Equal pay equal play?
That silly argument somehow comes up again in 2022
Last week in Miami a question was posed to Naomi Osaka about equal pay and tennis formats. It referenced the fact that the Slams pay men and women equally, and that women play best of three sets in the Majors whereas men play best of five sets:
Osaka’s answer was a perfectly polite way of focusing on the revenue growth of the women’s game over a long timescale, and acknowledging the steady work of past generations. It was logical.
The question above, and its premise, were not. There are both logical and illogical arguments for and against equal pay in sport. But the ‘women only play best of three sets so should be paid less than men playing best of five sets’ is specious at best, despite it being trotted out year after year.
Women and best of five
Women have played best of five sets at both ‘Slam’ and non-Slam level, and at both at amateur and professional level. From 1891 to 1901, in the finals of the US National Championships (the tournament that would later become the US Open) women played best of five at the Philadelphia Cricket Club venue. However the all-male council of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association subsequently decided to reduce the format to best-of-three sets, with the justification that five sets would be too strenuous a task for ‘the weaker sex’. The women, who had not been consulted, strongly protested to no avail. Elisabeth “Bessie” Moore who played two engaging, deciding 5th set matches between 1891 and 1901:
70-ish years later, Billie Jean King, during her trailblazing mission for equality in tennis, defeated 55 year old Bobby Riggs in a best of five set match at the Houston Astrodome in 1973. She only needed three of the five sets, winning 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.
A few years later, on the back of King’s victory and ongoing mission, WTA players voted to play best of five set matches. In response, no tournament owners changed the format.
In 1984, the WTA decided to try the format themsleves at the WTA Tour Finals, declaring that the title match would be best of five sets.
Chris Evert (the WTA president at the time) :“The women’s board felt it would be a good idea for us to try it. Women players in general are becoming better athletes and therefore can endure longer matches.”
Martina Navratilova: ‘’The best-of-five final adds another exciting dimension to the tournament, as it gives us more of a chance to showcase our talent.”
The first five-setter arrived in 1990 between 16-year-old Monica Seles and 20-year-old Gabriela Sabatini. Seles defeated Sabatini 6–4, 5–7, 3–6, 6–4, 6–2 in a 3 hour and 47 minute epic in front of a 17,290 person crowd (larger than Wimbledon’s current centre court capacity).
Seles: “We had one of the most exciting matches ever, I think. I played great. She played great. It was a hard match, but I enjoyed every minute.”
Five years later Steffi Graf would defeat Anke Huber in Madison Square Garden. The match was looking like a rout in favour of Graf, with Huber overcome by nerves in the early stages:
Huber: "I was really, really nervous at the start. It was my first big final. I didn't know how to hold my racket in my hand. I just tried not to think what I was doing and started to get better. Plus there were some longer points, so I got back into the match."
Huber: “Five sets is great for women’s tennis and great for the players. I think they should have them for the finals of the Grand Slam tournaments. Everybody among the women can do it.”
Graf: "It was exciting to be in a fifth set, knowing it could go either way on my serve. The fifth set made it very special."
After the final, Harvey Araton of the New York Times wrote:
Then came Graf's first set against her compatriot Anke Huber. Graf won 18 of the first 24 points. She needed 26 minutes -- four for an injury timeout -- for an unwatchable 6-1 romp. This was just what women's tennis needed to complete this Monica Selesless fizzle of a season-ending final. This was just going to prove the point the Australian Open has been trying to make: Women are lesser tennis beings than men. They deserve less Grand Slam pay. Hours later, deep into the fifth set, Huber was somehow still running down the vaunted Graf forehand. She wound up losing, 6-1, 2-6, 6-1, 4-6, 6-3, but her spirited two-hour, 46-minute challenge pushed Graf to the edge, and, at least, gave women's tennis a symbolic lift. Huber didn't exactly turn Madison Square Garden into Anke Stadium, but the fans did appreciate the unexpected extended day.
Filip Bondy of The New York Daily News wrote:
…the match just kept getting better as it moved along. What might have been an ordinary three-set victory by Graf became a classic tennis contest, undecided until Graf finally won her fourth breakpoint in the eighth game of the fifth set. Along the way, Graf and Huber showed us something important. As usual, we have been underestimating female athletes. Given half the chance, they can put on a five-set show without a trace of collapse.
Graf however was less sure than Huber about expanding the longer format to all women’s Slam finals:
Graf: "It really depends on the surface. I think it would be tough on clay,
or in Australia, where it's really hot."
In 1999, the tournament switched back to a best-of-three set final.
The backdrop to these five setters in the early-mid 1990’s were a fraught time for equality in tennis. In 1994, not long before the Graf Huber WTA Final match, the Australian Open announced that the women’s final would become best of five sets in 1995. But none of the women had been consulted about the change, with the WTA finding out about the news after the announcement was made.
Marianne Witmeyer (WTA player): “They didn’t talk to players, they didn’t get feedback. It comes back to people not communicating.”
Graf and others got the decision overturned.
Tennis Australia subsequently announced that it would pay WTA players $330,000 less in prize money for the 1996 edition, abandoning its equal pay structure that had been in place between the mid 80’s and early 90’s. A potential WTA boycott in response never materialised because of concerns about losing sponsorship, and more speculatively because of reluctance from the two top players at the time, Graf and Seles.
It would be five years later, in 2001, before equal pay returned for the Australian Open for good.
Wimbledon, the last holdout against equal pay at Slam level, changed course in 2007, influenced by an open letter in The Times written by Venus Williams in 2006.
Wimbledon has argued that women's tennis is worth less for a variety of reasons; it says, for example, that because men play a best of five sets game they work harder for their prize money. This argument just doesn't make sense; first of all, women players would be happy to play five sets matches in grand slam tournaments. Tim Phillips, the chairman of the All England Club, knows this and even acknowledged that women players are physically capable of this.
