Anyway, various obligations - not all of them relating to my upcoming vacation - have got me with a full plate for today and tomorrow, but I'm still hoping to post an entry on the WTA Tour's Roadmap, which I'm supposed to be discussing with Larry Scott tonight. It's a propitious moment, because of the most recent rush of publicity about the equal prize-money issue. I addressed this over at my ESPN guest blog today.
My fundamental position on the Big Ticket issue of equal pay has shifted some.
Tennis players are not postal workers (although Nikolay Davydenko could easily be taken for a friendly mailman, hat slightly askew, chronically overburdened by a huge leather bag on his shoulder, with a nasty beagle lying in wait behind every gate).
They're more like actors, public speakers, musicians and others of either gender whose pay tends - sometimes, very tenuously and for odd reasons - to be linked to the crowds and ticket sales they can generate.
At the same time, tennis pros are competing for sums, not performing specific tasks or putting in specified hours to earn them (In fact, if tennis players were paid by the hour, Roger Federer would be broke. Dude gets it done before most of the other clowns punch in and check the sports scores). Given that, it clearly seems to send a wrong signal when women compete for a smaller pot than the men when their sport is as fully formed, although today's relatively small disparity in the pot sizes greatly weakens that signal.
Okay, we also have an 800-pound gorilla in the room: ideology. You read Larry Scott's comments this morning (see my ESPN post) and you'd think he'd just brokered the deal allowing women the vote. But this is precisely why nobody can really look at the prize-money issue in rational and reasonable way. Here's the curious thing: Billie Jean King launched the revolution that led to an independent women's tour because she earned something like seven times less than Ilie Nastase when both of them won the Italian Open title. The important thing here is that the IO was a dual gender event, as are the Grand Slams events. This points to the real issue here, if you care to take ideology and symbology out of the equation: Who is really doing the heavy lifting when it comes to drawing in the fans?
By this standard, there is a clear, simple way to determine the pot sizes at Grand Slam events. How much women money do the women and men respectively compete for on their own tours? That is, if the men routinely compete for $4 million and the women for, say, $3 million, wouldn't that suggest that the appropriate sum of prize money for women at a Grand Slam would be three-fourths that of them men? Or, if the numbers bear it out, three-fourths more?
That's about as close as I can come to an answer unconditioned by ideology or a gender bias either way. Of course, many other factors come into play to qualify this formula, including ideology. And there's also this slightly creepy aspect of having things determined by mathematical formulas or, worse yet, bean counters. Either way, though, I echo the sentiments of those who say they are not going to lose any sleep over compensation issues for tennis stars. And I do find it off-putting when people try to cast this issue in terms of women's rights in any meaningful sense of that term.
