Fiend at Court Unplugged
In a recent interview on the No Challenges Remaining Podcast, one of the “Original Nine” players, Kristy Pigeon, indicated that she thought that the “Battle of the Sexes” movie accurately depicted the events of 1970. Despite that, it is important to remember that “Battle of the Sexes” was not a documentary. Creative license was exercised to weave complex events into a narrative structure to fit within a reasonable movie run length.
One such example is the depiction of events leading up to the signing of the $1 contracts by the Original Nine. It actually spanned three cities and a much longer timeframe. In the movie, the essence of what occurred was compressed into a shorter sequence of events. It obscured some of the political gyrations that were occurring.
The Open Era
It is important to remember that the “Open Era” of tennis was still in it’s infancy. It was only two years earlier, in 1968, when the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF) decided to allow professional players to compete with amateurs at the Grand Slam Tournaments. One side effect of the Open Era was exposing long standing inequities in prize money and player compensation.
Prior to the Open Era, professional players were compensated with under-the-table “expense money” for playing in tournaments. The secrecy made it impossible to know how much each player was compensated and how it varied between the men and the women. While Billie Jean King and the other women suspected that they were not receiving as much as the men, there was no way to know for sure.
Once under-the-table compensation was eliminated in favor of overt prize money, the disparities became public knowledge and impossible to ignore. Shortly before the US Open in 1970 it was announced that the “Pacific Southwest Open” scheduled for September would offer prize money of $12,500 to the men and $1,500 for the women.
The Seeds of Protest
The original idea conceived by Billie Jean King and Rosie Casals involved having the best women’s players boycott the “Pacific Southwest Open.” Tennis promoter Gladys Heldman intervened, taking up the matter up with Jack Kramer directly. Kramer was was the organizer and promotor of the Pacific Southwest Open.
Kramer responded antagonistically to Heldman’s reasoning and request for a more equitable distribution. He threatened to eliminate prize money for the women all together, rather than increasing it. His attitude was that the women should be happy to receive anything at all.
The Houston Invitational was Heldman’s solution to the impasse. With an assurance from Kramer that he would not protest the event, Heldman organized a small professional tournament for the top 8 women in Houston. The prize money for that event was initially $5000, but later rose to $7500 with the sponsorship of the Virginia Slims.
The fact that the tournament was later protested, is a matter of mystery and intrigue. While Kramer himself did not protest the tournament, Perry Jones who was the figurehead tournament director, allegedly did. The problem with that claim is that Perry Jones was hospitalized and in a coma when a two page telegram outlining his opposition was sent to the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA.) He died a day later without ever regaining consciousness.
In any case, that is why the women were assembled in Houston to play a professional tournament over the strident opposition of the USLTA. It was the culmination of the series of events that started with the exposure of the wildly inequitable prize money at the Pacific Southwest Open. That event, coupled with the refusal of Jack Kramer and the USLTA to even consider that it should be any other way, created the crucible from which the modern women’s tennis tour emerged.
Institutionalized Opposition
In her interview on the No Challenges Remaining podcast, Kristy Pigeon echoes the fact that the male players of the time were adamantly opposed to equal pay for the women. She believes that the male players were concerned that equity in prize money would reduce the prize pool available to the men. It was probably a legitimate concern.
Gladys Heldman is deceased, but the WTA Insider Podcast recently published an interview she gave on the day she was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1979. In that interview, Heldman pointed out that all of the 80 USLTA executive board members at the time were male. In addition, she asserted that the majority were “elderly.” Without any diversity in organizational leadership, the culture and the environment created a belief that the public was much more interested in watching men play tennis than the women.
These were different times. Kristy Pigeon won both the Junior US Open and Junior Wimbledon. She was very much committed to attending college. However, there were no tennis scholarships available to her. This was prior to Title IX which enabled women’s athletics at the collegiate level.
Promotion of Tennis
Because the men who dominated the positions of power in tennis establishments did not believe that the public was interested in women’s tennis, it was simply not promoted. Women’s matches were relegated to outer courts and unfavorable match times. Lower attendance and attention is inevitable in that situation. Those results were then turned around to justify the inequality of prize money.
In this case, inequitable prize money is actually not the root cause issue but rather a symptom of a much larger underlying problem. There is a cautionary tale is still relevant today. Promotion of tennis is still very much an issue for tennis in the current era. We will take a deeper look at tennis promotion tomorrow.
- No Challenges Remaining Podcast, Original 9 – Kristy Pigeon, Episode 275b, September 22, 2020.
- Battle of the Sexes, Fox Movies, 2017.
- “1970: The Women’s Tour Begins,”, Steve Tignor, tennis.com, February 26, 2015.
- WTA Insider Podcast, Original 9: Gladys Heldman, released 9/9/2020.
- “Column: The ‘Original Nine’ of women’s tennis made history — and a dollar each — 50 years ago,” Helene Elliott, Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2020.
Today’s image courtesy of Arek Socha from Pixabay.
