Well, I wouldn't go as far as to call any sports person a god, I prefer greats. On the eve of this year's Wimbledon championships, this was a nostalgic but also historically interesting programme contrasting two very different champions from the same era.
In the one corner, we have the trailblazing Billie Jean King pushing for equal pay for women in the sport while in the other corner there is Arthur Ashe, in his different way advocating civil rights for his fellow blacks.
Starting with Billie Jean, it's easy to see how she upset the status quo not just with her pugnacious style of play, cheaply derided by her detractors as too mannish, which we can now see for the homophobic remark it obviously was, but also in the way that she championed equality for women even going so far as to set up a breakaway ladies tour. Unsurprisingly, given its sporting, historical and cultural significance, significant reference is made to her "Battle of the Sexes" match against the chauvinist Bobby Riggs (rhymes with..?) which she won easily to ram her opponent's casually sexist jibes back down his throat.
It culminates in her final Wimbledon victory, a record sixth at the time, against the emergent young talent Chrissie Evert who also participates in the programme. Much more conservative at the time than King, the stage was set in 1975 at Wimbledon to see if King could have a last hurrah against an opponent who was obviously going to rule the sport for years to come.
It was however strange to watch this section and see no reference at all made to King's homosexuality which must have been just as important to her at the time.
Turning to Ashe's odyssey, his path to success was arguably even tougher than King's given the prevailing colour bar of the time. Ashe appears to be more diffident, indeed almost reluctant, to be the poster boy for his race, but as he matures he grows into the part, even participating in South Africa where he attempted to integrate the sport both for participants and spectators in the days of strict apartheid.
Interestingly we see some double standards practiced by Ashe who in fact was initially a traditionalist in being against equal pay for women in the sport, although he seems to have come around in the end.
His journey too, culminated at Wimbledon in 1975 where he met his brash polar opposite fellow-countryman Jimmy Connors. I remember as the final approached that he was given as little chance to win as Muhammad Ali had been against George Foreman the year before in the "Rumble in the Jungle" and again the odds were spectacularly upset when Ashe played a tactically brilliant game to triumph against an opponent he had never beaten before.
Again I felt the programme could have gone further and told us of his tragic death at a relatively young age from blood contamination, but I guess the main focus was on the tennis especially as it's a BBC show with the corporation's coverage of the championship just around the corner.
Even so I enjoyed this programme probably more for the back stories of both these tennis greats than their undoubted sporting skills.
With two more episodes to come featuring the inevitable Borg and McEnroe rivalry as well as that of Evert and Martina Navratilova, on the strength of this one, I'm expecting a couple more not too in-depth but nonetheless entertaining walks down memory lane.
