Billie Jean King has, quite correctly, been called the 'most dynamic and prolific winner ever to play at Wimbledon' in the official history of The Championships.

But this daughter of a Californian fireman has meant even more than that to the game. She is, simply, the woman who contributed more to the development of tennis than any other.

And if that were not enough, Billie Jean was the winner of the most talked-about tennis match ever, the so-called 'Battle of the Sexes' at the Houston Astrodome in September 1973, when she defeated Bobby Riggs in three straight sets.

The match, watched by a television audience of 90 million, is popularly credited with sparking the mid-Seventies tennis boom in the United States which saw an estimated 32 million Americans on tennis courts within a couple of years of that historic occasion.

The victory over the self-styled 'chauvinist pig' Riggs, himself a Wimbledon Singles champion in 1939, came towards the end of an astonishing run of success at The Championships in which, between 1961 and 1979, King claimed 20 titles - six singles, ten doubles and four mixed - a record she shares with Martina Navratilova.

Wimbledon first welcomed this breezily confident American as a champion in 1961 when, as Billie Jean Moffitt, she teamed with Karen Hantze to become Ladies' Doubles champion for the first time. Two more Doubles championships followed in her maiden name before she married Larry King. Her partners in those ten victorious outings were Hantze (twice), Bueno, Betty Stove and Martina Navratilova once and Casals five times.

The 1979 doubles victory with Navratilova over Stove and Wendy Turnbull was King's record-breaking 20th Wimbledon title, eclipsing the mark of 19 (all achieved in doubles) set by her fellow Californian, Elizabeth Ryan, between 1914 and 1934. The four mixed titles which contributed to that total of 20 were all won in partnership with Australia's Owen Davidson.

It was also the manner of all those victories which helped to shape women's tennis at the time, as Billie Jean's attacking style, honed on the cement courts of California, showed that women, too, could play serve-and-volley tennis.

In the 22 years she played at Wimbledon from her 1961 debut, Billie Jean lost just 41 matches in singles and doubles, having amassed 95 singles, 74 doubles and 55 mixed wins for a total of 224, an incomparable total. In 1967 and again in 1973 she won Wimbledon's Singles, Doubles and Mixed titles, a feat only achieved three times in the Open era of tennis, and she captured a total of 39 Grand Slam titles, including all four singles crowns.

Her record in the development of women's tennis is unmatched, and Billie Jean King remains deeply involved in the sport as a former captain of the US Fed Cup team and a respected commentator.

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