Tennis History | The Astrodome — the Battle of the Sexes was sold before it was played, 20 September 1973

Almost everything about the evening of 20 September 1973 was for sale, and the objects that survive from it say so more plainly than the retellings do. The match programme cost two dollars. Across the top of the cover it reads, presented by Oshman's Sporting Goods Company. Along the bottom: cover art commissioned by Lone Star Brewing Company. Bobby Riggs's warm-up jacket was yellow satin striped in red, embroidered with the logo of the Sugar Daddy candy brand and his signature beneath it, and the same brand's giant carton was displayed alongside carrying a cartoon of him. A sporting-goods chain, a brewery and a confectioner are legible across two objects and a programme cover. The staging matched the sponsorship. Riggs was pulled into the Houston Astrodome in a rickshaw drawn by women; Billie Jean King was carried in on a litter borne by men. The prize was one hundred thousand dollars, winner take all, on King's own published account. Howard Cosell called it for television. Then they played, and King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. The audience figures do not reconcile, and it is better to say so than to pick one. King's own site gives fifty million viewers in the United States and ninety million worldwide. Other accounts give roughly fifty million as the worldwide figure. The crowd inside the building is usually given as just over thirty thousand, and the number most often printed is 30,472. Whichever is right, it was more people than any tennis ground in the world could then seat, which is the reason the match was played in a stadium built for baseball and football. That is what the venue contributes to the story. The Astrodome was not a tennis facility and never became one. It was hired because it could hold a television audience's worth of people under a roof, on a night when the ticket, the programme, the jacket and the entrance had each been sold to somebody. Writing this evening as a sporting contest misses what it was built to be. Status note, current at 3 September 2026: Billie Jean King is living. The purse and the television figures above are those published on her own site, attributed as such. **Where this is pinned.** The Astrodome, 8400 Kirby Drive, Houston, Texas. This coordinate does not meet the two-independent-source standard, and the shortfall is disclosed rather than papered over. Wikidata gives 29.685000, -95.407778 and OpenStreetMap gives 29.684870, -95.407743. They sit about 15 m apart, which is close enough to indicate that one was derived from the other rather than measured separately, so they count as one source and not two. Two attempts at an independent reading failed: the Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returns no match for the stadium's Kirby Drive address, and the Historic American Engineering Record survey of the building at the Library of Congress (HAER TX-108) carries no coordinate in its record. The pin is therefore set at 29.684935, -95.407760 with a precision radius of 150 m, and that radius is taken from the HAER record rather than guessed: the survey documents the Astrodome's outer diameter as 710 feet across a footprint of 9.14 acres, so 150 m from the centre covers the structure regardless of the small uncertainty in the point itself. **Cover image.** A museum display case photographed on 14 October 2004 by the Flickr user dbking, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note what it is and is not. The file is described on Commons in wording that reads as though the photograph were taken at the match. It was not. It is a picture of objects from the match behind glass: the two-dollar programme, Riggs's Sugar Daddy jacket, the Super Sugar Daddy carton, a tennis shoe, and press photographs mounted on the wall behind — one of them captioned for the 1973 French Open and another for Evonne Goolagong at Wimbledon in 1976, neither of which has anything to do with this match. **Second image.** Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, 1973, photographer unrecorded. Public domain in the United States as a work published between 1931 and 1977 without a copyright notice. It is a posed publicity photograph rather than a picture taken during play.