Wealth & Money Quote by Bobby Riggs

Riggs turns a career philosophy into a punchline, then lets the punchline do the moral accounting. The line is funny because it’s brutally transactional: tennis isn’t framed as art, honor, or self-expression, but as a hustle with a clear price tag. And the kicker, “I stay in bed,” isn’t just laziness; it’s a refusal of the romantic athlete myth that you compete for love of the game no matter what. Riggs wants you to hear the quiet part out loud: motivation is negotiable.

The specific intent is self-mythmaking. Riggs, a gifted player and an even better promoter, built his legend on needling the public’s expectations. In an era when sports increasingly sold “sportsmanship” as a brand, he sells candor as spectacle. The subtext is that the marketplace is the real opponent. If the purse is big, you show up. If it’s small, maybe. If there’s no money, the event isn’t a contest at all; it’s charity, and Riggs isn’t in the charity business.

Context matters: by the time he became a household name around the Battle of the Sexes circus, Riggs was less athlete than operator, testing how far swagger and controversy could be monetized. The line prefigures that world. It treats performance as labor and attention as currency, which feels almost modern: the gig economy version of elite sport, decades early. It also needles the audience’s complicity. If you want heroes, pay for them; if you want purity, stop buying the show.