Battle Of The Sexes

In 1973, Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs played a tennis match. The stakes? $100,000 and the fate of gender relations on earth. Now, 44 years later, the battle of the sexes takes center stage once more in a new film that asks how far we have come.

- L.Jon Wertheim

BILLIE JEAN KING didn’t stick to sports. Mostly because she was never afforded that luxury. In the early 1970s, the entrenched tennis powers paid women dimes to the dollars they offered men. “They basically dared us to go off on our own,” King says, “so we did.” The breakaway tour that King effectively led—which eventually became the WTA—was as much an exercise in activism as it was an exercise in hitting a ball over a net.

A few years later, King grudgingly agreed to take on a 55-year-old trash-talking hustler (and former No. 1 ranked player) named Bobby Riggs in a $100,000 winner-take-all exhibition. What started as a publicity stunt became a worldwide referendum on gender. The match, on Sept. 20, 1973, was played before 30,000 fans in the Houston Astrodome and drew 90 million viewers worldwide— the most in the U.S. since 125 million people watched the moon landing in ’69. King, of course, handily picked apart Riggs and, by extension, some tired cultural stereotypes.

More than 40 years later, the Battle of the Sexes has inspired a feature film of the same name. In her first role since La La Land, Emma Stone, 28, portrays the 29-year-old King, nailing everything from her clipped diction to her manic ball bouncing. While Stone took lessons and packed on 12 pounds for the role, members of the UCLA tennis team served as stand-ins for some scenes. Steve Carell plays Riggs, a figure both repulsive and alluring. And, yes, the costars were paid equally for their work.

Hours before Sloane Stephens earned $3.7 million for winning the 2017 U.S. Open (the same as men’s winner Rafael Nadal), Stone and King spoke with SI.

SI: I feel like you two are doing pr for women’s tennis in 1973 and going from the local radio station now to . . .

BILLIE JEAN KING: The car dealership.