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Robert Larimore "Bobby" Riggs ( February 25 , 1918 – October 10 , 1995 ) was a 1930s—40s amateur Tennis champion who, as a professional, became the '''World No. 1''' Tennis player in 1946 and arguably in 1947. After being mostly forgotten for many years, he gained far more fame in 1973 at the age of 55 by challenge matches against two of the top female players in the world. His "Battle of the Sexes" against Billie Jean King was one of the most famous tennis events of all time. Jack Kramer calls Riggs in his 1979 autobiography "the most underrated of all the top players" and says, perhaps surprisingly, that he considers Riggs to be one of the 6 best players of all time. He goes on to say that at his best Riggs was probably even better than Pancho Gonzales , a man still considered by some to have been the greatest player of all time. Writing in 1979, Kramer considered the best ever to have been either Don Budge (for consistent play) or Ellsworth Vines (at the height of his game). The next four best were, chronologically, Bill Tilden , Fred Perry , Bobby Riggs , and Pancho Gonzales . After these six came the "second echelon" of Rod Laver , Lew Hoad , Ken Rosewall , Gottfried Von Cramm , Ted Schroeder , Jack Crawford , Pancho Segura , Frank Sedgman , Tony Trabert , John Newcombe , Arthur Ashe , Stan Smith , Bjorn Borg , and Jimmy Connors . He felt unable to rank Henri Cochet and René Lacoste accurately but felt they were among the very best. LEGITIMATE CAREER Riggs was born in 's, Gonzales' , and Newcombe's ." In his own autobiography, Riggs wrote that "In the 1946 match with Budge the United States Pro Championship , I charged the net at every opportunity. Employing what I called my secret weapon, a hard first serve, I attacked constantly during my 6-3, 6-1, 6-1 victory." Riggs, says Kramer, "was a great champion. He beat Segura . He beat Budge when Don was just a little bit past his peak. On a long tour, as up and down as Vines was, I'm not so sure that Riggs wouldn't have played Elly very close. I'm sure he would have beaten Gonzales -- Bobby was too quick, he had too much control for Pancho -- and Laver and Rosewall and Hoad ." Kramer goes on to say that Riggs "could keep the ball in play, and he could find ways to control the bigger, more powerful opponent. He could pin you back by hitting long, down the lines, and then he'd run you ragged with chips and drop shots. He was outstanding with a volley from either side, and he could lob as well as any man.... he could also lob on the run. He could disguise it, and he could hit winning overheads. They weren't powerful, but they were always on target." As a 20-year-old amateur, Riggs was part of the American Davis Cup winning team in 1938. The following year he made it only 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 U.S. Open , earning the number 1 world amateur ranking for 1939. Riggs teamed up with Alice Marble , his Wimbledon co-champion, to win the 1940 U.S. Open mixed doubles championship. In 1941, he won his second U.S. Open singles title, following which he turned professional. His new career, however, was quickly interrupted by military service during World War II . After the war, as a pro, Riggs won the Professonal American Singles Championship in 1946, 1947, and 1949. In the 1946 tour against Don Budge he won 18 matches and lost 16, establishing himself as the best player in the world. The next year he beat Budge again by the same narrow margin. According to Kramer, "Bobby played to Budge's shoulder, lobbed him to death, won the first twelve matches, thirteen out of the first fourteen, and then hung on to beat Budge, twenty-four matches to twenty-two." Kramer, however, had a sensational year as an amateur and it is debatable whether he or Riggs was the top player for the year. In 1948 Kramer turned professional and he and Riggs embarked on a long tour that began with a victory by Riggs in front of 15,000 people who had made their way to Madison Square Garden in New York in spite of a record snowstorm that had brought the city to a standstill. At the end of 26 matches Riggs and Kramer had each won 13. By that point, however, Kramer had stepped up his second serve to take advantage of the fast indoor courts they played on and was now able to keep Riggs from advancing to the net. For the rest of the tour he dominated Riggs mercilessly, winning 56 out of the remaining 63 matches. The final score was 69 victories for Kramer and only 20 for Riggs, the last time an amateur champion has beaten the reigning professional king on their first tour. In many of the last matches it was assumed by observers that Riggs frequently gave up after falling behind and let Kramer run out the victory. In spite of still beating some of the other professionals such as Pancho Segura , Riggs soon retired from competitive tennis and briefly took over the job of promoting the professional game. As a Senior player in his 60s and 70s, Riggs won numerous national titles within various age groups. TENNIS HUSTLER Riggs became famous as a hustler and gambler, when, in his 1949 autobiography, he wrote that he had made $105,000 in 1940 by betting on himself at Wimbledon to win all three championships: the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. Betting was legal in England, and he parlayed a modest $500 initial bet on his chances of winning the singles competition into a sum that would be equivalent to at least $1 million in 2006 dollars. According to Riggs, World War II kept him from taking his winnings out of the country, so that by 1946, when the war had ended, he then had an even larger sum waiting for him in England, fattened by compounding interest. 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 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 match began, King had learned from Margaret Court's humiliation and was ready for Riggs's game. Rather than playing her own usual aggressive game, she stayed back for the most part, handling Riggs's lobs and soft shots easily, making Riggs cover the entire court as she ran him from side to side, beating him at his own defensive game. After quickly falling behind from the baseline, where he had intended to play, Riggs was forced to change to a declared disgustedly that Riggs was the only third best senior player, behind himself and Gardnar Mulloy , and challenged King to another match. King refused. Nearly thiry years later, a 2001 ABC television docudrama entitled '' When Billie Beat Bobby '' recounted the match and the lead-up to it. These two 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 returned to 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 . POST-TENNIS Bobby Riggs was diagnosed with Prostate Cancer in 1988. He founded the Bobby Riggs Tennis Museum Foundation to increase awareness of the then-obscure disease. Riggs died of the cancer in 1995 in Leucadia, California , aged 77. Riggs was elected to the International Tennis Hall Of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island , in 1967. 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