I know. You had to be there.
But if you were, it was quite a moment. Then last week, ESPN released a report suggesting the whole thing was a fraud. The new evidence is a 79-year-old man who claims to have listened while a couple of mob bosses met at a Tampa country club and discussed Riggs’ promise to throw the match.
The alleged witness, Hal Shaw, told ESPN that about 40 years ago, he was working behind the pro shop at Palma Ceia Country Club when Santo Trafficante Jr., the mob boss of Florida, and Carlos Marcello, the mob boss of New Orleans, walked in with Trafficante’s lawyer, Frank Ragano.
Shaw claimed that Ragano described everything that Riggs was going to do over the next nine months: Play the world’s top-ranked woman, Margaret Court. Defeat Court, thus luring King into a match to defend the honor of female tennis players. Hype the event to the rafters, attracting international attention. Then lose the match, after which the Mafia would forgive Riggs for $100,000 in gambling debts.
If this were any other sports victory, we could just shrug and move on. But the King-Riggs match was a central story in the history of the American women’s movement.
When he said that “a woman’s place is in the bedroom and the kitchen, in that order,” you did not see a frightened man defending his threatened prerogatives. You saw a guy laughing at the whole business of girls trying to pretend to be good at sports. Or business. Or whatever.
It was a message for any woman who had ever worried about being laughed at if she stepped out of line. So a claim that this story was actually just an elaborate scenario, played out to pay off one of Riggs’ gambling debts, is not something you want to ignore.
Nobody featured in this incredible tale is still alive except Shaw, the assistant golf pro who says he overheard everything. While it’s possible that Shaw kept it to himself for 40 years because he’s just not a chatty guy, one of the other lead players was talkative in the extreme. Frank Ragano, who allegedly orchestrated the gathering, eventually produced a memoir, “Mob Lawyer.” There is nothing in it about tennis.
“Ragano would have mentioned it to me,” said Nicholas Pileggi, a longtime friend of Ragano’s who wrote the book’s foreword. “He wanted to do the book, and he kept telling me: ‘This could go in the book. That could go in the book.’ Anything that was going to help promote the book.”
Pileggi, one of the world’s great experts on all things Mafia, was offended at the idea that anyone could imagine top mob bosses trotting into a country club and hashing out a long-running plot to fix a tennis match in the pro shop.
“The notion of Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello appearing together in a public locker room is so outrageous,” he sniffed. “These guys do not meet.”
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