Athletes - Bobby Riggs

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	Athletes - Bobby Riggs

Robert Larimore "Bobby" Riggs (February 25, 1918–October 10, 1995) was a 1930s/40s tennis champion who gained even more fame in 1973 at the age of 55 as a result of challenge matches against two of the top female players in the world.

Legitimate Career

Riggs was born in Los Angeles, California. Small in stature, he lacked the power of his much larger competitors such as Don Budge and Jack Kramer but made up for it with brains and speed. A master court strategist and tactician, he worked the opposition out of position and scored points with the game's best drop shot from both the forehand and the backhand, as well as the game's best lob.

Riggs was part of the American Davis Cup winning team in 1938 and the following year he made it to the finals of the French Open but then won the Wimbledon Championships triple, capturing the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles. He went on to win the US Open, earning the number 1 world ranking for 1939.

Riggs teamed up with Alice Marble, his Wimbledon co-champion, to win the 1940 US Open mixed doubles championship. In 1941, he won his second US Open singles title following which he turned professional. As a pro, he won the National Singles Championship in 1946, 1947, and 1949, and for a few years in the mid-40s, while touring against Don Budge and a few other professionals such as Pancho Segura, Riggs was arguably the best player in the world. He soon retired from competitive tennis, however, and briefly took over the job of promoting the professional game.

Bobby Riggs was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1967. As a Senior player in his 60s and 70s, Riggs won numerous national titles within various age groups.

Tennis Hustler

For many years while in retirement, Riggs was a well-known tennis hustler and made a living by placing bets on himself to win matches against other, apparently better, players. To entice fresh victims to play him, he would handicap himself with weird devices like using a frying pan instead of a tennis racquet for the match. Whatever the handicap, Riggs generally won his bets.

A master promoter of himself and the game, Riggs saw an opportunity in 1973 to make money and to elevate the popularity of a sport he loved. Although 55 years old, he deliberately played the male chauvinist card and came out of retirement to challenge one of the world's greatest female players to a match, claiming that the female game was inferior and that a top female player could not beat him even at the age of 55. The cagey Riggs challenged Margaret Court, 30 years old and the top female player in the world. In their May 13, 1973, Mother's Day match in Ramona, California, Riggs used his patented drop shots and lobs to keep an unprepared Court off balance. His easy 6–2, 6–1 victory landed Riggs on the cover of both Sports Illustrated and Time magazine.

Battle of the Sexes

Suddenly in the national limelight, Riggs taunted all female tennis players, prompting Billie Jean King to accept a lucrative financial offer to play Riggs in a nationally televised match that the promoters dubbed as the "Battle of the Sexes." On September 20th, at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, King entered the arena in Cleopatra style, carried aloft in a chair held by four bare-chested muscle men dressed in the garb of ancient slaves. Riggs followed in a rickshaw drawn by a bevy of gorgeous scantily-clad models.

When the two got down to serious tennis, King had learned from Margaret Court's humiliation and was ready for Riggs' style of game. Rather than her usually aggressive style, she played back for the most part, fielding Riggs' lobs easily and returning them to wherever he was not standing, thus compelling him to run all over the court and quickly wearing him down. She defeated him 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. A 2001 ABC television docudrama titled When Billie Beat Bobby recounted the match.

These matches, instigated solely by the consummate showmanship of Riggs, did more to increase interest in the game of tennis, especially women's tennis, than any prior championship or other competition had been able to do up to that time. In 1985 at age 67, Riggs got himself back in the tennis spotlight when he partnered with Vitas Gerulaitis to launch another challenge to female players. His return to the public eye was short lived, however, when they lost their doubles match against Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver.

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