When Rosie, Frankie, Ann, and I became the first troupe of women pros to travel the world for two years with the MacCall tour, we enjoyed a warm relationship with the six men in our group, Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, Fred Stolle, Ken Rosewall, Pancho Gonzalez, and Andrés Gimeno. Now that shamateurism was exposed and everything could be aboveboard, we were all fighting for better pay from tournaments and promoters. All of us wanted more freedom to set our own playing schedules and loosen the control of the national associations like the USLTA. And yet, when I tried to enlist the male players’ support for our fight for better treatment and prize money by arguing that a united front would benefit us all, I was stunned at the male players’ responses. We were less welcome than before.
I went to the men’s leaders before they started the Association of Tennis Professionals in 1972 because I couldn’t believe the men left women out. They never bothered to respond to me. It was the same in 1969 when John Newcombe organized the International Players Association. I asked them, too, if they planned to include women, and I was told, “You must be joking.” It still hurts me to talk about it. Newcombe and I played mixed doubles during the months I trained in Australia. I would later become good friends with Arthur Ashe, the first president of the ATP, but he was backward on gender issues before he married his wife, Jeanne Moutoussamy, an exceptional photographer and strong professional woman.
Arthur told The Boston Globe, “The women are going to disappear because they don’t draw flies.” Clark Graebner said, “I’m just as happy to never see the girls. They’re not very attractive. I wouldn’t want my daughter playing on tour.” The American star Stan Smith told The Daily Mirror of London, “These girls would be much happier if they settled down, got married, and had a family. Tennis is a rough life and it really isn’t good for them. It de-feminizes them…[They become] too independent and they can’t adapt to anyone else, they won’t be dependent on a man. They want to take charge, not only on the courts but at home.”
I couldn’t believe it. These were my friends and contemporaries and they didn’t want us around. It was crushing. Fred Stolle, one of the Aussies, told me, “No one wants to pay to watch you birds play.”
While the disparities between the men’s and women’s prize money remained a problem from the first open tournament in Bournemouth, we soon had another issue. The number of tournaments where women players were invited was shrinking as well.
By 1970, George MacCall couldn’t make the NTL work anymore, and the rival WCT bought the contracts of all six of our male teammates—but none of us women. Every woman player around the world was again at the sole mercy of our national associations and promoters for opportunities to compete.
Larry and I were worried enough that Larry drafted a confidential letter that we circulated in February 1970 to eight of the top women’s players and Gladys Heldman, the publisher of World Tennis magazine, who was also a promoter. We offered a proposal for how we could set up a pro women’s tour as a group. The proposal argued that we should take control of our futures, and it suggested that the players we approached could share 10 percent ownership of our events, with another 20 percent going to whomever was hired to manage the circuit. The remaining 70 percent would go to the promoters for their operational costs and prize money.
We couldn’t get enough of the other women to take the leap, so we tabled the idea. Three months later, a handful of us thought about organizing a protest during the 1970 Italian Open in May when first prize was $7,500 for the men compared to just $600 for the women—an appalling twelve-to-one disparity. We complained that our treatment was getting worse, but we didn’t walk out.
Things were really starting to rumble now. We learned that the men’s U.S. Open winner would get $20,000 compared to just $7,500 for the women’s champ, which mirrored what the other Grand Slams were offering. Our concerns spiked again when Jack Kramer, never one to conceal his contempt for female players, convinced the ILTF to set up a $1 million International Grand Prix tennis circuit for 1971 with Pepsi as a sponsor. Only a handful of the twenty-five new Grand Prix events would be open to women, and at those events we weren’t eligible for perks like the $229,000 in year-end bonuses the men could earn. In fact, under Kramer’s plan, the few tournaments women did play would have to send 10 percent of the proceeds into the men’s bonus pot. Unbelievable. We got only the scraps for prize money, but now we were also supposed to subsidize the men’s tour at the limited Grand Prix events they did let us play in.
