Which Male Tennis Player Did Billie Jean King Beat in the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ Match in 1973: Bobby Riggs, the Full Mechanics of a Made-for-TV Spectacle

Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, a 55-year-old former world No. 1 and 1939 Wimbledon champion, in the “Battle of the Sexes” on September 20, 1973, at the Houston Astrodome. King, then 29, won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in front of a live crowd of 30,472 and a prime-time television audience estimated at 50 million in the United States. The match was an exhibition, not a sanctioned tour event, so it carried no ranking points or official title.

The straightforward answer hides a thicker story. That night was the second Battle of the Sexes of 1973, not the first. It was engineered as theater by a hustler who knew exactly what he was selling. And the score line, three straight sets, understates how deliberately King had to play to defuse Riggs’s game and the cultural argument he had attached to it. What follows is the mechanism of the match: how Riggs built the con, how King broke it, and why a 55-year-old’s legs mattered more than his reputation.

The challenge mechanism: how a hustler manufactured a grudge match

Riggs was not a random old champion with an opinion. He was a career gambler and showman who had spent decades making money by arranging matches he expected to win, often against opponents he had lulled with handicaps. By 1973 he had a public platform and a pitch: women’s tennis was inferior, and he could prove it at 55.

The sequence matters because it explains why King, rather than someone else, ended up across the net.

May 13, 1973: Riggs defeated Margaret Court 6-2, 6-1 in Ramona, California. Court was then the dominant women’s player on tour and had recently won three of the four major singles titles in 1973. The lopsided score gave Riggs instant credibility with the press. July 1973: Riggs publicly challenged King, the more famous and more commercially bankable women’s champion, who had won the 1972 U.S. Open and Wimbledon and had pushed for equal prize money. Summer 1973: King initially declined, then accepted. Her stated reason, repeated in interviews for decades afterward, was that she did not want to leave the result of the Court match as the only evidence in the argument. September 20, 1973: The match was staged at the Astrodome, promoted heavily, and carried by ABC’s prime-time broadcast.

The mechanism is circular and self-reinforcing. Riggs’s win over Court created a demand for a bigger match. The bigger match created a bigger audience. The bigger audience made the result culturally load-bearing, which is why a single exhibition, worth no ranking points, became the match people still name 50 years later. The question “which male tennis player did Billie Jean King beat” is really a question about a promotional machine that converted a lopsided senior-versus-prime mismatch into a referendum.

That machine had a physical basis, and it is not flattering to either player’s legend. Riggs was 55 in 1973. King was 29, at the peak of her athletic powers, and had won six Grand Slam singles titles by then. The age gap of 26 years is the single largest variable in the match, and it is the variable that Riggs’s hustle depended on the public ignoring.

The tactical mechanism: why three straight sets was not a walkover

The score reads like dominance. The play was more surgical than that. Riggs’s game at 55 was built on touch, spin, guile, and a lob that could disrupt a bigger hitter’s rhythm. His best path to victory was to keep points short, frustrate King with junk and changeups, and steal a set early while her nerves were live.

King’s counter-plan was to take away the conditions that made his game work. She returned serve aggressively and attacked the net, refusing to let points become long rallies where Riggs’s craft could accumulate. She targeted his movement, hitting behind him and to the open court rather than engaging in the soft exchanges he wanted. And she treated the occasion as a match to be won, not a show to be survived.

The mechanism of the upset is therefore legible in three layers:

Conditioning. King’s cardiovascular fitness and recovery between points were far superior at 29 than at 55, and the Astrodome’s indoor conditions, with no wind and a controlled temperature, rewarded repeatable, high-tempo tennis. Tactical discipline. King declined to play Riggs’s game. She did not trade lobs or slow the pace. She forced him to move and to hit passing shots under pressure, which is the hardest thing for an older player to sustain across three sets. Psychological framing. King had publicly framed the match as a test of the women’s game’s legitimacy. That framing raised the stakes but also gave her a clear job: win cleanly, without gimmicks, so the result could not be dismissed as a fluke or a fix.

