How Bobby Runs and Talks, Talks, Talks

(2 of 8)

Bobby has to win because his mouth has put him way out on the line; Billie Jean must avenge the legions of women in chains, real or imaginary, who consider Riggs a male of supernaturally loathsome porcinity. With the possible exception of a nude tag-team wrestling match pitting Burt Reynolds and Norman Mailer against Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, it is scarcely conceivable that any other single athletic event could burlesque the issue so outrageously. A Las Vegas casino is chartering a plane to fly in show-biz folk and high rollers. Ms., the feminist magazine, plans a charter flight to make sure that Billie Jean does not lack for rooters deep in the heart of Marlboro country.

The purse is $100,000, winner take all, but the victor will likely get a minimum of $200,000 and the loser $100,000 because of shares in the ancillary rights—everything from buttons (Bobby Riggs—Bleah!) to popcorn. Thus, the players' pot will set a tennis record. And, though King is reluctant to join in the hoopla, though she tries to avoid responding to the sexist gambit that has become Riggs' credo (see box page 56), she is not above capitalizing on the happening. Recently she filmed an electric-shaver commercial with Riggs. Set in a Boeing 747 mockup, the scenario has Billie Jean walking past a row of Riggs look-alikes and muttering, "I think they ought to break the mold."

Of course there is no mold. Bobby is, first, an excellent athlete, one of the best tennis players the game has seen. But more important to his present endeavor, he is also an original—a garrulous, demonic elf, a street-shrewd promoter who has finally found a way to satisfy his gargantuan appetite for both action and attention.

It all began, James Thurber would probably say, in the Garden. Bobby Riggs, somewhat less cosmic, says that it began two years ago. He had been on the road gambling, hustling, playing in senior men's tennis tournaments. Upon winning a seniors' tournament in La Jolla, Calif., he received a telephone call from his second wife, Priscilla, who was in Florida. She told him much the same thing after 20 years of marriage that his first wife, the former Kay Fischer, had said after 13 uneven years: Where have you been all our wedlock?

"We had long had our problems," Riggs says of Priscilla. "My wife thought I ought to spend more time looking after my family instead of playing gin and hustling golf and tennis. She didn't think it was dignified. Once she made me go to a psychiatrist to try to cure me of my addiction, but after a couple of sessions I had him flicking cards into a hat. Then we spent time playing gin rummy."