Worse, when I asked USLTA officials how their 1971 schedule for us was shaping up, they told me there were only two tournaments scheduled for women between October 1970 and March 1971. That was a deeply troubling moment. The livelihoods of women players everywhere were at stake.
We were finally fed up when Kramer announced that the prize money he was offering for the 1970 Pepsi Pacific Southwest Championships two weeks after the U.S. Open would be a disparity of eight to one. He planned to offer a $65,000 purse to the men versus $7,500 for the entire women’s field. None of the women would be paid a dime for their work unless they made the quarterfinals, but every man who entered would get a paycheck.
This time, there was an uprising. It started at Forest Hills in September 1970, and it is no exaggeration to say tennis—and, eventually, the business of all sports for women—would never be the same.
Chapter 12
I wasn’t playing at the 1970 U.S. Open because I was recovering from my second knee surgery, this one to my right knee. I only survived my semifinal match against Rosie at Wimbledon a month earlier by chipping and lobbing strategically against her. Before our final, Margaret had a doctor shoot six or seven syringes of painkillers into her badly twisted ankle. I wish I had done the same to my knee.
The brutal two-hour twenty-seven-minute match that we played was the longest in the history of the ladies’ championships to that point. My run of three Wimbledon titles had been snapped the previous year, and I wanted to start a new streak. Margaret arrived at Wimbledon determined to keep alive her chance for a Grand Slam sweep of the majors that year, the same as she was trying to do when I upset her in 1962.
This time she outlasted me 14–12 in the marathon first set that took eighty-eight minutes to play. In the second set we blasted away at each other for another hour. At times we looked like two escapees from an orthopedic ward. Margaret kept tripping on her numb foot and even fell down once. I could barely stand on my shaky right leg. We had been in each other’s crosshairs as the two best players in the world for years now, and each of us refused to give an inch. I was up 8–7 in the second set, but she won the next game by knifing a backhand volley by me. At least I went down fighting, rescuing seven match points before she won the epic second set, too, 11–9. Tennis historians still call it one of the finest matches ever played on Centre Court. But for me, it was a crushing defeat.
I had the knee surgery the following week. I was still on crutches by the U.S. Open, so I agreed to work the tournament as a television commentator for CBS. Sports broadcasting was just opening up to a few women. Maureen Connolly had announced some Wimbledon matches on BBC broadcasts, and the Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona retired from competition at the age of seventeen and in 1964 became the first female sports broadcaster on an American network when she joined ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
I spent a lot of time in the tiny women’s locker room at Forest Hills gauging the players’ mood. Rosie and I started polling the women players to see if we could agree to protest Kramer’s prize money decision. I called Larry for advice, and he suggested we talk again to Gladys Heldman. Rosie and I had already met with Gladys about it at a tournament in New Jersey the week before the Open.
Years later, when Gladys was asked who was responsible for starting the women’s tennis tour, she often smiled slyly and jokingly said, “Jack Kramer did.” Gladys was a brilliant, self-made, well-connected power broker in a male-dominated world who fo
unded her magazine at the age of thirty-one and turned it into the bible of our sport. She was tireless, generous, glamorous, eccentric, narcissistic, creative, and just plain wonderful. She could also be imperious if necessary and would go toe-to-toe with anybody. She was an outsider in the WASP-dominated tennis world, a Jewish woman who couldn’t join some of the private clubs where we played, and she often used the pages of World Tennis to advocate for causes. In short, she was not someone who easily took no for an answer, or the kind of woman you told to be quiet and go away.
Rosie, Nancy Richey, and I had lunch with Gladys on the West Side Tennis Club terrace during the U.S. Open and asked her for help. We all agreed that a boycott of Kramer’s tournament wouldn’t work unless all the women were united, and that wasn’t true yet. It was decided instead that Gladys would try to persuade Kramer to increase the women’s purse. She spoke with him twice. The first time, he refused to talk to her about it. The second time he told her, “Fine, if the women players don’t like it, I won’t give them any prize money.” Gladys’s report back to us was “Kramer’s an ass.”
