, The Last Sure Thing. Mako believed Riggs was so vain that his play was just awful enough to demonstrate to smart tennis people that he had tanked the match.
Almost right after the match, King says she began hearing the rumors that Riggs had thrown it. The rumors were started by “people who were unhappy—guys who lost money,” she says. “And a lot of people, men, particularly, don’t like it if a woman wins. They don’t like it. They make up stories. They start just thinking about it more and more. It’s hard on them. It’s very hard on their egos.”
King also says because of all the stories about Riggs’s betting and hustling, especially in Los Angeles, it was just natural that some people would assume the fix was in.
Asked recently whether she could believe Riggs had thrown the match, former world number-one player Chrissie Evert said she wouldn’t think so but you could never be sure. “Ninety-nine percent of me would say [King] beat him fair and square,” Evert says. “But if you know Bobby Riggs, you can’t put anything past him.”
The assumption by some was that Riggs would not have been able to resist the odds on Billie Jean King, who was listed as high as 5–2 in the Las Vegas sports books. Tennis legend Don Budge, who died in 2000, had told one of his sons he had no doubt Riggs threw the match for money. “In no uncertain terms, he definitely heard from people that Riggs had thrown it,” says Budge’s son, Jeffrey. “And it was huge money—more than $100,000, perhaps $200,000 to $500,000. Dad said, ‘[Riggs] could have run her off the court any day of the week as he did against Margaret Court.’”
But Kuhle denies Riggs threw the match, arguing it would have been impossible for Riggs to have quietly placed large bets on King in Vegas. In the 1970s, as they do now, sports books had strict wagering limits and large bets would have moved the odds in an obvious way. “It just makes no sense,” Kuhle says.
If Riggs had thrown the match for the Mafia, how would that kind of fix have benefited Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante Jr.? Both men controlled networks of illegal bookmaking operations. From New Orleans, Carlos Marcello ran “the wire” that took bets on horse races and sports wagering across the country, Mafia experts say. Gambling experts said that “a perfect fix” is a result known to illegal bookmakers. That knowledge allows them to offer fatter odds on a betting favorite knowing it would attract far more action.
London betting shops listed odds on “The Battle of the Sexes,” which had been scheduled to be shown on closed-circuit TV at a half-dozen London movie houses. But the bookmakers viewed the match with “huge suspicion,” recalls Graham Sharpe, a 62-year-old media relations director at William Hill, the UK’s largest bookmaker. “This thing was regarded as a freak show, a sideshow. And we were concerned because one of the guys is a noted hustler and a compulsive gambler, who is not as pure as the driven snow. If anyone tried to bet more than a few pounds, we’d reject the bet and figure he knew something that we didn’t.”
The Mafia expert and author Lamar Waldron was told about Riggs’s Mafia acquaintances and what Hal Shaw had heard. “Given all the connections that Riggs had and the way these Mafia leaders operated, it would be unusual if they didn’t look to him to throw the match,” Waldron says. “Certainly it appears the motive and opportunity was there.”
When Shaw watched Riggs lose to King, he says he knew the scheming he had overheard in Palma Ceia’s pro shop had been executed. “There’s nothing impossible when money’s involved and power’s involved,” he says. Shaw says he is glad he decided to come forward and tell his story and has nothing left to fear. “You can ask me a thousand questions, I would still tell you what happened that night, you know, 40 years ago,” he says. “I got no ax to grind. I don’t get anything for this. I know deep in my heart—Riggsy had taken a fall, but made it look good. He was a showman, and he pulled it off.”
But Lornie Kuhle angrily denied Shaw’s allegations during an interview at his home in Decatur, Illinois. “I’ve never heard anything so far-fetched,” he says. “It’s just complete bulls——.” As for Shaw, he said, “I mean, that’s ridiculous—unless he’s got Alzheimer’s, and people do get that when they’re 79 years old.” He added, “I never heard anything so far-fetched as this guy in Tampa. I’d like to meet that guy sometime.”
Kuhle also vehemently disputed the suggestion that Riggs owed mob-linked bookmakers any money, at any time. “You can say the mob killed John Kennedy,” he says. “We could rationalize that one, but Bobby never owed anybody a dime—football bets, basketball bets, or anything like that . . . There are no mob people involved with this match. The mob doesn’t even play tennis . . . I think that’s a funny story.”
