The reason? To witness a tennis match that promoters had trumpeted as the Battle of the Sexes.

The contestants were 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, at one time the nation’s best male tennis professional, and Billie Jean King, age 29, consistently ranked among the greatest female players of all time. The winner would take home $100,000 — about $700,000 today.

In Las Vegas, sports bettors heavily favored Riggs; Jimmy the Greek declared, “King money is scarce. It’s hard to find a bet on the girl.”

Riggs boasted that he could beat any female player on the planet. King felt she had a duty to accept Riggs’ highly publicized challenge for the event after thinking, “It would set us back 50 years if I didn’t win that match. It would affect the self-esteem of all women.”

(At the time, a woman could still not obtain a credit card without a man’s signature.)

Riggs, though, viewed the quirky contest as a springboard to easy cash and a late-in-life career launch playing exhibition matches against easily defeated women.

Both players hailed from Southern California. Riggs had begun playing tennis at age 12, and by 1946 he was the world’s top professional. King also proved to be a natural at the game and, at 17, won the women’s doubles title at Wimbledon, the first of 20 such victories for her there.

Riggs had always loved the media spotlight, and by the early 1970s female tennis players had become a favorite target of his bombast.

Some of his jaw-dropping proclamations back then included such whoppers as, “Women belong in the kitchen and the bedroom, in that order,” and “Women don’t have the emotional stability to win.”  

His first tennis coach had been a woman.

Riggs usually trained rigorously for his matches, but he had slacked off with the King contest. While King spent practice time playing skilled male players, Riggs chased women, went to parties, knocked back cocktails, puffed on cigars, and gained 15 pounds.

When asked about King as an opponent, he chortled, “There’s no way that broad can beat me.”

Riggs ended up eating his words. From the match’s outset, King forced Riggs to cover the entire court as she ran him from side to side, always playing to his weak backhand and rocketing shots past the out-of-shape opponent.

Winning three straight sets, King had simply ground down her much older rival, a man the same age as her father.

Riggs declared himself a “bum” and sank into a six-month funk before becoming a tennis pro and greeter at a Las Vegas casino. King continued to mow down the competition and retired with 39 Grand Slam titles.   

“To beat a 55-year-old guy was no thrill for me,” King said later about the match. “The thrill was exposing a lot of new people to tennis.”

Although Randal C. Hill’s heart lives in the past, the rest of him resides in Bandon, Ore. He can be reached at wryterhill@msn.com.