Ugh. I missed writing about the latest “Battle of the Sexes” tennis fiasco last month. I meant to. I think my brain must have registered a veto after threatening to leave if I did.

You remember the first one, don’t you? That was when senior pro tennis huckster Bobby Riggs, who was never a top ranked pro player even in his prime, had challenged #1 ranked female tennis champ Margaret Court to a match using sexist wisecracks and shamed her into playing him in 1973. On national TV, the 55-year old lobbed and cheap-shotted poor Margaret, who was having a bad case of jitters as she was supposedly defending her sex, to distraction and won handily. Billy Jean King then picked up the metaphorical flag, challenged Bobby, and won in a match that looked exactly like what it was: a female tennis pro at the top of her game beating an old man who was a last a decent pro player 25 years earlier. This proved exactly nothing, but it was enough to make King a feminist icon. The match was effectively used to argue for women getting equal pay in pro tennis, and helped get the women’s professional tour started.

The whole thing was an over-hyped joke, lousy tennis combined with lousy politics, that presaged the worst of reality TV decades later. Still, no real was harm was done except extending obnoxious Bobby Riggs’ 15 minutes of past-his-pulldate fame. But for some reason it was felt necessary to revive the stupid stunt in 2025.

Nick Kyrgios faced off against Aryna Sabalenka, the #1 ranked female player in the world, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Decemeber 28. Unlike Court and King in 1973, few in the U.S. know her name: Sarina Williams she’s not. Kyrgios isn’t an old man like Riggs, but he is still an inferior male adversary, having been too injured to play in a major tournament since 2022. He is currently ranked #677 on the men’s tennis tour.

But wait, there’s more!

Unlike the last Battle of the Sexes, this one was wasn’t Riggsed, it was rigged. See?

Yup, the #1 woman player in the world had 9% less space to cover, and 9% more court to shoot for on Kyrgios’s side. Moreover, Kyrigios only got a single serve, while Sabalenka had the usual two chances to serve in bounds. That, my friends, isn’t tennis. I don’t know what it is. Stupid?

And guess what? Kyrgios won anyway, taking the match in straight sets. In a major contrast with the 1973 match, both players seemed to be taking the competition less than seriously, yucking it up between points. Sabalenka clearly signaled that it was all a lark in the awards ceremony after she lost. See, then when she lost, her fans can say she weren’t really trying. King treated the match with Riggs like grim death.

Maybe there was a method to Sabalenka’s madness: she is on record as saying that it is unfair to allow trans women to compete in women’s sports. If that was her motive in looking inferior to a male tennis pro at half-speed even with the court dimensions favoring her, the least he could have done was wear a wig and a dress.