Gladys started making phone calls. Meanwhile, one of our smartest young players, Ceci Martinez, decided to apply her psychology training from San Francisco State University to the problem. We were constantly told that paying spectators weren’t interested in women’s tennis. We faced a Catch-22: Our visibility was sabotaged because women’s matches were routinely shunted to the back courts and received little or no publicity or coverage, then we were blamed for not drawing bigger crowds.
Ceci decided to test the competing premises. She designed a one-page questionnaire that she and her doubles partner, Esmé Emmanuel, of South Africa, handed out at Forest Hills during the U.S. Open. The mimeographed survey asked fans questions including “Do you think women players should (1) play their own tournaments separate from the men, (2) play along with the men at the same tournaments, (3) not play professional tennis?”
The results were encouraging. Of the 278 people who returned the questionnaires—94 women and 184 men—about half said women’s tennis was just as interesting as men’s. Eighty-two percent of men preferred seeing men and women play in the same tournament. One third of the men and half of the women thought the prize money distribution should be equal. This was something we could build on. This was data, not hearsay.
On Sunday, September 6, Rosie and I led a locker room meeting to discuss whether to boycott Kramer’s event. Everyone hated the prize money disparity, but once again a lot of women were afraid. What if we upset our national associations? What if we were banned from Wimbledon or the other majors? We were pretty hotly divided, and I was getting pretty exasperated, when Gladys burst through the door with a big smile on her face and almost sang, “Ladies! I’ve got news!”
Gladys and her family were moving back to Houston after years of living in New York and she said she could organize an eight-woman tournament at the Houston Racquet Club from September 23 to 26, the same week as Kramer’s 1970 Pacific Southwest tournament. She said the total prize money would be $5,000. It seemed like an elegant solution. We could forget having to ask all the women to join the boycott, and yet still send a message to Kramer and the establishment that we would seek other options if they continued their inequitable treatment of us.
The next day, Rosie, Ceci, and eight other players announced our intentions to reporters from around the world at the annual Lawn Tennis Writers Association luncheon. I had business commitments in Manhattan and couldn’t attend, but they were terrific. They distributed a three-point manifesto in which we said we were seeking “prize money commensurate with that of men, equal exposure in center court matches, and better treatment by the news media, which subordinates women’s tennis to the men’s game.” We weren’t even arguing for equal pay at that point. Rosie suggested that a three-to-one ratio could be acceptable. Rosie also dropped the word boycott for the first time and said some of us might skip Kramer’s event because of the “ridiculous” disparity in prize money. “It’s discrimination,” she said.
The news of our revolt made headlines around the world, including on the front page of The New York Times. Numerous other outlets printed the results of Ceci’s survey. It was the first time a large segment of the general public had an insight into how unfairly the women players were being treated.
Once again, most of the top male players abandoned us. Arthur Ashe told reporters, “Men are playing for a living now. They don’t want to give up money just for girls to play. Why should we have to split the money with them?…We’re supporting families and we’re the drawing cards.” Rod Laver, Pancho Gonzalez, and Stan Smith, who would soon overtake Arthur as America’s best player, said similar things. Marty Riessen complained that “women’s events just clutter up tournaments” and Cliff Richey—whose sister, Nancy, was on our side—said, “Women ride on the coattails of the men and then complain.”
I wasn’t about to remain quiet. When Bud Collins reached me, I fired back in The Boston Globe, “I sell more tickets than Stan Smith. I think I’m a more exciting player and more people want to see me play.”
Kramer later insisted in his autobiography that the diminished women’s prize money was “just good business sense” on his part, not prejudice. “People get up and go get a hot dog or go to the bathroom when the women come on,” he wrote.
* * *
—
The players who agreed to compete in Houston that week were Rosie Casals, Nancy Richey, Kerry Melville, Judy Dalton, Val Ziegenfuss, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Patti Hogan, and me. Julie Heldman, Gladys’s daughter, attended but, because she was injured, played only a token point with me as a show of solidarity with us. It was clear to me that what we were doing was historic. My surgically repaired knee was still mending and I was hobbling around pretty badly, so I originally planned to play only the mixed-doubles pro-am. The club’s male members bid for the opportunity to play with us, and I donated $500 so the women pros earned some prize money for participating. But when Patti withdrew and we needed another singles player, I took her place.
