The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (21 page)

But Riggs was rarely overmatched on the tennis court. Twice, he won the U.S. singles championships at Forest Hills, in 1939 and 1941. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Riggs won U.S. Pro singles titles in 1946, 1947, and 1949.

And always, Riggs had a bet on the outcome of his match. “I've got to have a bet going in order to play my best,” Riggs wrote in his 1973 memoir,
Court Hustler.
At least once, he had a bet going and played his worst. Tennis historian Bud Collins recalls a 1940s doubles match in which Riggs and his partner cruised to a two-set lead. But they then lost by dumping the next three sets, Collins says. The fix was obvious. “Well, there's always money with Bobby,” Collins says. “The jingle of tennis was always there.”

After Riggs's tennis career ended, he continued to play against seniors and amateurs at clubs in Chicago, New York, and, later, in California. He was in such supreme control of a match that players say he had the ability to drop a first set or even two sets, bet on himself at fatter odds, and then come storming back to win. “Staying in the barn” is what Riggs's best friend, Lornie Kuhle, calls this hustle. “[It] means you're not giving it your full effort, yet your opponent thinks you are,” Kuhle says. “He led you to believe you really had a chance to beat him. As soon as the bet was increased, he came out of the barn, and he beat you. Then everybody would scream bloody murder and foul. Bobby would stay in the barn a lot—on the golf course, on the tennis court.”

Before long, Riggs was playing more golf than tennis. That was because golf's handicap system made it easier for Riggs to disguise his true talent; every golf gambler knows most wagers are won during the first-tee negotiations. “The second worst thing in the world is betting on a golf game and losing,” Riggs often said. “The worst is not betting at all.”

In the 1950s, Riggs was the resident tennis pro at the Roney Plaza Hotel, a Miami Beach artdeco magnet for celebrities and mobsters who enjoyed wagering. “Bobby was hanging around the unsavory people,” says Gardnar Mulloy, 99, a close friend of Riggs's and a former U.S. number-one player. “I'd seen him with people that normally you would think you wouldn't want to be with. And he was always betting big money—it was always, it seemed to me, a fix.” In those days, Riggs played golf for money with South Florida mobster Martin Stanovich, nicknamed “The Fat Man.”

Riggs also gambled on the links with Jackie “The Lackey” Cerone, a hit man for the Chicago Mafia and protégé of mob boss Sam Giancana, according to Riggs's son and Kuhle. As he caddied for his father as a teenager in a money match against Cerone, Larry Riggs says he noticed that Cerone and his pals kept brazenly riding their carts over his father's ball. They kicked the ball too, when they thought no one was looking.

Bobby Riggs just smiled. “These are rough guys,” he told his son. “These guys—you don't mess with these guys. Just don't ask any questions. Just keep your mouth shut.”

Larry Riggs was a child of Bobby Riggs's first marriage, which ended in divorce. Riggs's second marriage was to a woman whose family owned the American Photographic Cos. in New York, a $20 million a year corporation where Riggs worked during the 1960s. He wore a suit and necktie and took the commuter train from Long Island to Penn Station. He tried to satisfy himself by playing cards and golf on the weekends, but it wasn't enough action. His second wife divorced him in 1972, handing Riggs a $1 million-plus divorce settlement.

With that stake, Riggs moved into his older brother's duplex apartment in Newport Beach, California. Riggs wagered every day on things he could control, like tennis and golf. “Bobby had the guts of a burglar on a tennis court or on a golf course,” says tennis legend Tony Trabert, 82, a close friend. “He could goad people or needle people or set people up by purposefully losing a set or two and get the bet up to higher stakes and then win with ease. He just had amazing control.”

But Riggs was also betting on contests he couldn't control: like horseracing and pro and college football. With California bookmakers, he'd place bets on every televised football game and often on games that weren't on TV. On a New Year's Day in the early 1970s, he lost every bowl game, dropping nearly $30,000 to the bookmakers, his friends said. At Caesars Palace, Kuhle recalls that Riggs, sloppy from too much bourbon, lost $17,000 playing baccarat in a few hours.

Riggs enjoyed far more betting success on the seniors' tennis circuit, dominating his opponents. In the early '70s, he beseeched the top women players to play him in a series of exhibition matches, but no one agreed. After having vanished from the public eye for nearly two decades, Riggs saw the proposed matches as a chance to climb back into the spotlight and make some easy money.

