Midway through the third and final set, Bobby Riggs shuffled to the sidelines complaining of cramps in his playing hand. As Rheo Blair, nutrition adviser of the Bobby Riggs Traveling Chauvinist Pig & Nostrum Show, massaged his falling prince's hand, some anonymous TV director captioned the scene—and the entire evening—with commendable brevity. Floating across the screen came the words BOBBY RIGGS 55 YEARS OLD.
That was the main message following all the hoopla at the Houston Astrodome last week. The putative Battle of the Sexes turned out to be one more sorry chapter in the story of the ancient struggle between sclerotic age and limber youth. In three straight sets that lasted 2 hr. 5 min., Billie Jean King, 29, the pride of women's tennis, briskly dispatched Robert Larimore Riggs, the huckster who had hustled the world of spectator sportsmen into believing that you really can go home again.
Pumped up with enough hot air and hard dollars to start a respectable Balkan war, the big evening maintained its P.T. Barnum air—at least until the principals squared off across the net. Workaday Texas fans mingled with celebrities who had jetted into Houston for the occasion. Before the match, such diverse names as Andy Williams and Claudine Longet, ex-Football Star Jim Brown, Heavyweight Champion George Foreman, Actor Rod Steiger and Actress Jo Ann Pflug (in a clinging blue jersey with I'M A BILLIE JEAN KING FAN Stenciled on the back) swirled through a champagne party ($1 per glass) on the green-carpeted Astrodome floor. There were a few rounds of beautiful-people tennis (the Williams-Longet team beat Merv Griffin and Sandra Giles, a Riggs playmate). The 80-piece red-coated University of Houston Cougar band blared such anomalous songs as Jesus Christ, Superstar while comely majorettes did a Rockettes routine out front. Even Umpire Jerome Morton got into the act, wearing a modish gray velvet tuxedo and red ruffled shirt that the U.S.L.T.A. would surely never sanction.
For the ABC-TV audience (an estimated 48 million), the show began with a male-female duet of Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better. That was followed by the omnipresent Howard Cosell in his own flashy tuxedo—which seemed rather like a smoking jacket on a whooping crane. The experts on hand were Gene Scott and Rosemary Casals; both worked hard to demonstrate their sexist bias. Scott never had a chance in the face of Ms. Casals' steady barrage of anti-Riggs billingsgate.
Bosom Buddies. The climax of the opening ceremonies seemed to herald a match between Genghis Khan and Catherine of Russia. King was borne in on a red-draped gold divan by four bare-chested men wearing slave armbands, while Riggs entered in a ricksha pulled by five of the ample girls he refers to as "bosom buddies." He presented Billie Jean with a large Sugar Daddy sucker ("for the biggest sucker in the world"); the stunt had Billie Jean's full cooperation, since it reportedly earned each a fast fat $20,000. King responded by giving Bobby a live baby pig, appropriately named Larimore Hustle.
Then came the main event, a mixed singles mismatch between one excellent tennis player in her prime and another champion pathetically past his. To make matters worse, right at the start the psycher seemed to become the psychee.