The Room Where It Happened: WTA Tour marks 50 years, backwards and forwards

NEW YORK—When the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) was founded in 1973, women could not apply for a credit card on their own.

Consider the literal and figurative meaning of a credit card. You will be allowed to spend money that you might not have. Call the credit card a statement of trust in the holder’s credibility, a belief on the part of the lender that, soon enough, results will be generated.

Such was the challenge for women’s professional tennis in the early 1970s: establishing credibility. “Our first step was to change the hearts and minds of people,” said Billie Jean King, the primary person behind the creation of the WTA. “We changed opinions and we changed the game.”

King made those comments Friday night in Manhattan, in front of approximately 400 people gathered to recall those origins, celebrate what has happened since, and take stock of what it all means. Singer Bre Jackson kicked it off with a rendition of “The Room Where it Happens,” a song from the musical Hamilton.

Notables from both tennis and beyond were present, including Hall of Fame inductees Tracy Austin, Francoise Durr, Chrissie Evert, Mary Pierce, Gabriela Sabatini, Pam Shriver and Virginia Wade—along with “Original Nine” Hall of Famers King, Rosie Casals, Judy Dalton, Kerry Melville Reid and Valerie Ziegenfuss. Also on-hand were pioneer broadcasters Lesley Visser from CBS and ABC’s Robin Roberts, dozens of other WTA players past and current, agents, tournament directors, past WTA CEOs, as well as the tour’s current leaders, president Micky Lawler and CEO Steve Simon.

The setting, the Ziegfeld Ballroom, was massively bigger than the small conference room located inside London’s Gloucester Hotel, where the WTA was willed into life one long day in June 1973. That year, four days prior to the start of Wimbledon, roughly 60 women’s tennis players gathered, led by King. Fourteen of them came on-stage Friday night, including the Hall of Famers who were active then, and Trish Bostrom, Cynthia Doerner, Ilana Kloss, Ingrid Lofdahl Bentzer, Racquel Giscafre, Peggy Michel, Janet Newberry, Laura Rossouw and Betty Stove.

Half a century ago, as the women huddled in London around the table, Stove received a firm directive from King: Betty, guard the door. No one was leaving that room until an association was formed. Call it the women’s tennis version of the Constitutional Convention, complete with by-laws authored by King’s husband at the time, Larry (he too was present Friday evening). Eventually, there emerged the Women’s Tennis Association, King as president, Wade as vice president, Lesley Hunt as assistant vice president, Lofdahl and Durr as co-secretaries, Stove as treasurer. Said Roberts, “It took guts to create the WTA.”

Our first step was to change the hearts and minds of people. We changed opinions and we changed the game. Billie Jean King

Now it was 50 years later. The ancestors of the WTA had been the “Original Nine,” the group of women who, under the leadership of World Tennis magazine founder and publisher-editor Gladys Heldman, had turned pro for a symbolic dollar bill and started the Virginia Slims Circuit in the fall of 1970. Lawler in her speech noted how the tour’s title sponsor had gone from a cigarette manufacturer to Hologic, a corporation with a strong focus on improving women’s health. Taking it all in as she addressed the audience, Coco Gauff compared Friday evening’s event to, “a women’s tennis history book that has come to life.”

A vivid and epic example came when Evert spoke on-stage with her ESPN colleague, Chris McKendry, about the ways competition and camaraderie had constantly shaped and reshaped Evert’s textured relationship with her greatest rival, Martina Navratilova—the two dominating the game for well over a decade, collectively winning 36 major singles titles (18 each).

From 1973 to ’88, these two had played one another 80 times, their striking contrast of style and personality greatly raising the WTA’s profile and popularity. The Evert-Navratilova connection had only grown deeper through various life transitions. “It’s just so ironic that Martina and I had cancer at the same time,” said Evert.

Navratilova, unable to attend Friday’s festivities due to a family commitment, provided a video expressing her affection for Evert. Said Evert about Navratilova, “We need to be close.”

Austin and Sabatini also shared time together on-stage. This pair of US Open champions from different decades (Austin in ’79 and ’81, Sabatini in ’90) reflected on the tour’s growth, from staff members, tournaments, and prize money to, in Sabatini’s case with her native Argentina, an entire country taking pride in her achievements.

The WTA’s golden anniversary occurs amid a year of other touchstone moments that greatly define the history of women’s tennis. Nineteen seventy-three was when the US Open became the first major to award equal prize money. September 20 marks 50 years since King beat Bobby Riggs in the iconic “Battle of the Sexes” match. Let it also be noted how in that summer of ’73, soon after the WTA was formed, as one document after another was crafted and refined, as meetings took place late into the night, King competed at Wimbledon – and ended up winning the singles, doubles and mixed. Asked just a few years ago how long it took her to recover from 1973, King said, “I’m still recovering.”

Thirteen months after King’s win over Riggs, Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Women could now independently apply for credit cards. Surely, everything from the revolutionary efforts of the “Original Nine” to the establishment of the WTA and the tour’s blossoming popularity had played a role in this happening. Credibility earned. “Sports is a microcosm of society,” said Roberts.

As usually happens at these events, attendees were given a gift. Frequently, that’s a piece of clothing or an ornament. But this time, all received King’s latest book, Trailblazers: The Unmatched History of Women’s Tennis.

So was Friday evening simply a fond look back? Not quite, when you take in how King sees history less as a straight line to the past, but instead more of a loop, defined by continuous motion.

“There are always two parties,” said the American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The establishment and the movement.” Tennis, of course, is a game of movement, a sport that starts with small steps from the ground. To swing forward, you must first take the racquet back. As King has said, “To know and study the past is to know who you are so you can move into the future.”

Said Gauff, “We need to know what came before us.” And as Gauff has also said, “I promise to always use my platform to help make the world a better place.”

Fifty years since its inception, the WTA endures, not merely as a well-established sports organization, but also as a movement.