Battles are not over in women’s equality fight
When tennis fans were going online to check scores from last year’s U.S. Open tennis tournament, there no doubt were many who were looking for results of matches involving Serena Williams, who was going for a calendar-year grand slam.
We’re guessing that Raymond Moore wasn’t one of them.
Moore, an ex-player from South Africa who was an owner and managing partner of the venerable men’s and women’s tournament at Indian Wells, Calif., for 20-plus years before becoming CEO of the event in 2012, took the opportunity last week in a conversation with reporters to denigrate the female players who make up half of his tourney.
Said Moore, “In my next life, when I come back, I want to be someone in the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association), because they ride on the coattails of men. They don’t make any decisions, and they are lucky. They are very, very lucky. If I was a lady player, I’d go down every night on my knees and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal were born, because they have carried this sport.”
It got worse.
Moore went on to praise Williams as perhaps the greatest women’s player ever, then added that when Williams retires, the WTA has “a handful of very attractive prospects that can assume the mantle.” Asked to clarify if he meant physically attractive or attractive because of their games, he said, “I mean both. They are physically attractive and competitively attractive.”
We assume that at that point, Moore found the hole he was standing in deep enough, and quit digging.
His comments, once they were widely disseminated, created an immediate firestorm. Moore backpedaled like an NFL cornerback, saying, “I am truly sorry for those remarks, and apologize to all the players and WTA as a whole.”
When he made his initial comments to reporters Sunday, Moore said he planned to stay in his post for years to come. As the furor over his remarks built, that plan crumbled, and by Monday night, Moore had announced his resignation.
Williams was clearly taken aback by Moore’s original statements, saying, “Obviously, I don’t think any woman should be down on their knees thanking anybody like that. I think (sister) Venus, myself, a number of players have been – if I could tell you every day how many people say they don’t watch tennis unless they’re watching myself or my sister, I couldn’t even bring up that number.”
In fact, there exist many tennis fans who prefer the women’s game, with its increased emphasis on strategy and precision, over the men’s game, which can be more about brute strength of serve, especially on hard courts.
This is not the women’s professional basketball league, the WNBA, which features a game bearing little resemblance to that offered by the NBA. Aside from the power aspect, there are more similarities than differences between men’s and women’s tennis, and the women’s game is in no way an inferior product.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, women’s tennis was sponsored by Virginia Slims cigarettes, a brand made for women that had the slogan, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.”
Women have come even further in the decades since, in nearly every pursuit imaginable. But we shouldn’t forget that there are still people who think like Raymond Moore, probably lots of them. The fight for women’s equality has been, and will continue to be, a long one, and many battles have yet to be won. Chalk up Raymond Moore’s exit as another small victory.