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Confirming many people's suspicions that have lingered for 40 years, an expose on ESPN.com this week showed strong evidence that Bobby Riggs deliberately lost his famous Battle of the Sexes tennis match to Billie Jean King as a way to erase his gambling debts with organized crime. The 55-year-old Riggs had throttled Margaret Court, the world's top female tennis player, in a televised match on Mother's Day 1973 6-2, 6-1. Four months later King, the defending Wimbledon champion, beat Riggs in surprisingly easy fashion 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 before a big TV audience and more than 30,000 fans at the Houston Astrodome--despite being a 5-2 underdog at Las Vegas sports books. When one views the Riggs-King match with a critical eye, Riggs played passively and listlessly--not remotely the same way he played against Court in May. Riggs' shots were soft and usually placed directly at King. Riggs, the 1939 men's Wimbledon champion, whose serve was impeccably accurate, also double-faulted at four critical points in the match--including set point in the first set. Several all-time male tennis legends, including Don Budge who achieved the Grand Slam in 1938, expressed doubts about the honesty of the match, but their doubts were dismissed as wounded male pride at the time. According to the ESPN story, Riggs was anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000 in debt to the mob. A witness, now 79, who was close to the mob, told ESPN he had overheard the discussions regarding the fix. Riggs came up with a two-part plan: In exchange for having his gambling debts expunged, Riggs would goad Court into a TV match with sexist comments knowing full well he could beat her soundly. He would then purposely lose to King as a way for the mob to make a killing in wagers on King at long odds. Riggs died in 1995 at age 77. King was among the last people to speak to him.
Tags:
tennis
Bobby
Riggs
Billie
Jean
King
fix
Added: 28th August 2013
Views: 1383
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
 
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An ambulance was dispatched to the actor's home in Los Angeles around 8PM Saturday evening but he was confirmed dead at the scene.
Tags:
James
Garner
Rockford
Files
Legend
Passes
Added: 20th July 2014
Views: 1149
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Posted By: pfc |
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For years it was believed only a few highlights of the 1972 Stanley Cup finals between the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers still existed. (Before 1980, TV networks often erased sports programming in order to reuse the expensive videotapes for other events. After all, the conventional wisdom was that nobody would be interested in seeing old sports events! For example, there is no surviving full videotape of Super Bowl I.) Someone at Madison Square Garden discovered the New York Rangers had filmed the sixth game of the Cup finals for their own purposes. In 2008 MSG network combined an audio tape of Dan Kelly's CBS broadcast (preserved by a Bruins fan) and dubbed it over the silent film the Rangers had made. The happy result is this 12-minute condensed version of the game in which the Bruins defeated the Rangers 3-0 to win their fifth Stanley Cup. Look for the brilliance of Boston's Bobby Orr to be the deciding factor. Note: You may have to crank up the sound to adequately hear the legendary voice of Dan Kelly do the play-by-play.
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1972
Stanley
Cup
final
Game
6
Added: 6th January 2015
Views: 1377
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
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Bowling legend Andy Varipapa displays some of his creative and excellent trick shots in this 1934 short feature called Strikes and Spares. This eight-minute movie was nominated for an Oscar in the now-discontinued category of "oddities." Varipapa--who was a household name among bowling buffs--starred in two other bowling shorts during the 1930s. He died at age 93 in 1984.
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Strikes
and
Spares
bowling
Andy
Varipapa
Added: 13th September 2015
Views: 1351
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
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This is the CBS News coverage of Jack Benny's funeral. The entertainment world's legends turned out in droves to pay their last respects to the great comedian who died at age 80 on December 26, 1974. Benny had been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer about three weeks before his death.
Tags:
funeral
Jack
Benny
CBS
News
Added: 19th September 2015
Views: 1239
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
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