EQUAL pay in tennis majors has long been both hotly debated and a benchmark for women's sport worldwide. Tennis equality has taken on a different twist amid the coronavirus pandemic and what it serves up next could be pivotal to shaping all sports grappling with recovery from the grassroots up.
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And it appears headline men are taking up the charge.
Looking back on $1 contracts to move forward
Fifty years ago Judy Dalton was among nine women, including American Billie-Jean King, to sign one-dollar professional tennis contracts to make a statement on the large-scale inequalities between the men's and women's games. It was two years into the Open Era.
This paved the way for big names in the decades to come - Steffi Graf, Serena Williams, Ash Barty - to win big, but also to grow the women's tour and in turn, really boost the standard.
Dalton, who used to live in Durham Lead, told The Courier the women's circuit was likely to take a big hit from pandemic suspensions to tournaments - an issue most sports are starting to face right now.
While Dalton said it was unlikely player pay would get as low as her struggles in 1970s there was little doubt this would hurt players down the list in world rankings most. Players like Ballarat's Zoe Hives, whose WTA singles ranking is 296 (as of last month).
Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer have already been in talks in how to best help lower-ranked players.
Leading men are taking up serve on post-iso tennis equality
Djokovic, the ATP players' council president, this week came out and said they were looking at ways for the men's top 100 singles players and those in the top 20 for doubles to pool earnings or skew prize money and effectively subsidise fellow players on the men's tour.
The men's world number one spoke to tennis rival and friend Stan Wawrinka in an Instagram chat about how most men outside the top 200 or so lack federation support or sponsorship and were pretty much on their own.
These lower-ranked players are the ones they need for tournaments and they need for the future.
Federer later came out on Twitter proposing it was time for the men's and women's tours (ATP and WTA) to merge in a unified governing body - something the Original 9 had also wanted in 1970.
"It probably should have happened a long time ago, but maybe now is really the time," Federer posted. "These are tough times in every sport and we can come out of this with two weakened bodies or one stronger body."
Ripple effects will reach Ballarat
Zoe Hives has been gradually making her return to training at her family home in Kingston after a horror year sidelined with glandular fever and the dizzying effects of postural tachycardia syndrome.
Illness ended a breakthrough period for Hives in which she won her first round in singles at the 2019 Australian Open and claimed her first WTA doubles title that April alongside Astra Sharm.
Should there be no return to the tour soon, there will be no events to help boost promising players, like Hives, on the world stage. For example, the annual Australian Fed Cup Tennis Foundation's Breakfast with the Stars coinciding with the Australian Open.
These are the kinds of ripple effects confronting all sports including our community football and netball leagues.
This is definitely more than just the game
Interestingly, this was to have been the year when Dalton and the Original 9 were to be celebrated as special guests at Wimbledon and the US Open marking 50 years in September when they held up those one-dollar bills.
There was to have been a special trip to Houston, home to the first tournament on the group's breakaway tour that changed women's professional tennis forever.
That was an era in which Dalton and fellow Australian Kerry Reid were banned from playing in Australia entirely.
While an incredibly courageous move, courage and disruption for the betterment of tennis and women's sport now need not go back to a one-dollar stand. Not when women's sport has made such big advances - and the women's cricket world cup is a huge example of this.
But the message of unity is vital.
Federer and Djokovic are hitting the right notes in trying to spark change now, despite the uncertainty, rather than leaving the fight for sporting equality until it is too late.
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