For the millions who view Billie Jean King as an icon of feminism, LGBTQ rights and equality all around the globe, it might have been shocking and perhaps disappointing to hear her on the eve of Wimbledon offer support for tennis’ recent thirst to get in business with Saudi Arabia just like golf, soccer, Formula 1 and a broadening profile of global sports.
“I’m a huge believer in engagement,” King said at an event in London celebrating the 50th anniversary of the WTA’s founding. “I don’t think you really change unless you engage.”
At first blush, it may seem strange that one of the first openly gay athletes with worldwide fame, the founder of the WTA and the driving force behind getting equal prize money for women beginning at the 1973 U.S. Open has given her blessing to the inevitable chase for money from a country that would have embraced none of those things, and whose human rights record still falls short of even minimum standards in the modern-day Western world.
But King is also a realist and a highly successful businesswoman who knows where to push and where to compromise. And in this case, she knows where the wind is blowing. At this point, the question for tennis and other similarly situated sports is not so much about whether it’s necessary to accept Saudi investment, but rather how to do it in a way that retains a shred of dignity and avoids the kind of debacle that split the golf world in two over the past year.
The ATP has acknowledged active discussions with the Saudis, and WTA chairman Steve Simon said he made a visit there in February.
Is it sportswashing if the WTA or ATP Tour accepts tens of millions in investments in exchange for holding a big tournament in Riyadh and putting the Aramco or visitsaudi.com logo on the court at various tournaments? You can certainly make that case.
Is it unsavory for a sport that has arguably come the farthest in equality between men and women to embrace a country where women’s rights have broadened in recent years but still would not be considered acceptable to anyone on the WTA Tour? Absolutely.
Would it be hypocritical for the WTA — one of the most progressive sports organizations in the world with many prominent LGBTQ players over the course of its existence — to get in business with a country where homosexuality is illegal and could be subject to the death penalty? There’s no doubt.
Daria Kasatkina, the 10th-ranked player in the world who came out as a lesbian last year, said Wednesday after winning her second-round match at Wimbledon she would have major reservations about the partnership.
“It’s easier for the men because they feel pretty good there,” Kasatkina told reporters. “We don’t feel the same way. Money talks in our world right now. For me, I don’t think that everything is about the money.”
But the history of professional tennis, and particularly the WTA, has always been intertwined with pushing boundaries and making compromises for the sake of providing opportunities just to make a living.
We should never forget — and King certainly doesn’t — that when the women’s tennis tour was formed, it was backed financially at the beginning and for years after by Virginia Slims. The logo of the tour depicted a woman holding a tennis racquet in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
King took some heat for that in the early 1980s, when people began to realize how absurd it was that a company whose product was contributing to a spike in women’s lung cancer rates was financially backing the most prominent sport for women.
When asked about that during a promotional event in Boston, she answered: “I believe in the free enterprise system. It’s up to the woman herself to make that choice whether to smoke or not smoke. The most important thing is that we’re well-informed and that we make our own decision.” In 1999, well after her playing career, Philip Morris — the parent company of Virginia Slims — appointed King to its Board of Directors, where she served for five years.
King always justified that decision by pointing out that Virginia Slims went to bat for women’s tennis when nobody else would, a decision that helped change the trajectory of the sport and provided opportunities to an untold number of young girls and women who wanted to play.
And though the scale might be different now, there are some similarities to this moment.
Over the last 20 years, tennis’ prominence and its financial strength have become much more intertwined with the four Grand Slam events, which are independent entities run by Tennis Australia, the French Tennis Federation, the All England Lawn Tennis Club and the U.S. Tennis Association. So the question for the ATP and WTA Tours has increasingly become how they sustain and market a product that not only makes money but provides a pathway for players who aren’t making the quarterfinals or semifinals of Grand Slams to earn a living, or for young players simply to pay their bills when they’re trying to climb the rankings.
Unlike in golf, where the so-called “grow the game” narrative often felt like a guise for Phil Mickelson or Dustin Johnson to buy another yacht, the scale in tennis is just different.
The 80th-ranked player in the ATP points race this year, Cristian Garin, has made $414,571 in prize money this year. His counterpart on the women’s tour, Laura Siegemund, has made $382,149. When you consider taxes and the fact that players have to pay for their own travel and coaching, it’s not easy to make a career financially viable. Players on the Challenger Tour, which is where many have to start to build their ranking, typically lose money week-to-week unless they’re winning tournaments or making finals and have to rely on other sources of financial support from a sponsor or perhaps a national federation to make it work.
So you can understand why there’s an openness to the Saudis, especially for the WTA, which lost a significant amount of prize money when in late 2021 it announced a suspension of events in China until former player Peng Shuai’s allegations of sexual abuse by a government official were investigated, and that her safety and freedom could be verified.
Though the WTA’s stand was admirable, the reality is that it couldn’t have played in China anyway until this year because of the severe COVID-related restrictions that were still in place there. And in September, the tour will indeed return to China without the investigation it wanted.
In the idealized world of what Billie Jean King stands for, you’d want her to stand up and say that the WTA should only go to Saudi Arabia if it expands women’s rights and drops anti-homosexuality laws. But that’s not how it’s going to work if the WTA’s primary goal is to make life better for its players.
“How are we going to change things if we don’t engage? It’s hard, it’s very hard,” King told The National, an English-language newspaper out of Abu Dhabi. “So when we go to a country and play a tournament, just think, if you’re a little girl, or a parent, that they get to see these women being very successful and great athletes, and it helps change the hearts and minds of people and how they think.”
That answer may not satisfy the image of King as a trailblazer, but it’s entirely consistent with her history as a realist.
