Bobby Riggs
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Bobby Riggs on the cover of Sports Illustrated just before his match with Billie Jean King in 1973 |
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Riggs at Wimbledon in 1939 |
Robert Larimore ("Bobby") Riggs (
February 25,
1918 –
October 10,
1995) was a 1930sâ€"40s amateur
tennis champion who, as a professional, became the
World No. 1 tennis player in 1946 and the
co-World No. 1 in 1947.
After being mostly forgotten for many years, he gained far more fame in 1973 at the age of 55 by challenge matches against two of the top female players in the world. His "Battle of the Sexes" match against
Billie Jean King was one of the most famous tennis events of all time.
Jack Kramer calls Riggs in his 1979 autobiography "the most underrated of all the top players" and says, perhaps surprisingly, that he considers Riggs to be one of the 6 best players of all time. He goes on to say that at his best Riggs was probably even better than
Pancho Gonzales, a man still considered by some to have been the greatest player of all time.
[Writing in 1979, Kramer considered the best ever to have been either Don Budge (for consistent play) or Ellsworth Vines (at the height of his game). The next four best were, chronologically, Bill Tilden, Fred Perry, Bobby Riggs, and Pancho Gonzales. After these six came the "second echelon" of Rod Laver, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Gottfried von Cramm, Ted Schroeder, Jack Crawford, Pancho Segura, Frank Sedgman, Tony Trabert, John Newcombe, Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith, Björn Borg, and Jimmy Connors. He felt unable to rank Henri Cochet and René Lacoste accurately but felt they were among the very best.]Riggs was born in
Los Angeles, California, the son of a minister and one of 6 siblings. He was an excellent
table tennis player as a boy and when he began playing tennis at age 11 he was quickly befriended and then coached by Esther Bartosh, who was the third-ranking woman player in Los Angeles. Depending entirely on speed and ball control, he soon began to win boys (through 15 years old) and then juniors (through 18 years old) tournaments. Although it is sometimes said that Riggs was one of the great tennis players nutured by
Perry T. Jones and the Southern California Tennis Association, Riggs writes in his autobiography that for many years Jones considered Riggs to be too small and not powerful enough to be a top-flight player. (Kramer, however, says in his autobiography that Jones turned against Riggs "for being a kid hustler.")
[The Game, My 40 Years in Tennis (1979), Jack Kramer with Frank Deford, page 21] After initially helping Riggs, therefore, Jones then refused to sponsor him in the important Eastern tournaments. With the help of Bartosh and other mentors, however, Riggs played in various national tournaments and by the time he was 16 was the number 5-ranked junior player in the United States. The next year he won his first national championship, winning the National Juniors by beating
Joe Hunt in the finals. That same year, 1935, he met Hunt in 17 final-round matches and won all 17 of them.
At 18 Riggs was still a junior but won the Southern California men's title and then went East to play on the grass-court circuit in spite of Perry Jones's opposition. Along the way, he won the National Clay Courts Championship in Chicago, beating
Frank Parker in the finals with drop shots and lobs. Although he had never played on grass courts before, Riggs had a successful summer, winning two tournaments and reaching the finals of two others. Although still a junior, he ended by the year by being ranked number 4 in the United States men's rankings. Kramer, who was 3 years younger than Riggs, writes "I played Riggs a lot then. He liked me personally too, but he'd never give me a break. For as long as he possibly could, he would beat me at love.... Bobby was always looking down the road. 'I want you to know who's the boss, for the rest of your life, Kid,' he told me. Bobby Riggs was always candid."
[The Game, My 40 Years in Tennis (1979), Jack Kramer with Frank Deford, page 31]Small in stature, he lacked the overall power of his larger competitors such as
Don Budge and
Jack Kramer but made up for it with brains, ball control, and speed. A master court strategist and tactician, he worked his opponent out of position and scored points with the game's best drop shot and lob as well as punishing ground strokes that let him come to the net for put-away shots. Kramer, one of the very few players who was undeniably better than Riggs, writes that there is a major "misconception" about Riggs. "He didn't play some rinky-dink
Harold Solomon style, pitty-pattying the ball around on dirt. He didn't have the big serve, but he made up for it with some sneaky first serves and as fine a second serve as I had seen at that time. When you talk about depth and accuracy both, Riggs' second serve ranks with the other three best that I ever saw:
von Cramm's,
Gonzales', and
Newcombe's." In his own autobiography, Riggs wrote, "In the 1946 match with Budge [for the
United States Pro Championship], I charged the net at every opportunity. Employing what I called my secret weapon, a hard first serve, I attacked constantly during my 6-3, 6-1, 6-1 victory."
