Women’s Tennis Association: A Short History
While it is true that women’s pro tennis as we know it today was born in 1970, many tennis followers are unaware of the fact that women have been playing tennis in professional circles since the year 1947.
The first start for women’s pro tennis was in 1947, when Pauline Betz and Sarah Palfrey Cooke played a number of exhibition matches against each other. Both these women were US National Champions. Three years later, tennis great Bobby Riggs signed both Betz
(who was a superior player) and Gussie Moran on a pro tour with players such as Pancho Segura, a leading tennis player of the 1940s-50s. In 1958, Althea Gibson joined the pro tour. She was the first African-American competitor in the sport, and she teamed
up with the Golden Goddess, Karol Fageros. They opened for basketball team Harlem Globetrotters for one season, and that was for all practical reasons the end of women’s professional tennis for the next twenty years.
However, in 1967, promoter George McCall recognized the huge potential of women’s tennis along with the great talent available for the sport. He signed four female players to join his tour, which consisted of four men. His picks were Billie Jean King, Ann
Jones, Rosie Casals and Françoise Durr. These women were offered a two year agreement, and they played independently as the Open Era dawned.
Three years later in 1970, tennis World Number 1 and promoter Jack Kramer offered the male players a total of fifty thousand dollars in prize money, while the women players were only awarded seventy-five hundred dollars. When he refused to match the women’s
money to the men’s, King and Casals called for a boycott of the event Kramer was sponsoring, the Pacific Southwest Championships in Los Angeles.
This was a crucial and revolutionary period for women’s tennis, and one of its major supporters was Gladys Helman. Helman was the publisher of World Tennis magazine in America, and she responded to the King and Casals’s boycott by organizing a women’s tour
which was entirely independent of help from the men’s division. It was sponsored by Virginia Slims, a cigarette brand for women.
From 1972 to 1972, the WT Women’s Pro Tour awarded almost ten times more prize money than other pro events for women in tennis. While the United States Lawn Tennis Association, or the USLTA initially refused to sanction the event, this was resolved when
both the USLTA and Virginia Slims were given individual events for sponsorship.
In the year 1973, the US Open laid down the foundations of equality in women’s tennis by offering equal amounts of prize money to both male and female players. The player to earn the most money during this period was Billie Jean King, who was the greatest
advocate for this cause. She earned over a hundred thousand dollars between 1971 and 1972. Her “Battle of the Sexes” victory against tennis pro Bobby Riggs in 1973 gave women’s tennis a great amount of media attention, and the estimation of women’s professions
rose in all fields.
The WTA, or Women’s Tennis Association of today was officially formed in 1973. It is the official organizer of women’s professional tennis, and it promotes the WTA Tour. Sponsors have included Virginia Slims from 1971 to 1978 and 1983 to 1994, Avon from
1979 to 1982, J.P. Morgan Chase from 1996 to 2000, Sanex in 2001, Home Depot in 2002 and Sony Ericsson from 2006 to present.
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