 

Six weeks after Hal Shaw heard the mob leaders weigh the appeal of a fixed tennis match, Bobby Riggs held a news conference at the Westview Hotel in downtown San Diego. It was February 1973. Before a roomful of reporters, Riggs held up a $5,000 cashier's check—the money was staked by a local developer—that he was offering to Margaret Court or Billie Jean King. All either one had to do was agree to play him.

Court, then 30, agreed to a match with the 55-year-old Riggs, telling friends it would be an easy payday. Almost overnight, there was worldwide interest; Riggs made sure of it with quotable chauvinistic rants against women that sounded as if they were intended to get under the skin of King, a crusader for the women's liberation movement and a cofounder that year of the Women's Tennis Association.

“He took the most basic conflict in the world, which is man versus woman, and he took that conflict and used tennis as the metaphor and created the match,” says Kuhle. “And therefore the whole world became interested.”

Riggs had no doubt he would defeat Margaret Court. “I'm just going to destroy her,” he told his son, Larry.

And over the next three months, Riggs trained 10 to 12 hours a day, playing hours of tennis against outstanding young male players and running miles alongside a San Diego golf course. This was Riggs's usual routine: train, rigorously, for a big match. “Never underestimate opponents,” Riggs advised in his list of rules for competition titled “You Too Are Champions” published in the late '60s.

By the time she faced Riggs, Court was 30 years old and had won 18 of her previous 25 tournaments, including three majors—the U.S. Open, Australian, and French. She was one of the most dominant players of all time, having won a total of 62 Grand Slam singles and doubles events in her career—a feat never matched by a man or a woman. Still, the oddsmakers, all men, installed Riggs as the betting favorite in the Las Vegas sports books. The match attracted a fair amount of action; nearly everyone bet on Bobby Riggs.

On May 13, 1973, an overflow crowd of fans and celebrities assembled at San Diego Country Estates in Ramona, California, and more than 30 million people watched on CBS. Before the first serve, Riggs handed Court a bouquet of red roses. She curtsied.

Riggs made few errors and relied on his masterful service game and trademark lob while Court looked flummoxed and hit shot after shot into the net. Riggs coasted, winning 6–2, 6–1. “Sometimes I look back and think,
Why did I need to do it?
” Court now says. “I was number one in the world in tennis . . . Look, we all make mistakes in life, and probably that was one of my mistakes.”

“As soon as Margaret lost, I said, ‘I have to play,'” King, 69, told
Outside the Lines
in an interview last week. “I knew I was going to say yes and I knew that it was on, the match was on.” And she knew she had to win. A boxing promoter and television producer named Jerry Perenchio, who promoted the Ali-Frazier bout in 1971 as “The Fight,” organized “The Battle of the Sexes” between King and Riggs. He put up a $100,000 winner-take-all prize for the best-of-five-sets match and arranged for it to be played in the Houston Astrodome in prime time on national television.

A week after Wimbledon, which King had won for the fifth time, Riggs and King hammed it up at a raucous news conference at the Town Tennis Club in Manhattan. “Personally,” Riggs said, “I would wish that the women would stay in the home and do the kitchen work and take care of the baby and compete in areas where they can compete in because it's a big mistake for them to get mixed up in these mixed sex matches.” (Kuhle and Riggs's son, who was in his midtwenties at the time, say this was pure shtick, that Riggs was not a chauvinist, but viewed women as equals; his first tennis coach back in LA was a woman.)

Riggs flew home to California. His son, Larry, says he was friendly with an investor named Steve Powers, who had a Beverly Hills estate renowned for its wild, all-night parties. “Bobby and I had a deal—he got to stay at my house as long as he entertained my guests, and he did that,” Powers says. “He didn't ask much of me—just get him laid with the wild women in LA. And I did that.”

In July, Riggs moved into Powers's guesthouse, where he lived—and partied—during the eight weeks prior to the King match.

“Steve had his maid, and she wore the French maid outfit with no underwear on the top or the bottom,” Larry Riggs says. “That set the tone for the parties at nighttime . . . It was just a wild time to be had by everybody, including my dad.”

