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A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game | 
 enlarge | Author: Selena Roberts
Publisher: Crown
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $6.00
You Save: $18.95 (76%)
New (12) Used (26) Collectible (1) from $1.73
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 396572
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 6.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 1400051460
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3420922
EAN: 9781400051465
ASIN: 1400051460
Publication Date: August 16, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Billie Jean King didn’t want to play Bobby Riggs. He baited and begged her for months while she ignored his catcalls and challenges. But after Margaret Court’s ignominious defeat in the so-called Mother’s Day Massacre, Billie knew what she had to do despite the personal and professional risks: take on the self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig and slay the myths about women and weakness. And so it was that King’s acquiescence led to the Battle of the Sexes, one of the most wildly surreal moments of the decadent 1970s. The worldwide event, showcasing three sets of tennis in a raucous Houston Astrodome, forever changed the social landscape for women.
In A Necessary Spectacle, Selena Roberts, one of the country’s finest sportswriters and the only female sports columnist in the New York Times’ history, has created a masterful and entertaining journey through the 1970s and beyond, capturing the color and passion, tackiness and anger, prejudice and progress of an American culture in transition. At the heart of the story lies the intersection of two complex characters: Billie Jean King, the daughter of a homemaker and a firefighter who grew up in the Norman Rockwell tradition of the 1950s; and Bobby Riggs, the gambling son of a fundamentalist minister who won everlasting fame as a card-carrying sexist—not because he believed women to be inferior, but because he craved attention.
Roberts enjoyed unprecedented access to the characters in this story, including numerous in-depth interviews with Billie Jean King and her former husband, Larry, as well as the friends and family of Bobby Riggs, who died in 1995. Essential details and insights also were provided through hours of conversation with key figures in the women’s rights movement and Title IX fight, including Gloria Steinem and Donna de Varona, and with tennis legends of the 1970s, such as Chris Evert, Margaret Court, Rosie Casals, and others. This book reveals the outsize personalities of Billie and Bobby; the intensity and intricacy of the Kings’ longtime marriage; the simmering social revolution that pitted chauvinists against feminists and tennis players against each other; and a wrenching coming-out story recounted in intimate detail by Billie Jean King for the first time. By the end of the book, Roberts has traced the cultural continuum of Billie and Bobby’s night at the Astrodome. She relates its significance to the day Richard Williams began hitting bald tennis balls to his pigtailed daughters, Venus and Serena; to the glorious afternoon when more than 90,000 fans watched as the U.S. women’s soccer team won the 1999 World Cup; and, ultimately, to the present day’s second-generation battle to keep Title IX alive. The book’s poignant last scene between Billie and Bobby serves to remind us how much of an effect that 1973 match—and the passion it fueled for change—continues to have on American society, showing how necessary it was, and how necessary it remains.
1973. The Battle of the Sexes.
It was the match that changed everything. In this riveting book by New York Times sports columnist Selena Roberts, the whole spectacle returns, larger than life and more important than ever. This story reaches beyond two outsize and utterly fascinating personalities who emerged during a simmering social revolution that pitted chauvinists against feminists. It also chronicles the complex, longtime marriage of Billie Jean and Larry King; the cavalcade of issues that rocked the 1970s, from equal pay to abortion rights; and a wrenching coming-out story recounted in intimate detail by Billie Jean King for the first time.
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| Customer Reviews:
 the best about a great person, and tennis player June 18, 2006
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
she changed the world that nite. read this to know how.
 Goes A Bit Off Track April 25, 2006
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Some interesting archaeology about the now nearly forgotten King-Riggs tennis match. Roberts, of the NYT, brings to life how important this thing seemed at the time, even though it all looks decidedly quaint today. Where the author goes off is when she tries to relate this to the federal Title 9 law on equality for women in sports. It's a bit forced, even if valid. Perhaps it's the book's herky-jerky structure that is just not nuanced enough to make this work. She also includes some interesting background about the Williams sisters, the relevance being that they later reaped what Billie Jean King sowed, financially. Maybe so. In the end, Riggs comes off more sympathetic than pathetic, and King is a bit too deified. Still, this is some high quality social history about an episode whose effects still have an echo.
THE MATCH and how it changed the world September 14, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The subtitle of this book 'the Tennis Match that Leveled the Game' isn't quite strong enough. This single match, called the 'Battle of the Sexes' was far, far more than a tennis match, and the aftereffect was far, far more than levelling the tennis game.
For a tennis standpoint, before The Match womens tennis was not a serious sport. The women played, but almost by themselves. The money, the sponsors, television, the fame wasn't there. After it was all there.
From a legal standpoint, The Match put power behind Title IX that required equal funding in schools for men and womens atheletic programs. From the overall women's rights viewpoint The Match was in 1973, so was Row v. Wade.
Ms. Roberts is a sports columnist. This training gives her a newspaper like writing style that is very well suited to the subject she is covering here. The book reads almost like a novel, an excellent novel but also conveys the impact of The Match that changed women's sports forever.
 GREAT BOOK ABOUT A GREAT LEGEND! August 27, 2005
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
I'VE FOLLOWED BJK'S CAREER SINCE SHE WON HER 1ST WIMBLEDON TITLE IN 1961! THIS BOOK GIVES YOU A VERY CANDID LOOK INTO THE LIFE OF THIS GREAT TENNIS LEGEND, THE STUGGLES SHE FOUGHT BOTH PERSONAL & PUBLIC.
INTERSTING DETAILS ON THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES WITH BOBBY RIGGS AND HIS LIFE.
AN EASY ENJOYABLE READ FOR ANYONE, BUT ESP. FOR TENNIS FANS FROM THE 60'S70'S ON!
A necessary read! August 27, 2005
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I loved this book! I'm not a huge tennis fan so as I began reading, I was shocked at how quickly this story pulled me in and kept me fascinated. It's about so much more than tennis. The personalities and motivations of Billie Jean and Bobby were so thoroughly explored that as this spectacle of a match was becoming imminent, I could feel the pressure and the tension that must have been felt not only by them, but by many women and men in the 1970s as gender lines were being tested. This book did a great job of framing the importance of that one event, as circus-like as it was. Billie Jean and Bobby brought discussions of gender roles into people's living rooms that day and the consequences have paved the way for women and for the athletes we cheer on today. "A Necessary Spectacle" gave me new insight. Excellent!
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