Imagine being Bobby Riggs at age 21 or 55…

In 1939, at 21, Bobby Riggs wins everything at Wimbledon. Singles… Doubles… Mixed doubles. Ever the gambler, Riggs maintained that by betting on himself he won $100,000. He was, obviously, a very different kind of amateur.

Bobby Riggs was born in 1918 and grew up in a relatively shitty working-class area of Los Angeles called Lincoln Heights. Long before his historic triumph at Wimbledon, he’d been branded a mere hustler and a gambler and was shunned by the amateur tennis scene at the Los Angeles Tennis Club and beyond.

From 1939 until 1972, he was totally off the tennis stage, such that it was back then, and living in complete anonymity. Of course, the Great Depression had something to do with this as did the fact that Riggs, like all of his contemporaries, were well-beyond their tennis primes by the time the Open Era of Tennis arrived in 1968.

Finally, Riggs or someone else, stumbled upon the battle of the sexes schtick that defined the rest of his life. I wonder who we have to thank for that? Like all schticks, it revived his fame though it did so at the cost of a great diminishment of the impact of the superb play during his earlier life. History, as it so happens, was usurped by notoriety. I wonder how that felt in Rigg’s heart of hearts? To be fair, it wasn’t like he consciously chose fame over his storied history as a player. He simply must have grabbed onto fame like the lifeline it was especially to bespectacled a tennis player in his mid-50s whom few had ever even heard of.

Something about Los Angeles helps to create hustlers and I wonder why that’s true. Trevino & Hogan would have gotten eaten alive out here. Sure, they could handle the heat and humidity of Texas but the glare and grit of Hollywood would have wilted them. Somehow, unlikely guys like Riggs & Pancho Gonzales thrived in Los Angeles, in their ways, at least for a while.