It doesn't seem a year ago to this very day

I love movies, as anyone who has read this blog probably knows. I don't go to movie theaters that often, though; and when I do, it's usually weeks after the movie opens. In fact, I often don't even hear about movies until their theatrical runs are almost over. Who knows what movie lovers did before TV and Netflix.

Because I don't usually see movies when they're new in theaters, I also don't usually notice trailers. Occasionally, though, I see a trailer that makes me really really want to see the movie. In 2015, my kids made me stop what I was doing to watch each of the "Force Awakens" trailers as they were released. I didn't mind, because I love Star Wars. And for a long-time Star Wars fan, there was nothing better than seeing Harrison Ford smile and say, "Chewy. We're home." We saw "The Force Awakens" a week after it was released.

Now, I'm almost Star Wars-level excited about a new movie.  I can't believe that it has taken this long, but someone has finally made a movie about the epic 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The movie is, of course, titled "Battle of the Sexes," and the trailer soundtrack is Elton John's "Love Lies Bleeding," which is 1973 itself, set to music.

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This is, believe it or not, the swimming pool at Kendrick Recreation Center.
You can't see the tennis courts, but they're behind the pool and to the left.
My kids and their swim team friends don't believe my stories about swimming
in shifts because the pool was so crowded during hot Philadelphia summers. 

I was eight years old in 1973, and I really loved tennis. I wasn't good at it--I didn’t have the necessary speed or coordination. It didn’t matter, though, because I still loved to play. I loved hitting a ball against the brick wall down the street from my house. I loved playing on the summer team at the Kendrick Recreation Center and in the juniors tournaments in Fairmount Park (during which I was usually eliminated in the first round). I loved my Wilson Chris Evert racket (wood!) that I’d gotten as a Christmas present. And I LOVED the women’s tennis tour.

I was kind of a girly girl. Not a cheerleader or a pageant aspirant type, but not what anyone would, at that time, have called a “tomboy.” (I hate that word.) I liked clothes, I worried about my hair, and I wanted my ears pierced, which my mother would not allow until I was in high school. I admired stylish, beautiful Chris Evert, with her shining blond ponytail and diamond bracelets sparkling on tanned arms. But Billie Jean King was my favorite. She was different from the other women on the tennis tour. She wasn’t elegant or fashionable or regal. But she was radiant and fierce, and I thought (and still think) that she was beautiful.

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I grew up in a rowhouse in a blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood, and attended a parish school with all of the other children of secretaries and sheet metal workers. I’m not sure that I or any of my friends would even have noticed tennis had it not been for Billie Jean and Arthur Ashe, who tried to bring tennis out of the country club and into the public parks. But as much as Billie Jean did to democratize tennis, she did even more for women's equality. She pioneered the then-radical notion that female athletes should make the same money as male athletes. How obvious does it seem today that the men’s and women’s champions at Wimbledon or the US Open should earn the same prize money? It wasn’t even remotely obvious in 1973. It was near-revolutionary.

The Battle of the Sexes was silly and show-businessy, but it was still a landmark event for women’s sports, and Billie Jean was a heroine. At that time (even more than now), women who spoke out for simple fairness and equality for women were often mocked and derided as "women's libbers" or worse. Lots of women were afraid of that kind of mockery--in fact, lots of women still are. They'd rather endure sexual harassment and inequality than have men dismiss them shrill or unattractive. But Billie Jean was fearless. Because she stood up for women's rights, she faced relentless scorn, and not just from Riggs. Like most eight-year-olds, I believed that life should be fair, and I was perpetually outraged by sexism in general, and by the over-the-top chauvinism of Riggs in particular. My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and siblings were all heartily sick of me and Billie Jean and Bobby Riggs by the time the whole thing ended in a decisive victory for Billie Jean.

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1973 was a pretty big news year. I paid attention to current events more than most eight-year-olds did, so I knew about the oil embargo, and Vietnam, which was still raging; and the growing Watergate scandal. War and scandal and economic crises meant nothing, though, compared to Billie Jean King shutting Bobby Riggs up, even for five minutes. It felt like a victory not just for women, but for little inner-city working class school girls, too. Billie Jean, who also came from a working-class family, showed girls like me that things were possible, even likely, no matter where you lived, or who your parents were, or whether or not you had the right hair or clothes. My friends and I couldn’t really aspire to Chris Evert’s cool elegance and beauty, but we could all aspire to be like Billie Jean. She looked like our older sisters and cousins, and if we worked hard, we could be like her. We could be fearless, and strong, and really good at something. We could kick ass and take names and still look cute in a tennis dress.

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I'm not eight years old anymore, so I know that Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs were both complicated and imperfect people. In fact, there have long been rumors that Riggs threw the match, in exchange for forgiveness of his Mafia-held gambling debts. He and Billie Jean were actually friends, and they remained friends until Riggs died of cancer in 1995.  As an eight-year-old girl who liked a good old-fashioned to-the-death blood feud between good and evil, I would have been appalled to know that Billie Jean King actually liked Riggs, who was pure evil as far as I was concerned. Now, of course, I love Billie Jean even more for her friendship with crazy, loud-mouthed, flamboyant Bobby Riggs, who probably wasn't as much of a chauvinist as he pretended to be for the cameras. Even today, I can think of lots of worse sexists than Bobby Riggs. Not mentioning any names, of course.

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The summer of 2017 will probably feel a lot like the summer of 1973. My kids are much older than I was in 1973, but they're still young enough to believe that life should always be fair and that the good guys should always win. Twenty-five, or maybe 35 years from now, movies will be made about the cultural and political earthquakes of their youth, and they'll tell their children what they remember, and what it all meant to them.  And they'll see a trailer, and hear a song, and they'll say "OH MY GOD! THEY FINALLY MADE A MOVIE!" I hope so, at least.