The world needs another Billie Jean King.
On Sunday, in Dubai, something absurd happened. Maybe you heard about it. Maybe you didn’t. On Sunday, in Dubai, the No. 1 women’s tennis player on earth decided to make her own sport a farce.
On Sunday, in Dubai, Aryna Sabalenka, a four-time Grand Slam winner and the defending U.S. Open champion, was beaten by washed-up men’s tennis underachiever Nick Kyrgios in an exhibition match that was explicitly designed, as if in a laboratory, to give every misogynist on earth live ammunition to bash the sport that she rules.
It’s hard to pick a single “worst part.”
But for me, the worst part is that the farce was cynically and bleakly dubbed “Battle of the Sexes II” by its creators.
In September 1973, in the Houston Astrodome, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the famous “Battle of the Sexes.” Books have been written about that match, movies made, and yet it might be hard for people more than 50 years later to fully appreciate and understand the moment.
Billie Jean King was in the process of inventing women’s professional sports in America. She, more than anyone, convinced Virginia Slims — a cigarette brand marketed for women — to sponsor a women’s tennis tour. She led a campaign that forced the U.S. Open to pay men and women equally.
She wasn’t fighting to prove that women were superior or even equal to men on the playing fields.
She was fighting to prove that women belonged in sports.
She had no interest in playing tennis against Riggs, a 55-year-old tennis hustler. But, when Riggs mentally, physically, and emotionally dismantled No. 1 player Margaret Court in an exhibition match, King believed that she had to play the match; she had to prove that women’s tennis was vivid and of high quality and worth watching.
She understood the stakes perfectly.
“I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn't win that match,” she said. “It would ruin the women's tour and affect all women's self-esteem."
That match was a circus, exactly what Riggs craved. The hype was overwhelming. Riggs got to be the center of the nation’s attention. But on the court, he never stood a chance. Billie Jean King played steady, sturdy, suffocating tennis, and she wore Riggs down in three straight dominating sets.
Did it prove anything to have a top women’s player beat a tired old man?
Yes!
“Beating a 55-year-old guy was no thrill for me,” Billie Jean King said. “The thrill was exposing a lot of new people to tennis.”
Yes!
The thrill was exposing a lot of new people to tennis … to women’s tennis … to women’s sports … to the joy of it all.
Sunday, the world’s No. 1 player, Aryna Sabalenka, chose to play a match that could only have the opposite effect of the true Battle of the Sexes. The only outcome was that it would expose a lot of new people to bastardized tennis that highlights the utterly irrelevant fact that at the top end of the sport, there’s a gap between women and men.
There was no way for Sabalenka to win the match.
There was no way for Sabalenka to highlight the wonders of women’s tennis.
There was no way for Sabalenka to escape this sham with her dignity and place in the sports world intact.
But she probably got a lot of money for it.
You would hope she got a lot of money for it.
You could spend thousands of hours trying to think up a match that would make Sabalenka and women’s tennis look worse … and never come up with one.
Think about this scenario:
— You set up the No. 1 women’s player in the world against the 671st -ranked man who has barely played in a year, who most people thought was retired, and who has spent time on podcasts recently bragging about how much time he spends drinking.
— You tilt the match so that each player only gets one serve. This is purportedly to give Sabalenka a fighting chance; Kyrios is, indeed, one of the greatest servers in the long history of tennis. But what it actually does is take away one of Sabalanka’s greatest strengths — her mighty first serve — AND exposes her to one of her greatest weaknesses, her penchant for double-faulting.
— You corrupt the actual shape of the tennis court because you want to make Sabalenka’s side of the court nine percent smaller. Again, this is meant to be a constant visual reminder that Sabalenka would not have any shot at all against an out-of-shape Kyrgios unless you pervert the very geometry of tennis.
It looks absolutely horrible.
She couldn’t possibly win. There were a million outs if she had — Kyrgios is finished, out of shape, he didn’t get a first serve, he hit into a smaller court, etc.
But it didn’t matter because she didn’t come close to winning. Kyrgios took the boring match in straight sets.
“I feel like we brought more attention to our sport, and I don’t see how it can be bad,” Sabalenka said when the thing mercifully ended. At that exact same time, social media overflowed with countless jibes mocking women’s tennis and reminding everyone that men reign supreme.
How can it be bad, indeed?
What does it mean to be the No. 1 women’s tennis player in the world, anyway?
Here’s the thing: Nobody in women’s tennis thinks they can compete on the men’s tour. Nobody. As Ben Rothenberg writes in his excellent Bounces newsletter, Sabalenka’s hitting partner is a 34-year-old former ATP player named Andrei Vasilevski, who topped out at 569 in the world.
So what? Women’s tennis isn’t meant to compete with men’s tennis any more than college football competes with pro, MLS competes with the Premier League, senior golf competes with the PGA Tour, the College World Series competes with the regular World Series or women’s track and field competes with men’s track and field.
This was a sad money-grab guaranteed to make women’s tennis look inferior rather than distinct. What a shame. The Battle of the Sexes lifted sports. This thing brought sports down.
