Some see the encounter between four-time major singles champion Sabalenka and Australia’s former world number 13 Kyrgios as harmless entertainment, but others believe it could belittle the women’s game if Sabalenka loses.<\/p>\n
The exhibition will be the best of three sets, with a 10-point tie-breaker if it goes to a decider.<\/p>\n
Each player will only receive one serve, while Sabalenka’s side of the court will be 9% smaller after tournament organisers Evolve said data showed female players move about 9% slower on average than their male counterparts.<\/p>\n
“I played Bobby three out of five sets, I played on a court and didn’t change anything,” recalled King.<\/p>\n
“I said, ‘look, I play straight up or else I’m not going to play’. And Bobby loved it.”<\/p>\n
King’s contest took place a few months after Riggs – who died in 1995 aged 77 – had soundly beaten world number one Margaret Court 6-1 6-2 in the first ‘Battle of the Sexes’ matches.<\/p>\n
It was played in the same year King founded the Women’s Tennis Association, and three years after a group of players, dubbed The Original 9, broke away from the sport\u2019s establishment.<\/p>\n
It also took place at the time of Title IX legislation in the US, which prohibited sex-based discrimination in any school or education programme, and gave male and female athletic teams equal benefits, opportunities and treatment.<\/p>\n
“Mine was really political. It was rough, culturally, what was coming in with it,” added the 82-year-old King.<\/p>\n
“I knew I had to beat him for societal change. I had a lot of reasons to win.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some see the encounter between four-time major singles champion Sabalenka and Australia’s former world number 13 Kyrgios as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341364,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-341363","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}