With a glass of bourbon in his left hand and a glass of Coca-Cola in his right, Bobby Riggs would take big swigs from both glasses and mix the liquids in his mouth before swallowing. And he was always puffing on a fat cigar. “I had never seen him really drink as much as he was then,” Larry Riggs says. “And it concerned me.”

Kuhle's job was to train Riggs, but for the first time anyone could remember, Riggs refused to practice with solid players or even exercise, his son says. Not once did he use Powers's lighted tennis court to do anything but goof around for the cameras or hustle matches. Instead, he'd play stragglers off the street for a few quick bucks. “It's very hard to turn down $500 if a guy wants to come out and play for $500. He can put that in his pocket,” Kuhle says. “There was so much commotion going on, and he just felt he could beat her on roller skates.”

Riggs tirelessly promoted the match, filming several TV commercials (American Express, Sunbeam Curling Iron) and seemingly never refusing an interview request or a party invite. Early one morning, Riggs realized $1,500 had been stolen from his wallet by a young woman he had been drinking with the night before. He grumbled that the woman hadn't even slept with him.

Riggs relished playing the impish, gambling-mad, chauvinistic court jester for enthralled members of the national media. On its cover,
Time
magazine called Riggs “The Happy Hustler.”
Sports Illustrated
warned, “Don't Bet Against This Man.” A recording artist named Lyle “Slats” McPheeters recorded “The Ballad of Bobby Riggs,” for Artco Records. On
60 Minutes
, Riggs tossed playing cards at a wastebasket for money, played tennis with eight chairs on his side of the court, and ran around Las Vegas looking for action on anything, from tennis and golf to backgammon and card tosses, with everyone he met.

“All of the running, all of the chasing, all of the betting, all of the playing—what's it all about?” Mike Wallace asked Riggs. “Do you do it for money, Bobby?”

“No,” said Riggs with a smirk. “I do it for fun, the sport, it's the thing to do. When I can't play for big money, I play for little money. And if I can't play for little money, I stay in bed that day.”

This wasn't a midlife crisis. This was a midlife Mardi Gras.

During those weeks, Larry Riggs noticed some “unsavory characters” kept showing up at Powers's house to meet privately with his father. “They weren't golfers,” Larry Riggs says. “I called them shady characters with the kind of flashy suits on and the ties and whatever. They just didn't fit in.”

After one of the visits, Larry Riggs confronted his father. “Who are those guys?”

“Friends of mine from Chicago.”

That's when Larry Riggs says he recognized the men as associates of Jackie Cerone, the Chicago mob hit man with whom his father had played golf and cards back at the Tam O'Shanter Country Club outside of Chicago. “Very not upright citizens of our country,” Larry Riggs now says of the men visiting his father.

“What the hell are those guys doing?” Larry Riggs asked his father.

“They're here to see me. We have a little business that we're doing. Don't worry about it. Everything's okay.”

But Larry Riggs says he worried obsessively. And he says his father never identified the men or explained why they flew from Chicago to Los Angeles to meet with him several times before the King match.

As Riggs lived the high life on the West Coast, King trained in South Carolina with the focus of a boxer preparing for a prizefight. Larry Riggs was so sure his father was going to lose to King that he refused to accompany him to Houston for the match. “You're going to embarrass yourself,” he told his father before he left. Larry Riggs says he bet $500 on King. King says she told her brother “to bet the house” on her.

On the eve of the match in Houston, Mulloy, the tennis legend who was Riggs's close friend, visited him in his leopard-patterned Tarzan Room at the AstroWorld Hotel. A party was raging. Riggs looked heavier to Mulloy; he had gained 15 pounds in the four months since the Court match. “Bobby was in his pajamas,” Mulloy recalls, “and I looked around at a half a dozen cuties there, and they're all having their drinks and laughing.”

Mulloy asked, “Bobby, what the hell are you doing? You got to play tomorrow.”

“Oh, there's no way that broad can beat me,” Riggs replied.

The next morning, Mulloy was scheduled to warm up Riggs on the Astrodome court for one hour, but Riggs quit after 10 minutes. Mulloy was stunned. He was even more astonished to find Riggs that afternoon in a nearby practice facility, standing on a court with a brown dog tied on a leash to his left ankle and an umbrella in one hand. People off the street with tennis rackets were lined up to play Riggs. If they won a game, they played for free; if Riggs beat them, they owed him $100. Riggs's brother, John, was collecting fistfuls of cash.