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What: “Breaking Through”

Where: Lifetime Television

When: Tonight at 6

Sunday was the 25th anniversary of the Battle of the Sexes, Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs, at the Houston Astrodome, and Lifetime’s quarterly sports magazine show looks back at the event in its featured segment tonight. King is interviewed by the show’s host, Maura Driscoll, a former UCLA gymnast (1985-89) and former Prime Ticket producer. The Lifetime show comes on the heels of an excellent 90-minute special Sunday night on ESPN Classic with Dick Schaap as the host. Schaap said King may be “the most important athlete of the century,” and that isn’t much of an exaggeration. She not only had an impact on women’s sports, but women’s rights in general.

And her 1973 match against Riggs--which she won, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3--probably did as much for women’s rights as any single event in history by drawing attention to the equality of the sexes. It was big news at the time and lived up to all the prematch hype.

Riggs, who died in 1995 at 77 of prostate cancer, was the ultimate promoter, and so was King. Before the match, Riggs and King, 55 and 29 at the time, were on the front page of every newspaper and every news magazine--except Time. “When I was playing in the U.S. Open that year,” King says, “I had gotten sick with a virus and had to default. Time withdrew their cover because they thought I wasn’t going to end up playing that match. Everybody said, ‘She’s choking. She’s not going to play that match.’

“I wasn’t a happy camper over that. It’s just one of those things in daily life as a woman athlete that you have to deal with. Even today, women athletes have it tougher than male athletes from that perspective.”

King also talks about how Margaret Court’s loss to Riggs that year on Mother’s Day inspired her to play the match. “They called it the Mother’s Day Massacre,” King says of Court’s loss. “How bad is that? I was in Japan and had one foot on the jetway and one foot in the plane when I heard the score. As I walked down the aisle, I went, ‘Oh, boy, I’m going to have to play that man.’ ”

Lifetime’s look at the Battle of the Sexes is not as complete or as well produced as ESPN Classic’s, and the Lifetime producers could have done without copying some overused production gimmicks--a man-in-street interview segment in which people are made to look like dummies, a la Jay Leno, and a trivia segment in which viewers are asked to name the year of the match, a la NBC’s “Dateline.” But the show still is worth watching.