Riggs, says Kramer, "was a great champion. He beat
Segura. He beat
Budge when Don was just a little bit past his peak. On a long tour, as up and down as
Vines was, I'm not so sure that Riggs wouldn't have played Elly very close. I'm sure he would have beaten Gonzales and
Laver and
Rosewall and
Hoad."
Kramer goes on to say that Riggs "could keep the ball in play, and he could find ways to control the bigger, more powerful opponent. He could pin you back by hitting long, down the lines, and then he'd run you ragged with chips and drop shots. He was outstanding with a volley from either side, and he could lob as well as any man.... he could also lob on the run. He could disguise it, and he could hit winning overheads. They weren't powerful, but they were always on target."
As a 20-year-old amateur, Riggs was part of the American
Davis Cup winning team in 1938. The following year, he made it only to the finals of the
French Open but then won the
Wimbledon Championships triple, capturing the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles. He went on to win the
U.S. Open, earning the number 1 world amateur ranking for 1939. Riggs teamed up with
Alice Marble, his Wimbledon co-champion, to win the 1940 U.S. Open mixed doubles championship. In 1941, he won his second U.S. Open singles title, following which he turned professional. His new career, however, was quickly interrupted by military service during
World War II.
After the war, as a pro, Riggs won the
Professonal American Singles Championship in 1946, 1947, and 1949. In the 1946 tour against Don Budge, he won 18 matches and lost 16, establishing himself as the best player in the world. The next year, he beat Budge again by the same narrow margin. Budge had sustained an injury to his right shoulder in a military training exercise during the war and had never fully recovered his earlier flexibily. Now, in 1947, according to Kramer, "Bobby played to Budge's shoulder, lobbed him to death, won the first twelve matches, thirteen out of the first fourteen, and then hung on to beat Budge, twenty-four matches to twenty-two." Kramer himself, however, had a sensational 1947 as an amateur and it is debatable whether he or Riggs was actually the top player for the year.
The promoter of the two Riggs-Budge tours was Jack Harris. In mid-1947 he had already made a deal with Jack Kramer that he would turn professional after the U.S championships at Forest Hills whether or not he was the winner. He also told Riggs and Budge that the winner of the Professional American Singles Championship, also to be held at Forest Hills, would establish the World Champion who would defend his title against Kramer. For the second year in a row, Riggs defeated Budge. Harris signed Kramer for 35 percent of the gross receipts and offered 20 percent to Riggs. He then changed his mind, as Riggs recounts in his autobiography, "saying he could get
Ted Schroeder as one of the supporting pair, provided both Kramer and I would yield 2-1/2 percent of our shares in order to build up the offer to Ted. We both agreed â€" and then Schroeder refused." Harris then signed
Pancho Segura and
Dinny Pails at $300 per week to play the opening match of the Riggs-Kramer tour. Riggs then went on to play Kramer for 17-1/2 percent of the gross receipts.
[Tennis Is My Racket, by Bobby Riggs, New York, 1949, page 16.]In early 1948, Kramer and Riggs embarked on their long tour, beginning with an easy victory by Riggs in front of 15,000 people who had made their way to
Madison Square Garden in New York in spite of a record snowstorm that had brought the city to a standstill. At the end of 26 matches, Riggs and Kramer had each won 13. By that point, however, Kramer had stepped up his second serve to take advantage of the fast indoor courts they played on and was now able to keep Riggs from advancing to the net. Kramer had also begun the tour by playing a large part of each match from the baseline. Finally realizing that he could only beat Riggs from the net, he changed his style of game and began coming to the net on every point. Riggs was unable to handle Kramer's overwhelming power game. For the rest of the tour Kramer dominated Riggs mercilessly, winning 56 out of the last 63 matches. The final score was 69 victories for Kramer and only 20 for Riggs, the last time an amateur champion has beaten the reigning professional king on their first tour. In many of the last matches, it was assumed by observers that Riggs frequently gave up after falling behind and let Kramer run out the victory. Riggs says in his autobiography that Kramer had made "nearly a hundred thousand dollars... on the American tour alone, while I took in nearly fifty thousand as my share."
[Tennis Is My Racket, by Bobby Riggs, New York, 1949, page 25.]In spite of still beating some of the other professionals such as
Pancho Segura in the following years, Riggs soon retired from competitive tennis and briefly took over the job of promoting the professional game.
As a senior player in his 60s and 70s, Riggs won numerous national titles within various age groups.
