Billie Jean King on American Masters and Battle of the Sexes
This episode of It’s Your Money and Your Life aired September 7, 2013, live from La Valencia in La Jolla. Joe Vecchio and Richard Muscio opened the hour from the hotel, then the show played a Billie Jean King interview taped in late July 2013. James Erskine sat in studio for the second half.
King drew a clean line between two films that fall of 2013. PBS American Masters was the whole life. James Erskine’s 2013 UK documentary Battle of the Sexes covered about five years around the 1973 match with Bobby Riggs. That documentary is not the later Hollywood feature. One is a career. The other is a window on those years.
The show closed by pointing listeners to American Masters that Tuesday (September 10, 2013) at 8 p.m.
Kids, sports, and who gets to lead
King kept coming back to kids and history. If children do not hear what happened, they do not know what they are standing on. She talked about girls and sports, and about who gets to lead: how few women were in the Fortune 500 and in Congress, and she brought up Norway. There was also a flight attendant story about how women get treated when they are just trying to get from one city to another. She pushed back on the old line that girls do not get along. Sports, for her, was the counter-script.
James Erskine and the lost 1973 footage
Erskine came on after the King tape. His film had premiered around Edinburgh and Wimbledon. He talked about hunting pictures that were supposed to be gone. Super 8 of the first Virginia Slims tournament turned up in a shoebox. The lost 1973 TV footage was another matter. He said a network rights fight had left the broadcast hard to find. He described an LA County probate hunt for archive material that had landed in an estate.
Margaret Court, Jerry Perenchio, and Sept. 20, 1973
Erskine spent time on Margaret Court and Mother’s Day. Bobby Riggs handed her roses. She curtsied. That is part of how he tells the road to King vs Riggs.
He also had a rare phone interview with promoter Jerry Perenchio, the same operator tied to Ali-Frazier. Perenchio is how Erskine gets at the business of putting the Battle of the Sexes on television, not only the score.
He framed September 20, 1973 as a sports event that put equality on national TV.
