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This chapter explores the lasting legacy of the tennis athlete Billie Jean King in advancing gender equality in sports. Her victory over Bobby Riggs in the exhibition match dubbed as the “Battle of the Sexes,” vindicated the cause of the women’s movement, advancing gender equality in tennis and uplifting women’s self-esteem across the world. It adds that despite her enduring legacy, King’s reputation was often marred by questions of sexuality and the parity of prize money. It suggests that Billie Jean King should be remembered in the simplest way possible: as one of the best female players in tennis who advanced gender equality to improve the sport for all.

ABC Sports capitalized on the notoriety it achieved during the 1970s by licensing an eclectic collection of items and producing non-sports programming. Along these lines, the subsidiary demonstrated that it did not need preexisting events to create popular sports television. It developed made-for-television specials, including Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’s Battle of the Sexes, Evel Knievel’s bone-shattering stunts, and The Superstars, which featured athletes competing in sports outside their areas of expertise. Though commercially successful, these programs were widely belittled as “TrashSports” that degraded the respectability ABC Sports had steadily built. Amid ABC Sports’ investment in TrashSports, the division became embroiled in a scandal surrounding the 1977 United States Boxing Championships, in which elements of the competition were fabricated to ensure its value as a television spectacle. Chapter 6 examines how ABC’s brand extensions and involvement in TrashSports took its sports programming to lengths that no longer necessitated preexisting events, and it uses the controversial boxing championships to investigate the limits to which ABC could manufacture engaging sporting content.

This chapter describes how Billie Jean King dramatically recalled her feelings about the Bobby Riggs match's larger historical significance for reporter Selena Roberts. “My job in the match, and I remember this being very clear, was to change the hearts and minds of people to match the legislation of Title IX and what we were trying to do with the women's movement. It was to validate it, to celebrate it, and to get going toward changing a world where we had equality for both genders.” King had voiced similar sentiments on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the match in 1998: “Title IX had just passed, and I would see people [looking] for an excuse to backtrack. I wanted to change the hearts and minds of people to match the legislation we had just gotten in place.” Recently she upped the ante by claiming that she had helped get Title IX passed in the first place.

Erica Jong’s smash-hit novel, Fear of Flying, was a work of unabashed sexuality and feminism. It takes the traditional male bildungsroman and turns it into a journey about a woman’s identity and sexual pleasure. But the desire for a “zipless fuck,” sex without any emotional strings attached or desired, proves to be elusive. The book, published when feminism was taking a radical turn and also entering the realm of public consumption (with the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs), garnering massive attention, serves as a model of dealing with sexual excess.