Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs<\/a> in the \u201cBattle of the Sexes\u201d in 1973, it would be many years before they received equal prize money at any major other than the U.S. Open, which awarded pay equity in 1973. In 1984, the Wimbledon men\u2019s champion won \u00a3100,000 (about $130,000 today), while the women\u2019s winner received \u00a390,000. The chief argument was that the men played three out of five sets at the majors and at the Davis Cup, while women played two out of three.<\/p>\n\u201cI was in favor of playing three out of five at the majors, just to prove that we could do it,\u201d said Navratilova by phone from her Florida home last month. \u201cWe wanted the world to know that we weren\u2019t wilting flowers. We never got the chance at the Slams, but we did at the Finals, and I loved it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anne Person Worcester worked for the tour sponsor Virginia Slims in the 1980s and went on to become the first female chief executive of the WTA Tour in 1994. She backed the three-out-of-five-set format at the Garden.<\/p>\n
\u201cWomen\u2019s tennis was on a high, and Virginia Slims wanted to be unique,\u201d Worcester said by phone in September. \u201cAfter decades of equal prize money conversations, what we heard most was that the men played longer than the women. It was a ridiculous argument because if you go to a three-hour Broadway show or movie do you pay more than for a two-hour show? But playing three out of five became a novelty, and most of the women were on board.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s tennis was in its glory in the 1980s. Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert were in the midst…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1138],"tags":[10481,10477,10479,9911,10482,10480,10478,28,10475,10476,1145],"class_list":["post-27864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wta-finals","tag-gabriela","tag-martina","tag-monica","tag-navratilova","tag-riyadh-saudi-arabia","tag-sabatini","tag-seles","tag-tennis","tag-women-and-girls","tag-womens-tennis-assn","tag-wta-finals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}