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Robert Larimore "Bobby" Riggs (February 25,
1918–October 25, 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 (tennis)|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 Professional
Tennis Championships|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.  

==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.  In order to
entice fresh victims to play him, he would
handicap himself with such weird devices as 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, in 1973
he saw an opportunity to make money and to elevate
the popularity of a sport he loved. Although 55
years old, he deliberately played the
Chauvinism|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 couldn’t beat him even at the age of 55.
The cagey Riggs challenged Margaret Smith Court,
the mother of three children who at the time was
recovering from an injury. In their May 13, 1973
Mother's Day match in Ramona, California, Riggs
used his patented drop shots and lobs, referred to
by some in the press as rinky-dink tennis, to keep
an unprepared Margaret 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 VII of
Egypt|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. She
thrashed him 6–4, 6–3, 6–3.

These matches, instigated solely by the consummate
showmanship of Bobby 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, Bobby Riggs got himself back in
the tennis spotlight when he partnered with Vitas
Gerulaitis to launch another challenge to female
players. However, his return to the public eye was
short lived when they lost their doubles match
against Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver.

As a Senior player in his 60s and 70s Riggs won
numerous national titles within various age
groups.

Bobby Riggs died of cancer in 1995 in Leucadia,
California. A 2001 American Broadcasting
Company|ABC television docudrama titled When
Billie Beat Bobby recounted the famous 1973 match.

Bobby Riggs was elected to the International
Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, in
1967.