IT HAPPENED THIS DAY


While a Swiss tennis legend gets ready to hang up his boots in London, Flushing Meadows saw a Spanish teenager making his way into the record books...

But way back, 49 years to be precise, in 1973, 29-year-old Billie Jean (Moffitt) King defeated the 55-year-old Robert Larimore (Bobby) Riggs, in a challenge match of sorts...

Riggs, a leading tennis player of the 1930s and 1940s, essentially a self-proclaimed male chauvinist then, and who won his lone Wimbledon title in 1939, held a view that the women’s game was so inferior to the men’s game that at his age he could beat any top female player...

As luck would have it, he prevailed upon Margaret Court 6-2, 6-1 on May 13th and thus threw a challenge to King. A crusader for gender equality for women from a young age, King, reluctantly though, accepted the challenge. The rest is history, as King routed the haughty Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in straight sets, this day at the Houston Astrodome...

Despite the controversies which cropped up later, as is wont to have happened with events such as this, King's triumph was seen as instrumental in ushering in a new era of women's sports as a force to reckon with, and also in more ways than one developing greater recognition for women athletes than just the 'battle of the sexes.' It paved the way not only for parity in women’s sports but also for emoluments in general at the workplaces...

King won 39 singles and doubles Grand Slam championships before retiring in 1984. She remains active as a coach and womens' sports patron. In 2006, the USTA National Tennis Center was renamed in King’s honour...

The champion for social justice and equality, since long, King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on August 12, 2009, becoming the first female athlete to be honoured with the nation’s highest civilian honor...

🙏🙏

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Battle-of-the-Sexes-tennis

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