For lengthy, a girl’s value in sport was a operate of whether or not she might match a person or be higher than him. It was no totally different in tennis, the place advantages and privileges weren’t shared equally. At the 1972 US Open, the boys’s singles winner took house $25,000. The ladies’s winner acquired $10,000.
This was half cultural, with the overall perspective being that ladies had been inferior to males, and half financial, with the differentiating issue being the variety of units ladies performed in a match vis-à-vis males: three to 5.
Cut to the current, ladies’s tennis is a beacon for the remainder of the sporting universe on the subject of gender equality. The 4 Grand Slams — the crown jewels of the game — pay women and men equally, and in December 2022, the Forbes checklist of highest-earning ladies athletes featured seven tennis gamers within the high 10, with Naomi Osaka, a four-time Major winner, and Serena Williams, a 23-time Slam champion, ranked one and two.
Serena Williams (left) and Naomi Osaka on the 2018 US Open.
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It all began precisely half a century in the past when the legendary Billie Jean King led the battle that compelled the US Open to develop into the primary Major to make sure pay parity in 1973. That identical yr, a 29-year-old King triumphed within the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ match in opposition to a 55-year-old Bobby Riggs (6-4, 6-3, 6-3) and in addition shaped the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), which is at the moment the governing physique.
Support for AIDS analysis, Black Lives Matter, Ukraine warfare victims
Tennis legend Martina Navratilova on the United Nations to enchantment to world sports activities our bodies to do extra to help homosexual athletes.
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AP
It is not only financially that the ladies’s recreation has been a pressure of development. Athletes starting from Martina Navratilova to Williams to Osaka to the teenaged Coco Gauff have all spoken passionately about points near their hearts.
Navratilova, who has gained 59 Majors throughout singles, doubles and combined doubles, is actively concerned in LGBTQIA+ causes, securing equal rights and advocating AIDS analysis, amongst others. Williams has typically spoken out in opposition to gun violence in America, moved as she was by her half-sister’s loss of life to the ghastly crime.
Osaka’s and Gauff’s had been the main athlete voices within the Black Lives Matter motion. At the 2020 U.S. Open that she gained, Osaka wore seven masks to seven matches, every highlighting the identify of a sufferer of racial injustice.
And when she withdrew from the semifinals of the 2020 Cincinnati Open to protest in opposition to police brutality, the organisers suspended the event for a day in solidarity. At a time when company sponsors are cautious of sportspersons who communicate their thoughts, and a towering determine akin to LeBron James was muted into not talking on China, it was an astonishing flip of occasions.
Of late, Iga Świątek, the World No.1 from Poland, has been constant in her help for warfare victims in Ukraine, sporting a ribbon on her cap within the nation’s colors.
Poland’s Iga Swiatek with a ribbon in Ukraine’s colors on her cap on the 2022 French Open.
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The WTA has roughly marched in tow with its athletes, staying true to its foundational precept of progressivism. In 2019, it launched a rule change to permit gamers getting back from maternity to make use of their frozen rating to get seeded at tournaments.
Recently, WTA boycotted China for almost a year-and-a-half, dropping thousands and thousands of {dollars} within the course of, over the demand for a good investigation into allegations of sexual assault levelled by Chinese participant Peng Shuai in opposition to a senior authorities official.
Yet, to many, the glass continues to be half empty. There are nonetheless tournaments that don’t supply the identical prize cash and rating factors, and there was a lot consternation at WTA’s choice to return to China this yr with no passable decision to the Peng difficulty.
But what ladies’s tennis has proven is the abdomen to battle. If King’s act from 50 years in the past of beating a person in a best-of-five-sets match helped safe wider cultural acceptance for the idea of equality, at the moment’s activism seeks to construct on that success on the boardroom stage.
As King stated again then, “I want women to have the cake, the icing and the cherry on top, too.”
Road to equality
On June 20, the Women’s Tennis Association turned 50. The governing physique was based in 1973 by Billie Jean King who held a gathering with greater than 60 of her friends at London’s Gloucester Hotel to persuade them of the necessity for an impartial gamers’ union
Before King beat Bobby Riggs, the primary ‘Battle of the Sexes’ match was between Riggs and Margaret Court in May 1973, which the previous gained 6-2, 6-1
The French Open had infamously refused a seeding to Serena Williams in 2018 when she returned from maternity. This prompted a debate earlier than WTA gave further safety to returning moms in the event that they had been ranked excessive sufficient earlier than taking the break
If the US Open was the primary to supply equal prize cash to women and men in 1973, Wimbledon was the final to come back round, in 2007, after an impassioned letter from Venus Williams in British day by day The Times
In the final two years, the marquee French Open evening session, for which tickets and broadcasting rights are offered individually, featured simply two ladies’s matches in opposition to 18 males’s video games
sudarshan.narayanan@thehindu.co.in