King vs Riggs, 1973: The Exhibition That Was Never Just an Exhibition

Thursday, 20 September 1973, the Houston Astrodome. More than 30,000 people were in the building, and somewhere between 50 and 90 million more were watching on television, depending on whose figure you take. Billie Jean King was 29. Bobby Riggs, a self-described male chauvinist, was 55. The prize was $100,000, winner-take-all.

King won 6–4, 6–3, 6–3.

Why the match existed

Four months earlier, on Mother's Day, Riggs had played Margaret Court, the world No. 1, and beaten her 6–2, 6–1 in under an hour. The result was being used, as King saw it, as an argument against the women's professional game that she and eight others had founded three years earlier with one-dollar contracts in the same city.

That is the context the scoreline does not show. King was not playing to prove she could beat a 55-year-old man. She was playing so that a defeat could not be used against the whole tour she had helped build.

The two racquets

No source we read records what either player used that night. For a match watched by tens of millions that may seem surprising, but the coverage was about the event, not the equipment. We would rather leave the table empty than fill it from memory.

How it was won

The Texas Tennis Museum describes King's approach as a disciplined plan built on consistency, fitness and strategy, designed to wear Riggs down. Court had lost to Riggs in under an hour. King set out to make the match long, keep the ball in play and make a 55-year-old do the running.

First set, King 6–4. The only set that was close on the scoreboard.

Second set, King 6–3.

Third set, King 6–3. Straight sets in a best-of-five.

The spectacle

King was carried in on a gold litter by men dressed in the style of a Cleopatra entrance. Riggs arrived in a rickshaw pulled by models his camp called the "Riggsettes." Jason Morton was in the umpire's chair, with a line crew drawn from Texas tennis officials. It was show business, and both players went along with it. The tennis was not.

What is not on this page

There are no game-by-game scores, no duration and no point statistics here. None of the sources we read record them. The two audience figures disagree, and we give both rather than choose.

What it changed

The match's value was never in the tennis. In 1973 the US Open became the first major to pay men and women equally. That was not caused by the Houston match, but it happened in the same season and came out of the same fight. John McEnroe later called King "the single most important person in the history of women's sports," a line History.com still quotes.

For a site about equipment, the honest conclusion is a short one. Tens of millions watched this match, and none of the sources we read say what was in the players' hands. What was recorded was the score, and the score was enough.