Backlash and Battles

 This week we learned about the battle of the sexes, a tennis match put on by Bobby Riggs, (a 55 year old man), challenging Billie Jean King, (a 29 year old woman,) as a way for Riggs to show that men could beat women at any possible sport. Contrary to Riggs’ opinions, King won by a landslide… but in recent years, there have been rumors that Riggs intentionally threw the match, and that he was working with the mafia. Listening to the interviewer, I kept thinking about the questions she posed, and the answers the reporter gave. Simply from the tone of voice, and the way the interviewer kept asking workaround questions, it seemed as though the interviewer was hoping that the rumor wasn’t true, and that the man was. I think even now, the match is a sort of pride for the women who were alive to witness it, and now that it’s been brought into question, it’s almost like questioning women’s reputation in sports; as that’s what the match seemed to be all about. As I ruminated on this, I tried to come up with a list of my thoughts surrounding the supposed throw of the match. There’s certainly a chance that Riggs was simply not skilled enough- with his age, and his preceding decline in the prior months. However, it seems as though many fans were surprised by his gameplay. This got me thinking- what if the rumors were true? What if Riggs had already talked to the mafia, and he already knew he couldn’t win, so he just let himself fail—even more so? But why would he do this? Maybe he thought in the future, people would bring up the match’s validity if he played poorly enough, saving his reputation, in a way, and the validity of his “man has superiority” argument? Whatever the answer, the match seems quite interesting.

We also talked about how the world was looking at the time, from laws for gender equality, to women in sports, to a number of other happenings. As I was listening to Ms. O’Connell’s talk, I kept thinking back on the timeline she posed, in which the world starts moving towards progress, and then there’s this backlash against all this new progression, and in her words, “the pendulum swings back”. It’s interesting how pervasive this is, in recent times and in the past, with movements and their backlashes. It brought to mind, in particular, the BLM movement, especially in 2020, when the movement was progressing rapidly—and then people started arguing against it, and talking about all lives matter and the blue lives matter movements, almost to fight against the BLM movement. But just like how women in sports have increased by a thousand percent in the last many years, hopefully movements such as these will be able to make it through the opposition, and keep on climbing.