The Virginia Slims Circuit was a
tennis
Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball ...
tour consisting of a group of originally nine female professional players. Formed in 1970, the Virginia Slims Circuit eventually became the basis for the later
WTA Tour
The WTA Tour is a worldwide top-tier tennis tour for women organized by the Women's Tennis Association. The second-tier tour is the WTA 125K series, and third-tier is the ITF Women's Circuit. The men's equivalent is the ATP Tour.
WTA Tour tou ...
. The players, dubbed the ''Original 9'', rebelled against the
United States Lawn Tennis Association
The United States Tennis Association (USTA) is the national governing body for tennis in the United States. A not-for-profit organization with more than 700,000 members, it invests 100% of its proceeds to promote and develop the growth of tennis ...
(USLTA) because of the wide inequality between the amount of prize money paid to male tennis players and to female tennis players.
Background
The Open era began with the
British Hard Court Championships in
Bournemouth in 1968. At the first Open
Wimbledon, the prize-fund difference was 2.5:1 in favour of men.
Billie Jean King won £750 for taking the title, while
Rod Laver took £2,000. The total purses of the competitions were £14,800 for men and £5,680 for women. By the 1970s, the pay difference which had been a 2.5:1 ratio between men and women had increased. In 1969, ratios of 5:1 in terms of pay were common at smaller tournaments; by 1970, these figures increased to 8:1 and even 12:1.
The situation came to a head in 1970, when most tournaments offered four times as much prize money to men than they did to women. At the
1970 Italian Open, men's singles champion
Ilie Năstase
Ilie Theodoriu Năstase (, born 19 July 1946) is a former World No. 1 Romanian tennis player. He was ranked world No. 1 in singles from 23 August 1973 to 2 June 1974, and was the first man to hold the top position on the computerized ATP rankin ...
was paid US$3,500 while women's singles champion King received just US$600. On top of this, the USLTA failed to organise any tournaments for women in 1970.
The campaign
King and eight other female tennis players – Americans
Rosemary Casals
Rosemary "Rosie" Casals (born September 16, 1948) is an American former professional tennis player.
Casals earned her reputation as a rebel in the tennis world when she began competing in the early 1960s. During a tennis career that spanned mor ...
,
Nancy Richey
Nancy Richey (born August 23, 1942) is an American former tennis player. Richey won two major singles titles (the 1967 Australian Championships and 1968 French Open) and four major women's doubles titles (the 1965 US Championships, 1966 Austral ...
,
Peaches Bartkowicz,
Kristy Pigeon,
Valerie Ziegenfuss
Valerie Bradshaw (née Ziegenfuss; June 29, 1949) is an American former female professional tennis player. She started as an amateur player at the beginning of the 1970s, then turned professional.
She is most famous for being one of the Original ...
, and
Julie Heldman; and Australians
Kerry Melville Reid and
Judy Tegart Dalton
Judy Tegart Dalton (née Tegart; born 12 December 1937) is an Australian former professional tennis player. She won nine major doubles titles, and completed the career Grand Slam in women's doubles. Five of her doubles titles were with Marga ...
– decided to enlist World Tennis magazine publisher
Gladys Heldman
Gladys Medalie Heldman (May 13, 1922 – June 22, 2003) was an American tennis player, manager and magazine publisher. She was the founder of ''World Tennis'' magazine. As a manager, she supported and represented Billie Jean King and eight other f ...
to help negotiate for greater equality in prize money and provide valuable
public relations
Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing and disseminating information from an individual or an organization (such as a business, government agency, or a nonprofit organization) to the public in order to influence their perception. ...
assistance. All the players were putting their tennis careers at risk because the influential USLTA did not back them.
Gladys Heldman and the "Original 9" decided to target the
Pacific Southwest Championships
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...
held in
Los Angeles
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, largest city in the U.S. state, state of California and the List of United States cities by population, sec ...
on the grounds that it paid eight times more money to men than it did to women. Heldman attempted to get the tournament chairman, former professional tennis player
Jack Kramer, to reduce the inequality between the prize money purses for men and women. Kramer refused, leading the "Original 9" to declare at a press conference held at
Forest Hills, New York
Forest Hills is a mostly residential neighborhood in the central portion of the borough of Queens in New York City. It is adjacent to Corona to the north, Rego Park and Glendale to the west, Forest Park to the south, Kew Gardens to the southeas ...
that they would boycott the Pacific Southwest Championships and play at what would become the first Virginia Slims Circuit event, a
US$
The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...
7,500 tournament held in
Houston, Texas in September 1970.
Despite the USLTA's declaration that it would not sanction this event, the "Original 9" went ahead, with Casals defeating Dalton in the final 5–7, 6–1, 7–5.
The formation
Heldman, with the assistance of Joe Cullman of
Philip Morris, then offered
US$
The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...
5,000 out of her own pocket to allow the "Original 9" to sign token $1 contracts and set up their own tour of eight professional tournaments in 1970.
The tour was sponsored by
Virginia Slims
Virginia Slims is an American brand of cigarettes owned by Altria. It is manufactured by Philip Morris USA (in the United States) and Philip Morris International (outside the United States).
Virginia Slims are narrower ( circumference) than st ...
. This independent women's professional tennis circuit provided more equal prize money than had been provided previously by the USLTA and other organisations.
Despite the USLTA's suspension of the "Original 9" from its tournaments, by the end of the year the Virginia Slims Circuit was able to boost its numbers from nine to forty members, which helped pave the way for the first full year season of the Circuit in 1971. Subsequently, in the aftermath of the creation of the
Women's Tennis Association
The Women's Tennis Association (WTA) is the principal organizing body of women's professional tennis. It governs the WTA Tour which is the worldwide professional tennis tour for women and was founded to create a better future for women's tenn ...
in 1973, the Virginia Slims Circuit would eventually absorb the
ILTF's ''Women's Grand Prix'' circuit and become the
WTA Tour
The WTA Tour is a worldwide top-tier tennis tour for women organized by the Women's Tennis Association. The second-tier tour is the WTA 125K series, and third-tier is the ITF Women's Circuit. The men's equivalent is the ATP Tour.
WTA Tour tou ...
.
See also
*
History of tennis
The racket sport traditionally named lawn tennis, invented in Birmingham, England now commonly known simply as tennis, is the direct descendant of what is now denoted real tennis or royal tennis, which continues to be played today as a separate sp ...
References
;General
*
*
;Specific
Further reading
*
{{Women's tennis seasons, state=collapsed
WTA Tour, *
History of tennis