It’s hard to overstate just how seriously Billie Jean King approached the tennis match they called ‘the Battle of the Sexes’, played on an acrylic cloth surface selected by her, with heavy duty tennis balls requested by her, before a global audience of 90million in Texas in September 1973.
She went into seclusion before the match, prompting rumours that she was not well enough to compete. She said she didn’t want the ex-tennis player and promoter Jack Kramer commentating on the match for the US’s ABC network, much to the broadcaster’s disgruntlement, because he was prejudiced against women. She insisted on a five-set format, to test whether a woman could beat a man at tennis.
And she promptly wiped the floor with her opponent – a ridiculous, bespectacled 55-year-old former Grand Slam champion in Bobby Riggs, whom she beat in straight sets on that warm Houston night. The win planted a flag for women’s tennis at a time when equal pay for women, newly introduced to the US Open on the grass of Forest Hills that autumn, had led many to question it.
‘It was 1973 and it was a huge, huge moment in the United States,’ King tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘Women couldn’t get a credit card on their own, title IX (which forbids classroom discrimination) had just been passed the year before. What happened that night was about social change. It was real. You’ve got to set that match against the times and what was going on.’
Aryna Sabalenka, who will step into King’s shoes on Sunday with a Battle of the Sexes rematch against Nick Kyrgios at Dubai’s Coca-Cola Arena, certainly doesn’t hold a candle to the example that the now 82-year-old King set. Sabalenka, the current world No 1 and a four-time Grand Slam champion, said at a tournament in Madrid earlier this year that she prefers the men’s game to the women’s: ‘I feel like there’s more strategy and it’s more interesting to watch.’
And while King, who was 29 when she played Riggs, campaigned for sports scholarships for girls and wage parity for female players, Sabalenka has breezier priorities. She shows her vast social media audiences, including 1.2million on TikTok and a further 4million on Instagram, how she dances with her coaching team, adores tequila and sails the Greek islands on a yacht with her boyfriend, the Brazilian acai-bowl millionaire Georgios Frangulis.
Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs ahead of their 1973 Battle of the Sexes match
Aryna Sabalenka will meet Nick Kyrgios in this year’s edition – with a few twists from the original
While King, who was 29 when she played Riggs, campaigned for sports scholarships for girls and wage parity for female players, Sabalenka has breezier priorities
Though the 27-year-old Belarusian has said she sees herself as a carrier of King’s torch on Sunday, many women feel she is putting commercial gain above the credibility of their game, with the risk of losing to Kyrgios. The optics aren’t helped by the Australian’s guilty plea to a charge of common assault for pushing his then girlfriend Chiara Passari in 2021 – though there was ultimately no conviction.
The setup also gives Sabalenka a deeply patronising helping hand and will heighten the mockery from some quarters should she lose – and gives Kyrgios a good excuse if she wins.
The players will have only one serve each, in what is being seen as a bid to dilute Kyrgios’ biggest weapon. In his prime he topped out at 143mph, far greater than his opponent – who can reach 133mph herself, just a tick below Georgina Garcia Perez’s world record – will ever have had to return before.
Sabalenka’s side of the court will also be nine per cent smaller than Kyrgios’, as part of the calculation that women cover less ground than their male counterparts, and giving him a reduced area to return the ball into. Kyrgios’ lack of competitive tennis – knee and wrist injuries mean the world No 671 hasn’t played since March, while he has won only one tour-level match in the last three years – might do a better job of levelling up this contest than fiddling with the rules and court.
King, who insisted on competing with a man on men’s tennis terms, doesn’t see Sunday’s match as anything like her clash with Riggs all those years ago.
Should it be seen as the next in the series of Battles of the Sexes? ‘No,’ she tells us. ‘I don’t think it means anything. It’s entertainment.’
Like King, Andrea Petkovic, the recently retired German former top-10 female player turned commentator, who is one of the sport’s most articulate and thoughtful analysts, wants Sunday’s match to be viewed as pure entertainment, though she fears the sewer of online discourse on women’s sport will not allow that.
‘I wish it was different – but for women, everything we do is still kind of political in the sports realm,’ she tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘The discussion online shows it’s still there and there is still some meaning and symbolism to it, though I honestly don’t know whether Aryna and Nick knew that this was going to create this discussion.
Sabalenka’s side of the court will also be nine per cent smaller than Kyrgios’, as part of the calculation that women cover less ground than their male counterparts
King, who insisted on competing with a man on men’s tennis terms, doesn’t see Sunday’s match as anything like her clash with Riggs all those years ago
‘If people try to make it political or cultural, I will feel for Aryna. It’s a lose-lose situation – because if she wins, it’s like, “Yeah, but they made the court smaller” and “Nick’s not playing really professionally” and “he has the knee problems and the wrist problem”. And if she loses, it’s even worse because she lost to Kyrgios, who hasn’t played a match in a long time.’
