Battle of the Sexes
Bobby Riggs, a 1939 tennis champion, unwisely asserted that the female tennis game was inferior and that a top female player could not beat him. In 1973, Billie Jean King, who fought constantly for recognition and equality for women in sport, accepted his challenge, determined to beat him. She felt it would set the progress of women back fifty years if she lost and affect all women’s self-esteem. In front of a worldwide television audience of almost fifty million, she beat him easily. The match was called ‘The Battle of the Sexes’.
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Bobby Riggs, tennis champ,
said a woman couldn’t
beat a man . . .
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Billie Jean King, tennis champ,
in three straight sets, showed
a woman can.
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© Liz Brownlee
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From Reaching the Stars, Poems about Extraordinary Women and Girls, by Liz Brownlee, Jan Dean and Michaela Morgan, Macmillan.
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