Listening to history: Rare recordings highlight the fight for women’s tennis

Rarely heard voice recordings of trailblazing tennis entrepreneur Gladys Heldman and firsthand accounts from Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals and Nancy Richey are features of a TennisWorthy podcast released this week by the International Tennis Hall of Fame, as part of Women’s History Month.

Introduced by ITHF President Patrick McEnroe and compiled by esteemed tennis historian Chris Bowers, the 25-minute oral history brings to life the tumultuous summer of 1970, when nine of the world’s best women players joined forces with Heldman to rewrite the future of professional tennis.

Before delving into the archival interviews, Bowers sets the scene.

Original 9: A legacy of independence and empowerment

“For a revolution, or a war of independence to happen it requires two things: the right context and the right people,” he said. “In the great battle for independence in 1970 that gave birth to modern day women’s tennis, there were two crucial people.

“One of them was Billie Jean King.”

The other was Heldman, the visionary owner and publisher of World Tennis Magazine. And the context was the ever-widening gap in playing opportunities and pay for women players, who had not benefitted from the instigation of Open tennis in 1968.

Against the broader rumblings of societal change, matters came to a head in August, 1970 when Jack Kramer’s prestigious Pacific Southwest Championships announced the women’s field would be paid little more than one tenth the men.

An exasperated King, Casals and Richey invited Heldman -- who was a mentor and confidante as well as a savvy businesswoman -- to lunch and told her they wanted to boycott Kramer’s tournament.

“Men were still running the tournaments, promoting them, and very few women were involved in all of that,” Casals said. “It was something that was difficult to maneuver because every time we needed to talk to somebody about women, it was a man.”

Heldman counselled restraint but when her efforts at diplomacy with Kramer failed, she set about organizing her own eight-woman tournament at the Houston Racquet Club. Inevitably, this attracted the ire of administrators at the USLTA and their counterparts in Australia, who threatened to blacklist any player who took part in the unsanctioned event.

Throwing caution to the wind, Heldman was ready to invest her own money in the venture, but she asked her friend Joe Cullman, the tennis-crazy chief of tobacco giant Philip Morris, if she could use his company’s Virginia Slims branding for added cachet. He agreed and, even better, provided one third of the prize money purse of $7,500.

The podcast goes behind the fraught scenes of the iconic dollar bill photo taken in Houston on Sept. 23, 1970 and explains the legal purpose behind the $1 dollar pro contracts Heldman signed with her players.

While these contracts did protect the athletes and indeed anyone associated with the tournament from being sued, they did not stop tennis authorities from imposing penalties -- which they did in the form of suspension from official competition, including the Grand Slams.

Nonetheless, the players were ready to take a stand.

“I mean, there was no money, so it was worth taking the chance,” Richey said. “I would rather throw myself in with Gladys Heldman who was a success at everything she ever did, versus the USLTA which was doing nothing.”

And what was King thinking as she held that hugely symbolic dollar bill aloft?

“Oh, my God, we’re actually going to try to do this. And that whole week I kept calling [then-husband] Larry and saying, ‘This is nice to have this tournament. But then what?’”

The Virginia Slims Invitational was won by Casals, who defeated Dalton in the final. The event was such a success -- notably in the eyes of Cullman -- that a 21-tournament Virginia Slims Circuit was mounted early in 1971.

It was an incredible feat of organization and logistics, spearheaded by Heldman, but the sport’s politics remained fraught and the USLTA even mounted a rival tour.

So on the eve of Wimbledon in 1973, Billie Jean, understanding that dividing the top talent was just bad business, brought 60 players together for another ride-or-die moment at London’s Gloucester Hotel.

At that meeting, the players chose unity when they voted to form the WTA. Later that summer, the US Open introduced equal prize money, and King defeated Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes. Women’s tennis was on its way -- with a little help from its ‘friends.’

“If the USLTA had not suspended them, if Jack Kramer had not screamed about women’s tennis, if he had not put them down, women’s tennis might have died,” Heldman said in 1979, the year she was inducted into the Hall of Fame.

“It lived because it came to a fighting climax and because Billie Jean and the other women, but mainly Billie Jean, was such a marvelous spokeswoman.”

The TennisWorthy podcast is further enlivened by anecdotes from Judy Tegart Dalton and Julie Heldman, Gladys’ daughter. The powerful posse that has gone down in the history books as the Original 9 also comprises Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Kerry Melville Reid and Valerie Ziegenfuss.

In 2021, they became the first group of players to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

“The enormity of what the Original 9 achieved went well beyond tennis,” Bowers said.

“How much one views it as part of the women’s lib movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s is open to question. Not all pioneering women players of the time see it quite so broadly. But there’s no question they inspired people in other sports and walks of life.”

This year’s induction celebration will be held at the Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island from Aug. 21-23, with Maria Sharapova and Bob and Mike Bryan set to be enshrined.

Highlights of the Fanfest surrounding the main ceremony will include a pro-celebrity tournament comprised of two teams made up of Hall of Famers Andy Roddick, Kim Clijsters, Tracy Austin, Jim Courier and Gigi Fernandez.

Listen to the full Original 9 podcast. And here's information on how to enjoy this summer’s festivities.