Margaret Court was the undisputed #1 woman tennis pro in the world, and it was SHE Bobby Riggs challenged. And he beat her just as he predicted! The "BATTLE OF THE SEXES" was won by an old, has-been former tennis champion turned tennis hustler.
Later, of course, when Bobby Riggs was even older, he played Billie Jean King and lost to her.
And the Billie Jean King match is the ONLY match we ever hear about! I expect this movie to be horribly PC!
Don't you worry little man, Margaret Courts story is told, (BTW, it was after BJK turned Riggs down) and it was just a few months later that King accepted his challenge. All well covered in the film. How can it be horribly PC it it presents the facts?
it rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again
It presents some facts, more or less, but it is very PC-distorted. Entertaining, though.
shareI was a kid at the time, and FYI I don't remember the match against Margaret Court at all, but the match against King was so hugely anticipated that absolutely everyone was talking about it. It was THE sports event of the year, if not the decade! It was broadcast on national TV during prime-time, and the pre-match discussion dominated chatter everywhere from the grade schools to the old folks' homes, everyone had an opinion. No, lots of opinions.
I have no idea why one match became a huge media event and the other didn't, and the movie didn't go into the particulars.
Well, let's see. Seems kinda obvious. The first match didn't upset the social order of 'men are better' and the second one did. Plus it was a 100,000-dollar prize. Three times the stakes. He beat the current top woman, but a couple months later the current top woman slaughtered him on the court. Also, BJK had a mission, knew how to promote it, and had a lot of followers. Her purpose, her mission, had a lot of meaning to women of the time, whereas Court was only in it for the money and has actually been shown to be very backward and antisocial, given she's a pastor who is actively anti-LGBT. BJK was a harbinger of the future and Court a throwback.
share"The first match didn't upset the social order of 'men are better' and the second one did."
I'm talking about pre-match publicity. I don't remember any before the Court-vs-Riggs match, but the King-vs-Riggs match was hugely publicized, so much that the whole world was talking about it BEFORE King won.
Was the Court match nationally televised? The thing is that the King/Riggs match was on nighttime national TV, if not international TV, and everyone I knew or heard about ran home to see it live. I can only presume that either King or the TV network was responsible for drumming up an unprecedented level of pre-match publicity, because if Riggs had been able to draw that kind of attention on his own, the match with Court would have gotten just as much interest.
Ah, yes, "anticipated." Riggs promoted it more because the prize was 3x, and BJK had started the whole women's tennis group and was an American tennis star, whereas Court was from Australia. Comes down to the same thing - Court was only in it for the money and BJK was a star with a mission. But, yeah, the movie didn't go into specific details beyond that.
shareIt could have been because King was American and Court was Australian, it could have been because King was a feminist spokeswoman, it could have been because the TV network decided to hype one match and not the other.
I suspect we're not going to get an answer here, because the movie didn't go into it and I'm probably the only person on this board with any personal experience of the match.