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.
Ethics Alarms 