Highlighting stories that go above and beyond:

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ESPN has been taking a pounding for the ESPN-Frontline fiasco. However, Don Van Natta Jr.’s story on Bobby Riggs shows the journalism the network is capable of producing.

The post includes a 14-minute report on ESPN’s Outside The Lines. It’s fascinating how a story could come alive 40 years later.

Van Natta writes:

Riggs relished playing the impish, gambling-mad chauvinistic court jester for enthralled members of the national media. On its cover, Time magazine called Riggs “The Happy Hustler.” Sports Illustrated warned, “Don’t Bet Against This Man.” A recording artist named Lyle “Slats” McPheeters recorded “The Ballad of Bobby Riggs,” for Artco Records. On “60 Minutes,” Riggs tossed playing cards at a wastebasket for money, played tennis with eight chairs on his side of the court and ran around Las Vegas looking for action on anything, from tennis and golf to backgammon and card tosses, with everyone he met.

“All of the running, all of the chasing, all of the betting, all of the playing — what’s it all about?” Mike Wallace asked Riggs. “Do you do it for money, Bobby?”

“No,” said Riggs with a smirk. “I do it for fun, the sport, it’s the thing to do. When I can’t play for big money, I play for little money. And if I can’t play for little money, I stay in bed that day.”

This wasn’t a midlife crisis. This was a midlife Mardi Gras.

Suspicions from those who knew him:

Across nearly 40 years, some of the men who knew Riggs best have wondered: Was “The Battle of the Sexes” nothing more than a cultural con job?

“A lot of my tennis friends immediately suspected something was up, and many of us still believe something was up,” says John Barrett, the longtime BBC tennis broadcaster. “It wasn’t so much that Bobby lost. It was that he looked as if he had almost capitulated. He just made it too easy for Billie Jean King. We all wondered if the old fox had done it again.”

“Everything was different,” says Adler. “If you were a tennis person that knew Bobby Riggs, the first thing that comes to your mind is he threw the match.”

Steve Powers, who owned the guest house where Riggs stayed prior to the match, says “If Bobby had an opportunity to fix the match, he would have jumped at it. Ethics wouldn’t have stopped him.”

Tennis great Gene Mako, who died in June, had insisted for years that Riggs had thrown the match. “You have to know Bobby,” Mako told author Tom LeCompte in the 2003 Riggs biography, “The Last Sure Thing.” Mako believed Riggs was so vain that his play was just awful enough to demonstrate to smart tennis people that he had tanked the match.

Even from his son:

However, Larry Riggs did not dismiss Shaw’s story outright because, after all, his father knew and gambled with a lot of mob guys all over the country. Bobby Riggs was also a longtime member of the La Costa Country Club in Carlsbad, Calif., a reputed mob-built country club where mob leader and Riggs’ acquaintance Moe Dalitz was a member. And Larry Riggs had never understood why those Chicago pals of hit man Jackie Cerone had visited his father several times prior to the King match.

“Did he know mafia guys? Absolutely,” Larry Riggs says. “Is it possible these guys were talking some s—? Yes, it is possible. They talked to him about doing it? Possible.” However, Riggs says, it was more likely his father purposefully lost with an eye toward setting up a bigger payday rematch — and a continuation of the national publicity that he so craved — than throw the match for mob money. Larry Riggs also says he remains baffled by the fact his father did not prepare for the King match — the only match in Bobby Riggs’ life for which he had failed to train. “Never understood it,” Larry Riggs says.

And there’s more. You make your own conclusion.