He once said “If I am to be a chauvinist pig, I want to be the number one pig.”

At that time women were starting to assert rights to equal pay in all fields, and Riggs was willing to argue that sportswomen didn’t deserve parity with men.

“Women’s tennis is so far beneath men’s tennis” he opined, and he wanted to prove it by taking on the best female player at the time, Billie Jean King.

More than a match for Riggs, in terms of her tennis prowess and rhetoric, King became the perfect spokesperson for the anti-chauvinists.

Riggs’ and King’s battle helped raise the profile of women’s tennis and also helped raise their pay

Her legendary 1973 match dubbed The Battle Of The Sexes is the subject of a new film opening in cinemas tomorrow.

Riggs’ and King’s battle helped raise the profile of women’s tennis and also helped raise their pay. Riggs would later joke “Billie and I did wonders for women’s tennis. They owe me a piece of their checks”.

But while King will no doubt be best remembered for facing off against Riggs, she had a stellar career before and after and is still a tireless champion of women’s rights.

Born Billy Jean Moffitt on November 23, 1943, in Long Beach, California, her father was a fire department engineer, but had played basketball and tried out for the NBA.

Her mother was an accomplished swimmer and brother Randy became a major league baseball pitcher.

As a young girl Billie Jean’s preferred sport was softball, at which she excelled, playing in teams with girls four and five years older. But realising that she would never make it as an elite baseball player because she was a woman she decided to change sports.

Her parents suggested she play a more “ladylike” sport and so, at 11, she switched to tennis. But King didn’t play tennis like a lady.

People often remarked on her aggressive game, running up to the net to take on the other players. By the age of 14 she was a champion for her age group in Southern California.

At the age of 15 she won her first major tournament giving her entry to her first grand slam, the US Open in 1959. She lost out in the first round.

In 1961 she made headlines when she and Karen Hantze Susman became the youngest women to win the Wimbledon women’s doubles title.

They won again in 1962. At the time she was studying at California State University, where she met and began dating Larry King.

She juggled studies, boyfriend and playing tennis, but knew she had to improve her tennis game if she was to be successful. In 1964 she went to Australia to train with Mervyn Rose, and went on to win the US Open doubles that year.

In 1965 she took another Wimbledon doubles title, toured Australia, came close to winning the US Open singles and later in the year married Larry.

The next year she won her first singles title at Wimbledon. More would follow but frustratingly King was unable to make a living at the sport at which she excelled.

She began making statements about tennis being too exclusive and “clubby”. Some competitions, feigning amateur status, secretly paid some of the best players to keep them playing as amateurs.

When tennis turned professional in 1968 she also openly questioned the vast gulf between prizemoney for women and men. In 1968 she reached world number 1 and turned professional.

In 1971, while her tennis career was at its peak her personal life became complicated. She had an abortion because she felt her marriage was not stable enough for a child and then later began an affair with her secretary, Marilyn Barnett.

Perhaps her biggest year came in 1972 when she won the singles in the US Open, Wimbledon and the French Open. The Australian open eluded her.

When Riggs was looking for a female tennis star to prove that a male player, who had had his heyday in the ’40s could beat the top female talent of the ’70s, his first choice was King.

She refused but later regretted it when she saw Riggs’s second choice, Australian tennis star Margaret Court, get clobbered 6-2, 6-1 in May 1973.

King later agreed to take on Riggs for a prize of $100,000. The match took place in September 1973. King entered the arena carried on a chair by four brawny men, and Riggs in a rickshaw pulled by women.

But King, learning from Court’s defeat, took the tennis seriously altering her usual aggressive style to beat him 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.

She later said, “I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn’t win that match.”

King announced her retirement from singles competition in 1975 but later returned to the court.

In 1979 she ended her relationship with Barnett and in 1981 Barnett brought a lawsuit against King for “palimony”, arguing that they had lived like a married couple.

The lawsuit was unsuccessful, but King had been publicly outed, resulting in her losing sponsors and endorsements, and Barnett was left paralysed from the waist down after attempting suicide.

King retired from singles tennis in 1983, and she and her husband were divorced in 1987. That same year she was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame.

She retired from tennis doubles in 1990, but kept an involvement with the game, as a board member of the Women’s Sports Foundation, and played official roles with Olympic tennis teams.

She is still an inspiration to sportswomen around the world.