Gladys thought Margaret would also play singles, but Margaret, never an eager suffragette, later said she never intended to play. She said her ankle had not yet healed after our match at Wimbledon and she was exhausted from finishing her Grand Slam sweep at Forest Hills. CBS had deigned to broadcast only the last ten minutes of Margaret’s landmark victory there even though Maureen Connolly was the first and only other woman to ever accomplish a calendar-year sweep of the majors. Even that slight didn’t change Margaret’s mind. Rather than join us in Houston, she went fishing in Florida with her husband, Barry.
The Friday before our tournament week in Houston, Stan Malless, the chairman of the USLTA Sanction and Schedule Committee, began calling our American players to threaten us with indefinite suspensions if we played, a vague threat that implied we could be banned from making a living at the U.S. Open, Wimbledon, or anywhere else. The Australians among us feared that their association might do the same to them.
Malless upped the pressure on the Houston Racquet Club by refusing to sanction our event. That was a surprise to the Texas Tennis Association president-elect Jim Hight and the tournament organizer Delores Hornberger, president of the club’s Women’s Association. Tickets had been sold. The bleachers had already been set up. When Hight called, the USLTA made up a couple of rules on the fly to justify its threats, at one point telling him that our event and Kramer’s couldn’t be sanctioned during the same week, which was untrue. Hight pointed out that overlaps had happened numerous times before and treating us differently was discrimination. He and Delores bravely decided that under no circumstances would the tournament be canceled.
Gladys was still trying to reach USLTA officials herself. She urged all of us players to travel to Houston and promised to cover our airfare. We’d figure things out when we got there. The USLTA’s threats were obviously about cont
rolling women players. But something that Jack Kramer did showed the extreme lengths some men were willing to go. Kramer convened a meeting of the Pacific Southwest tournament’s all-male board, and then sent a telegram to the USLTA attributed to his longtime ally Perry T. Jones—who was in a coma on his deathbed at the time—condemning our “illegal” tournament. The Czar passed away the next day.
Kramer had battled the USLTA from 1952 to 1967 when he was promoting his own breakaway events for male pros, and now he was dictating USLTA policy with his objections against us. Gladys kept trying all weekend to reach the USLTA president, Alastair Martin, with whom she had worked closely in the past, but Martin didn’t respond to the two telegrams she sent. Nancy finally reached Martin by phone on Monday evening—forty-eight hours before we were supposed to begin—and Martin confirmed that we risked suspensions if we played.
By the following day, all but one of our players had arrived in Houston. Gladys had never quit working the phones and finalized another coup on Tuesday morning, hours before our pre-tournament cocktail party at the Houston Racquet Club began: Philip Morris, whose CEO was her longtime friend Joseph F. Cullman 3rd, had agreed to give $2,500 to sponsor our tournament on behalf of its two-month-old Virginia Slims brand, a cigarette marketed to women. The Houston Racquet Club gratefully accepted the help and agreed to change the event’s name from the First Houston Women’s International Tennis Tournament to the Virginia Slims Invitational of Houston, and the Slims assistant brand manager Bill Cutler and the Philip Morris publicist Dallas Kersey booked flights to Houston to arrive in time to attend the party.
Having the backing of such an influential corporate sponsor was extremely important. But while Gladys was getting the Philip Morris commitment, Malless had phoned Delores and said the USLTA would now sanction our tournament if we made it an amateur event with no publicized prize money and paid expenses under the table—a return to shamateurism. Delores agreed to that concession before talking to the players, which I was very unhappy to learn after Peaches and I, the last to arrive in Houston that day, made it to the pre-tournament cocktail party. To me, the USLTA’s offer was yet another insult. If we agreed to return to shamateurism, where or when would it ever stop?
All In Page 19