Once upon a time, women in tennis meant short skirts and visible knickers. Now it’s all serious muscles and attitudes. But, Jim White asks, are women doing themselves a disservice?
Four hundred and fifty-five thousand pounds: not bad for a fortnight’s work. That’s how much Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski will be straining (and, being British, probably failing) to put in their bank account by winning Wimbledon next week.
Meanwhile, their female colleagues – known in All England Tennis Club-speak as ladies – will be pursuing 409 000. The difference between the two pots is 45 500, or roughly twice the average annual earnings in Britain.
Not for the first time, the disparity between the prizes has raised hackles among the women players. It is not so much the money – after all, for any woman with a chance of popping the cheque in her kitbag, the gap constitutes loose change.
It is not even a simple question of discrimination. It is more to do with market forces: there are many on the women’s circuit who believe their product offers a more marketable spectacle than the men’s game. And thus, if the prize money is determined by the ability to put bums on the new number one court seats at Wimbledon, they should be getting as much as, if not more than, the men.
“I think the argument from the women’s tour that they provide better entertainment is a valid one,” says BBC tennis reporter Mary Rhodes. “Especially live. Television tends to iron out the differences but at courtside, many spectators will tell you they prefer watching women play.”
As the power game has overwhelmed men’s tennis, with brute servers like Rusedski or the Australian Mark Philippoussis consistently hammering the ball at more than 160km/h, the fun is becoming restricted to watching the line judges take cover. Those who value small matters such as athleticism, change of pace and the ability to improvise are more likely to find it in evidence away from the crash, bang, game-set-and-match-to-the-player- with-the-biggest-shoulders world of the men’s game. In short, fans are in greater danger of seeing a rally when women play.
Over the past year or so, however, several leading women players have become alarmed at the arrival in their midst of what appears to be a new breed of power women, who are compromising the unique selling points of grace and skill. Venus and Serena Williams, the American sisters built like rugby lock forwards, have been closely followed by French teenager Amelie Mauresmo, a woman with shoulders so broad she is rumoured to enter the locker room sideways.
But what really alarmed the critics was the moment, at the start of a tour event in Hamburg in April, when the French player Mary Pierce removed her sweatshirt to reveal that she was wearing Sylvester Stallone’s forearms. Until then, Pierce had largely been known for a father who was not so much pushy as actively sadistic, forcing her – often resorting to the use of his fists – from the age of six to train for eight hours a day, before taking her out of education entirely at 12 to concentrate even harder on her game.
That, and a physique which, especially when squeezed into her trademark skintight one- piece playing suit, used to have the camera shutters all of a flutter every time she arrived on court. Now here she was, Olive Oyl transmogrified into Popeye.
“It was an astonishing moment,” Rhodes says. “Especially as the last time anyone had seen her play she looked perfectly normal.”
Sensing that the power game was in the ascendant, what Pierce had done was spend the winter in the gym, building her upper body strength with the assistance of the legal steroid creatine, a supplement much favoured in American sport. The results were obvious and immediate. At both Hamburg and at the later Italian Open, she reached the final, only to be defeated on both occasions in a battle of the Amazons by Venus Williams.
Steffi Graf was but one of the many surprised by the new Pierce.
“You only have to look at players like Venus Williams to see that the women’s game is becoming more like the men’s in terms of its physical demands,” Graf said last week. “Now more players will have to develop physically to cope with that. Women’s tennis won’t be as pretty in the future and maybe it will lose some of its appeal in that respect.”
Graf’s choice of adjective is instructive: “pretty” is the operative word here. While the fans might worry that a descent into the power game will diminish the enjoyment of women’s tennis, the marketeers are more alarmed about the prospect of it becoming a muscle-bound freak show. They have long reckoned the biggest asset in women’s tennis is its looks. Martina Hingis’ sulky smile, Steffi Graf’s legs, any aspect of Anna Kournikova – these are the things that shift units.
Kournikova, for instance, has sponsorship deals that far outstrip her relative strength as a player. At the recent French Open, she was burdened down by deals with Adidas and the like – yet was not even seeded. Hardly surprising, as she is ranked 20th in the world. The 20th man, incidentally, is Francisco Clavet of Spain. Who? Exactly.
Graf is a shrewd enough operator to appreciate that women’s tennis as a whole is enriched by the presence of a figure capable of extending interest in the sport beyond its traditional boundaries. And she is not the only player to express concern at the thought of all that glamour being muscled out. The American player Lindsay Davenport sniggered at Mauresmo’s extensive shoulders, while Hingis called her “half a man”.
There might have been another agenda at work here, certainly in Hingis’s comment on Mauresmo’s butch looks: she is openly gay. Indeed there was much entertainment to be had listening to the commentators at the Australian Open describe the television pictures of her girlfriend, sitting up there prominently in the crowd.
When the cameras pan in on Tim Henman’s partner, or on Brooke Shields’s in the days when she used to follow Andre Agassi, it is always remarked upon. But Mauresmo’s girlfriend was ignored, dismissed with remarks such as: “A big crowd in today.” Only one commentator identified her.
A lesbian built like a brick outhouse, powering in ace after ace: it is the stuff of nightmares for those trying to sell women’s tennis and gain prize-money parity with the men. So when Hingis dispatched Mauresmo in straight sets in the final of the Australian Open, the sigh of relief echoed from around the court down the corridors of every sponsor connected with the game and there was more relief when Steffi Graf won the French Open.