The Married Directors Behind “Battle of the Sexes”
Published to The New Yorker on September 11, 2017
On September 20, 1973, the former tennis champ Bobby Riggs rode by rickshaw into the Houston Astrodome, wearing a yellow Sugar Daddy jacket. Across the court, Billie Jean King was carried on, Cleopatra style, by a bevy of bare-chested hunks. Riggs was fifty-five; King was twenty-nine. At the net, King handed Riggs a squirming piglet—code for male chauvinist pig. In the stands were more than thirty thousand spectators, the largest crowd ever at an American tennis match.