There will be a more vicious and toxic kind of misogyny for Sabalenka than anything King faced, should Kyrgios win. Back in 1973, King and female players were simply patronised. An American football player interviewed about the match in the Astrodome for that night’s ABC broadcast said he thought King would win ‘because she’s a beautiful lady and I love beautiful ladies’.
Riggs, who revelled in his own sexism, wore T-shirts stating ‘I’m a male chauvinist pig’ and actually carried a small, squealing pig into the arena. There was no way for millions of anonymous keyboard warriors to spread hate directly to the source of their anger in 1973.
But given that the new Battle of the Sexes will never change the entrenched views of the misogynists, the match could alternatively be seen as Sabalenka simply promoting herself – and tennis – to a fascinated and curious new audience. Extending the appeal and reach of a sport which, like almost every other, needs all the visibility it can get.
That’s the kind of asset she’s become for the women’s game, which has been in need of stardust since the Williams sisters stepped away. She has become the darling of the circuit with her distinctively 21st century approach to superstardom – opening a window to the world on her likes, pastimes and exotic holidays, in a way that her great rival on the court, Iga Swiatek, has never been remotely inclined to do.
There’s no filter with her. She doesn’t seem to care how people react, even when it’s a bad look, such as her ungracious response to Coco Gauff beating her in this year’s French Open final, for which she later apologised.
The personal tragedy in her recent background has also had the effect of somehow humanising her. Her former boyfriend Konstantin Koltsov fell from a hotel balcony last year in Miami. Sabalenka, who was in the city at the time to play the Miami Open, was heartbroken. She was only 21 when her father, Sergey, died, in 2019.
She is a marketeer’s dream, with a nickname – the Tiger – which comes complete with tattoo. Many tennis insiders believe the one thing holding Sabalenka back from superstardom is her nationality. Belarus offers a fraction of the market value of a more traditional European tennis nation, let alone a commercial giant like America, China or Japan.
Sabalenka is a marketeer’s dream, with a nickname – the Tiger – which comes complete with tattoo
Earlier this month, Sabalenka appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in the US and declared of Kyrgios: ‘I’m going to kick his a**’
And then there is the war in Ukraine, in which Belarus dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko is a puppet of Vladimir Putin. Sabalenka was pictured with Lukashenko in 2020 but disavowed him three years later, saying: ‘I don’t support war. I don’t support Lukashenko right now.’
Despite all this, Sabalenka is right to consider herself under-marketed. She split with former representatives IMG in January to sign with the boutique agency Evolve. ‘The Battle’ is the brainchild of Evolve – and more specifically Stuart Duguid, the agent of both Sabalenka and Kyrgios.
It has certainly raised her profile. Earlier this month, Sabalenka appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in the US and declared of Kyrgios: ‘I’m going to kick his a**.’
Though she might not be a successor to King, she has done much to foster the stronger relations that currently exist between the men’s and women’s tours, with a merger of the two now being talked of. She and Novak Djokovic have formed something of a friendship, practising together at Wimbledon and elsewhere. Sabalenka credited conversations with the Serb for helping her mentally as she went on to win this year’s US Open.
‘I love her because she’s so free, so spontaneous. She just does things,’ says Petkovic. ‘When she hears something could be fun, she just says “yes” to it, which I love about her. So that’s why I don’t know whether she thought that this was going to be such a big thing. It certainly doesn’t feel like she’s going into it as Billie Jean did. She’s there to have a good time.’
Emma Raducanu, who has the same fascination for Sunday’s match and will watch some of the BBC live broadcast, knows through her practice hitting with Carlos Alcaraz the challenges that come with being across the net from a male player.
‘The impact of their ball is different,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t for long but when I hit with Carlos in New York, I found that it looks like he’s not trying, but the ball when it reaches your strings is so heavy. That’s different compared to the girls, who usually hit the ball flatter. Aryna’s ball is pretty heavy, too, but the heaviness of the men’s impact is different.
‘Their strength in certain positions is, too. You think you’ve hit a good shot, and they’re just able to get behind the ball like an extra step and generate and kind of one-up you.’
Emma Raducanu knows through her practice hitting with Carlos Alcaraz the challenges that come with being across the net from a male player
Riggs, who revelled in his own sexism, wore T-shirts stating ‘I’m a male chauvinist pig’ and actually carried a small, squealing pig into the arena
But Riggs was no match for King, who won in three sets inside the Houston Astrodome
Raducanu also sees the potential for Sunday’s game to draw audiences to tennis: ‘I think it would just be cool for the public. It’s the first time it’s been done, so it will just be interesting.’
Nobody expected King to win in 1973 and it was the complacency of Riggs – who had already beaten all-time record Grand Slam winner Margaret Court in a three-set contest and seemed more interested in promoting the Sugar Daddy lollipop brand he’d created – which helped her win in straight sets. Riggs’ serve resembled that of a modest club player.
Kyrgios brings an ego and eccentricity resembling those of Riggs, so don’t discount the idea of history repeating itself.
‘I’m serious about this,’ Sabalenka said last week. ‘When I step on court, I want to win – no matter what the format.’