The counterintuitive detail is that Riggs’s celebrity as a hustler cut against him. Because he had built a career on manufactured matches and had beaten Court so easily, the public expected a Riggs win. King’s preparation was therefore underestimated, and her tactical plan, which depended on forcing a 55-year-old to run, was treated as unlikely to work. The match was not won by superior shot-making alone. It was won by refusing the terms of the opponent’s game.

Quantified context: the numbers behind the spectacle

The 1973 match is unusually well documented for an exhibition, which lets the scale be stated plainly rather than inflated.

The audience figures are the ones that explain the match’s afterlife. A crowd of 30,472 is large for tennis in 1973; a prime-time U.S. audience near 50 million is larger than most major finals of the era drew. Those numbers are why the result became a reference point in arguments about equal pay and women’s sports, and why the match is remembered as a cultural event rather than a tennis result.

The purse deserves a note on units and framing. The USD 100,000 winner-take-all figure is the promotional number widely reported at the time. It is not comparable to tour prize money in 1973 in any meaningful way, because exhibition purses were negotiated separately and were often inflated for publicity.

Edge cases: the match that came first, and the rematch that came after

The most persistent edge case is chronology. The September 20, 1973, match was not the first Battle of the Sexes. Riggs had already played, and beaten, Margaret Court on May 13, 1973. That match is the one that made the King match possible, and it is routinely omitted from casual retellings.

A second edge case is the nature of the result. King won an exhibition. She did not win a tour title, did not gain ranking points, and did not play under a standard tour format. The match was best-of-five sets, which favored the fitter player, and it was staged for television with the timing and pacing of a broadcast event. These are not asterisks that diminish the win. They are the conditions under which it happened, and they belong in any accurate account.

A third edge case is the rematch. A second King-Riggs match was staged in 1974, and it is not the match most people mean when they ask the question. The 1973 result is the one that stuck culturally. If a source presents a rematch score as the answer, it is answering a different question.

Misconceptions worth correcting

Several errors travel with this match, and each one is easy to check.

Misconception: King beat Riggs in the first Battle of the Sexes. Correction: Riggs beat Court in May 1973; King beat Riggs in September 1973. Misconception: Riggs was a random old man. Correction: he was a former world No. 1 and a 1939 Wimbledon singles champion, which is exactly why the match drew an audience. Misconception: the match settled the question of whether women could compete with men. Correction: it settled a promotional argument between two specific players under specific conditions. It did not establish a general rule, and King never claimed it did. Misconception: the result was a foregone conclusion. Correction: the public and much of the press expected Riggs to win, and the match was promoted as a genuine contest. Misconception: the match was a sanctioned tour event. Correction: it was an exhibition with no ranking points.

Practical actions: how to use this answer well

If the goal is to get the fact right, the sequence is short and mechanical.

Anchor the answer to September 20, 1973, and to Bobby Riggs. That pairing is the correct response to the keyword question. Distinguish the 1973 King-Riggs match from the 1973 Riggs-Court match. The Court match came first and is the reason the King match happened. State the score with the format: 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, best-of-five sets. Note the exhibition status. The match awarded no ranking points and was not a tour event. If citing audience or purse figures, label them as contemporaneous reports rather than audited statistics.

Two thresholds matter for anyone writing about this. The first is the date threshold: anything before September 20, 1973, is not the match in question. The second is the status threshold: an exhibition result is not a ranking result, and conflating the two produces false claims about what the match proved.

Limitations and what the record cannot support

The record supports the who, the when, the score, and the scale. It does not support broad claims about the relative strength of men’s and women’s tennis. One exhibition between a 29-year-old champion and a 55-year-old former champion is a sample of one, under conditions designed for entertainment. The result is real and historically important. The generalization is not.

The record also does not support precise claims about tactics beyond what is documented in contemporaneous reporting and later commentary. Point-by-point data from the 1973 broadcast is incomplete, so any assertion about how many points King won at net or how often she hit behind Riggs should be treated as description rather than measurement. What can be said with confidence is the mechanism: King declined Riggs’s terms, forced him to move, and won in straight sets.

This article is general educational information about a historical sports event. It is not a diagnosis, treatment plan, legal opinion, or investment recommendation. For questions about sports history or archival records, consult a qualified local librarian or archivist.