Don’t look now, but in the year 2007 equality has finally caught up to Wimbledon! Yes it only took 123 years for the Wimbledon, the birthplace of tennis to pay female players the same as their male counterparts.
How’s that for progress?
Women have only been demanding equal pay at Wimbledon since 1884 which was the year women began playing as pros at Wimbledon.
The Grand Slam in the US and Australia have had equal pay for both male and female athletes for some time, however, the French are still working out the issues and in France that just might take a while to resolve.
“The time is right to bring this subject to logical conclusion and end the difference,” announced Tim Phillips, chairman of All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club on February 22.
That’s sure is kind of you Mr. Phillips, but wouldn’t you say that is has taken much too long? The world has been transformed while Wimbledon has maintained its air of arrogance and tradition.
There are only a handful of sports where women are truly the stars. Tennis is one of them. It has taken the efforts of many women, most notably Billie Jean King, to cast a light on the inequities in the treatment of female athletes.
If you go back to the early days, you will see that women have been treated as a mere curiosity in the world of sports; so this change is truly cause for celebration.
The rumblings of discontent regarding the biased attitudes of the tennis organizers became louder and louder and now women have asserted themselves and demanded the right to be paid equally. Billie Jean King asked for prize money on par with male tennis players; and in 1972 after winning the US Open she threatened to boycott the Grand Slam the following year if she was not paid equally.
In 1973, because of Billie Jean’s efforts, the US Open became the first major tournament to offer equal prize money to both the genders.
There were other great tennis players who crusaded to earn equal pay. Among them Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, Jennifer Capriati, Steffi Graf and Monica Seles also joined the outcry.
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