Fifty-three years ago today, ninety million people watched a 29-year-old champion beat a 55-year-old hustler in the Houston Astrodome. The match mattered less than what she had done three months earlier.

The spectacle

Bobby Riggs was a former Wimbledon champion turned professional provocateur who had spent months insisting any decent man could beat any woman. He had already proved it once, beating Margaret Court badly in May.

Billie Jean King was carried into the Astrodome on a gold litter by four men in costume. Riggs arrived on a rickshaw pulled by women he called "Bobby's Bosom Buddies." He gave her a giant lollipop; she gave him a piglet.

Then she beat him in straight sets — 6–4, 6–3, 6–3 — by running a 55-year-old man around a court until his legs gave out.

What she'd already done

In June, three months earlier, King had gathered sixty-three players in a London hotel room and refused to let anyone leave until they had agreed to form a union. That became the Women's Tennis Association.

She had also threatened to boycott the US Open unless prize money was equal. It became the first major to pay men and women the same, that same year.

The match was theatre. The union was the substance, and it's the reason women's tennis has the economics it has today.

What it changed

It's tempting to say a tennis match changed how the world saw women's sport. What actually changed things was organising, negotiating, and being willing to walk away.

But ninety million people watched the match and almost nobody read the union paperwork. Sometimes the spectacle is what makes the substance visible.

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