Riggs became famous as a hustler and gambler, when, in his 1949 autobiography, he wrote that he had made $105,000 in 1940 by betting on himself at Wimbledon to win all three championships: the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. Betting was legal in England, and he parlayed a modest $500 initial bet on his chances of winning the singles competition into a sum that would be equivalent to at least $1 million in 2006 dollars. According to Riggs,
World War II kept him from taking his winnings out of the country, so that by 1946, when the war had ended, he then had an even larger sum waiting for him in England, fattened by compounding interest.
For many years while in retirement, Riggs was a well-known tennis hustler and made a living by placing bets on himself to win matches against other, apparently better, players. To entice fresh victims to play him, he would handicap himself with weird devices like using a frying pan instead of a tennis racquet for the match. Whatever the handicap, Riggs generally won his bets.
A master promoter of himself and the game, Riggs saw an opportunity in 1973 to make money and to elevate the popularity of a sport he loved. Although 55 years old, he deliberately played the
male chauvinist card and came out of retirement to challenge one of the world's greatest female players to a match, claiming that the female game was inferior and that a top female player could not beat him even at the age of 55. The cagey Riggs challenged
Margaret Court, 30 years old and the top female player in the world. In their May 13, 1973, Mother's Day match in
Ramona, California, Riggs used his drop shots and lobs to keep an unprepared Court off balance. His easy 6–2, 6–1 victory landed Riggs on the cover of both
Sports Illustrated and
Time magazine.
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Bobby Riggs caricatured in 1973 |
Suddenly in the national limelight, Riggs taunted all female tennis players, prompting
Billie Jean King to accept a lucrative financial offer to play Riggs in a nationally televised match that the promoters dubbed as the "Battle of the Sexes." On September 20th, at the
Astrodome in
Houston, Texas, King entered the arena in
Cleopatra style, carried aloft in a chair held by four bare-chested muscle men dressed in the garb of ancient slaves. Riggs followed in a
rickshaw drawn by a bevy of gorgeous scantily-clad models.
When the match began, King had learned from Margaret Court's humiliation and was ready for Riggs's game. Rather than playing her own usual aggressive game, she stayed back for the most part, handling Riggs's lobs and soft shots easily, making Riggs cover the entire court as she ran him from side to side, beating him at his own defensive game. After quickly falling behind from the baseline, where he had intended to play, Riggs was forced to change to a
serve-and-volley game. Even from the net, the result was the same: King defeated him handily, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. According to Kramer, "I don't think Billie Jean played all that well. She hit a lot of short balls which Bobby could have taken advantage of had he been in shape. I would never take anything away from Billie Jean â€" because she was smart enough to prepare herself properly â€" but it might have been different if Riggs hadn't kept running around. It was more than one woman who care of Bobby Riggs in Houston." After the match,
Pancho Segura declared disgustedly that Riggs was the only third best senior player, behind himself and
Gardnar Mulloy, and challenged King to another match. King refused.
In recent years a persistent
urban legend has arisen, particularly on the
Internet, that the rules were modified for the match so that Riggs had only one serve for King's two, and that King was allowed to hit into the doubles court area. This is false; the match was played under the normal rules of tennis.
There was also widespread speculation that Riggs had purposely lost, in order to win large sums of money that he had bet against himself. As Kramer writes, however, "Billie Jean beat him fair and square. A lot of men â€" especially around our age â€" were so stunned when he lost that they figured he must have tanked. Budge is convinced of that. But what motive would Riggs have for that? Bobby Riggs, the biggest ham in the world, gets his greatest audience â€" and purposely looks bad? There's no way. If he had beaten Billie Jean, he could have kept the act going indefinitely. Next they would have had him play
Chrissy on clay."
Nearly thirty years later, a
2001 ABC television docudrama entitled
When Billie Beat Bobby recounted the match and the lead-up to it.
These two matches, instigated solely by the consummate showmanship of Riggs, did more to increase interest in the game of tennis, especially women's tennis, than any prior championship or other competition had been able to do up to that time. In 1985, at age 67, Riggs returned to the tennis spotlight when he partnered with
Vitas Gerulaitis to launch another challenge to female players. His return to the public eye was short lived, however, when they lost their doubles match against
Martina Navratilova and
Pam Shriver.
Bobby Riggs was diagnosed with
prostate cancer in 1988. He founded the Bobby Riggs Tennis Museum Foundation to increase awareness of the then-obscure disease. Riggs died of the cancer in 1995 in
Leucadia, California, aged 77.
Riggs was inducted into the
International Tennis Hall of Fame in
Newport, Rhode Island, in 1967.
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The Game, My 40 Years in Tennis, by Jack Kramer with Frank Deford (ISBN 0-399-12336-9), 1979, New York
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Tennis Is My Racket, by Bobby Riggs, 1949, New York