Multiple WTA players and executives have also said they are willing to play best of five sets in recent years.
WTA CEO Stacey Allaster in 2011:
“Our players have always said that they are willing to play three of five sets. The Grand Slams decide the format at their events and to date each Grand Slam has opted for the women to play two of three sets.”
“We women are strong, ready, willing and able. All the women players have agreed to it, but it’s not what (the Slams) want at this time.”
“It’s like women playing nine innings of baseball while the men play 12. We’ve been saying for years, years, that we want to play five sets, but they (tournaments) always said: ‘Oh, no, no, we want it to stay the way it is.”
In response to the above comments, David Brewer the US Open’s tournament director from 2012-2019, reiterated the special-ness of the best of five format, but only for the men:
“Everybody talks about all kinds of format changes all the time. But one of the things that makes a Grand Slam special is that the men play three out of five sets. We think that’s one of the more intriguing things about a Grand Slam event, that it’s a great, long, strong, five-set match, where two players are going at it, head to head, for X-plus hours. That’s just an incredible sporting spectacle.”
I want to stress here that in recent years multiple former and current WTA players have expressed conflicting desires to play the longer format. For example, Martina Navratilova again called for women to play best of five sets as of 2019 but also suggested that men should play best of three sets to reduce injuries in 2013.
Pam Shriver also speculated that the best of three set format produces more intense matchplay compared to best of five sets:
“I don’t think the women should ever feel the need to play three out of five. They put everything they have into best-of-three now, and that makes those matches more intense. Every point feels like it counts, which isn’t true in best-of-five.”
Logic, timescales, and the future
Today at least, I’m not going to go into the weeds of the arguments around best of five or best of three sets at Slam level. First and foremost the current crop of WTA players need to be asked what they want before everyone else chimes in. It’s also unbelievably difficult for fragmented player body’s to agree and organise around changes like this even if there was desire for reform. This fragmentation has always been tennis organisation’s biggest asset when it comes to preserving the status quo.
I do however want to put the final nail in the coffin that is the ‘equal pay for equal play’ argument in tennis that the journalist put to Osaka at the top of this piece, and that somehow comes up year after year. Historically women have simply not had enough of an opportunity to play the best of five set format to make it something they have chosen not to do. Outdated ideas of female endurance, conceived at a time when female tennis players were not only forbidden from keeping their own scores but also wore “ankle-length skirts with starched petticoats underneath, tightly laced corsets, all supported by a girdle…. including a stiff whalebone collar, a necktie scarf, long sleeves, a broad-brimmed hat awkwardly attached with a pin, stockings, and sturdy heeled boots”, form much of the original, still-standing foundations of why men and women play different length formats. Similar prejudice has informed countless checkpoints of this debate over the last 125 years. As a result women have never been given anything close to the same opportunity men have to play best of five sets in the most important tournaments, outside of that one poorly communicated instance in Australia in 1994. And even that proposition was limited to the final rather than the entire tournament. It still certainly wouldn’t have been ‘equal play’.
The only way the ‘equal pay for equal play’ argument would make sense would be if the women had truly had equal opportunity to play. Deciding that women should be paid less because they play a shorter format at the Slams would be like if the 100 metre race at the Olympics had historically been men-only, with the women allowed to enter only the 60 metre race instead, and then despite the women offering and even voting to run 100 metres just like the men, that request falling on deaf ears while the pay was set per metre. The disparity then being justified with vague, handwaving arguments surrounding biology or scheduling.
When debating equal pay in sport, which continues to be a controversial topic even in 2022, there are more productive places to start. The position of supporting meritocratic revenue allocation based on which tour earns more (the men’s tour currently does) at least makes logical sense. But it ignores the longer term view which accounts for historic availability bias in which men’s sport has been infinitely more accessible, better funded, and platformed than women’s sport since its conception, thus adding up to an obvious conscious and subconscious head-start that many argue should continue to be mitigated when promoting and funding both sides of the sport. Tennis, in recent years, seems to have decided that the ATP and WTA tours should try to grow together rather than be wholly separated, at least partially acknowledging this historic imbalance, as well as the many lucrative upsides of a partly-combined sport.
Tennis, thanks in large part to Billie Jean King et al, was the trailblazer of equality in major sport. There should still be pride in tennis’ four biggest events being combined and paying men and women equally, as a rare celebration of a major sport in its whole rather than composite competitor parts (although equal pay does not exist in the same way outside of the Slams due to different tours/tournaments having different financial performances and prize money structures). But tennis will have to move in one direction or the other at some point. Women playing best of five sets, men playing best of three sets, or some hybrid of the two (for e.g best of three in week one and best of five in week two) is inevitable over a long enough timescale. This sport will equalise eventually, especially as it gradually becomes an even more combined commercial package. But we must, as a sport, stop the ‘equal pay for equal play’ trope. It ignores too much of what has happened in this sport over the past 125+ years, and how that century of history has shaped where we find ourselves today.
Equal pay for equal play? No. Equal pay for equal opportunity? Yes.
— MW
Twitter: @mattracquet
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Absolutely, 100%. The ebb and flow available in 3of5 (not guaranteed, admittedly) simply cannot develop in 2of3. For all the chatter about Alcaraz's being the first Spanish man to win Miami it's worth noting that wouldn't be true if the 2005 final had been 2of3 and not 3of5, as Nadal would have beaten Federer in 2 straight.
Reading this reminds me that I shouldn't be upset at the slow amount of change in low level (scholastic) tennis, because even with decades of data points and active lobbying by members/millionaires, pro tennis can't get its act together on things like 5-sets, et. al.