King's win over Riggs in '73 never seemed right

	Bobby Riggs was a favorite over Billie Jean King after he beat Margaret Court.
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They renamed the National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open, the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center this week. She was rightfully honored for her great contributions to tennis, and women's sports in general, and for one match in particular, her 1973 victory over Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes.

Books have been written about that match. It has been called one of the most important achievements in the history of women's sports. There's only one thing wrong, from my way of thinking. Bobby went in the tank. He threw the match. Could Billie Jean have won if Riggs had played it straight? We'll never know. He died almost 11 years ago.

Now I'm not able to tell you that Bobby admitted to me that he did business. I can't even present a witness who heard him say it. All I can offer is circumstantial evidence, which led me to conclude that the guy called the greatest hustler the sport has ever known pulled off his biggest hustle in Houston that day.

Bobby had made a killing in the 1939 Wimbledon Championship when he hit the trifecta, betting on himself to win the singles, doubles and mixed doubles. Betting was legal in England, and in his 1949 autobiography Riggs bragged that he came away with $105,000 in winnings, more than a million in today's money.

Many years ago my first newspaper assignment was the Sacramento Bee and my major beat was tennis. I hung around with a lot of the old timers, guys who'd played on the circuit with Riggs. They never got tired of stories about his hustles. I never heard Bobby disagree with any of them.

One of his favorite hustles was the mile marker scam. He'd be in a tournament and driving from the hotel to the club with a bunch of fellow players, and they'd see a marker that indicated that the club was one mile away.

"It's more like two," Riggs would say. "I'll give you odds that it's closer to two miles." So they'd all bet him. The night before Riggs had gone out and moved the sign.

"You never wanted to play gin rummy with Bobby," said San Francisco's Nick Carter, who was on the circuit with Bobby for many years. "Before the first deal, he'd take a card out and drop it on the floor and cover it with his foot. Can you imagine what an advantage that was in gin?

"Finally we all got tired of all of Bobby's hustles, so one night, when we had this big poker game going, we brought a mechanic in, just to break Bobby. Which he did. I couldn't just let it go like that, so I said to Bobby, 'You see that, you little bastard. How does it feel?' And I told him what we had done.

"You think he got mad? Not Bobby. He just went and found that guy, the mechanic, and said, 'You've got to teach me how you did that. I've got to know.'"