Kuhle, who is the founder and owner of the Bobby Riggs Tennis Center and Museum in Encinitas, California, also denied that Riggs received a Mafia payment deposited in a bank account in England, as Shaw had heard. “Listen, I’m with Bobby night and day for 20 years,” Kuhle says. “I’m the executor of his estate. I know every nickel he had in the bank. I know every check he’s written, every bet he made. There was never any bet with anybody in the mob or anything like that.”
However, Larry Riggs did not dismiss Shaw’s story outright because, after all, his father knew and gambled with a lot of mob guys all over the country. Bobby Riggs was also a longtime member of the La Costa Country Club in Carlsbad, California, a reputed mob-built country club where mob leader and Riggs’s acquaintance Moe Dalitz was a member. And Larry Riggs had never understood why those Chicago pals of hit man Jackie Cerone had visited his father several times prior to the King match.
“Did he know Mafia guys? Absolutely,” Larry Riggs says. “Is it possible these guys were talking some s——? Yes, it is possible. They talked to him about doing it? Possible.” However, Riggs says, it was more likely his father purposefully lost with an eye toward setting up a bigger payday rematch—and a continuation of the national publicity that he so craved—than throw the match for mob money. Larry Riggs also says he remains baffled by the fact his father did not prepare for the King match—the only match in Bobby Riggs’s life for which he had failed to train. “Never understood it,” Larry Riggs says.
King says Riggs underestimated her. He was devastated that he lost, though King acknowledges he might have been capable of throwing a match. “Oh, I’m capable of tanking; everyone can tank,” King says. “It depends on the situation. But that was not really in Bobby’s best interest in any way to lose that match.”
When Mulloy was told about Shaw’s story, he says, he believed it. “I think that the mobsters of some sort were in on the match with Billie Jean King,” he says. “He didn’t put himself in a position to win, and I think he did it on purpose to make a buck.” Besides, Mulloy adds, Riggs knew his defeat would create intense interest—and money—for a rematch with King.
In the contract signed by Riggs and King, there was an ironclad clause for a rematch, Kuhle and others say. Riggs considered suing King to force a rematch, but friends urged him not to do it. He was “crushed” by King’s decision to deny him a rematch. King says she knows nothing about a rematch clause, wouldn’t have agreed to one, and had never heard that Riggs contemplated suing her. Perenchio, the match promoter who is now 82 years old, did not respond to questions from Outsid
e the Lines along with a request to review the contract.
For Riggs, who was often quoted as saying, “I want to be remembered as a winner,” the aftermath of a loss on such a big stage to a woman he had ridiculed could not have been easy to endure. “He thought for sure she would play him in the rematch,” Larry Riggs says. “He thought for sure he would have redemption.”
Bobby Riggs’s friends say he was depressed for at least six months after his “Battle of the Sexes” loss. Even so, he had become a legitimate national celebrity. (On an airplane, Laugh-In star Arte Johnson told Riggs, “People tell me I look like you,” to which Riggs replied, “Funny—no one tells me I look like you.”) He would do humorous star turns on The Odd Couple and other TV shows. By early 1974—only a few months after the loss to King—Riggs moved to Las Vegas and worked at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino as the resident tennis pro and casino greeter. Paid an annual salary of $100,000, he moved into a house on the hotel’s golf course.
The Tropicana was the casino where mobsters had skimmed packets of $100 bills from the counting room—the crime immortalized in the film Casino. One of the men who benefited from the Tropicana skim was Riggs’s Chicago golfing buddy Jackie Cerone. In 1986, Cerone and four other men, from the Chicago, Detroit, and Kansas City mobs, were convicted of skimming a total of $2 million from the Tropicana during the mid-’70s. Larry Riggs says he is unsure who had arranged the job at the Tropicana for Bobby Riggs.
Through the late ’70s and early ’80s, whispers about an alleged Bobby Riggs fix only grew louder. In 1983, Riggs appeared on a syndicated television show called Lie Detector, hosted by the famous criminal defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey. On the show, Bailey asked Riggs if he had thrown the match, and he said no. Bailey declared for viewers that Riggs had passed the lie detector test. Kuhle says Riggs did the show for $5,000, not because he had felt a need to deny the allegation.
