A chap should be allowed to indulge a few fantasies, no matter how preposterous. Mine is that someone sort out the gross pay inequality at major tennis tournaments.
And, say what you will about Donald Trump, but he wouldn’t stand for such injustice. So I’m hereby putting forth his candidature as the world’s tennis supremo. Yes, I know he already has a job, but I did tell you my idea was a fantasy.
The first of the yearly four Grand Slams, the Australian Open, is currently under way, and it would be a perfect time for Donald to put his foot down. If he could shut down all the federal DEI programmes in one fell swoop, he’d find it a doddle to make sure players get equal pay for equal work.
Someone has calculated that during the first week, before the quarterfinal stage, the women’s world number two, Iga Swiatek, was paid $148,000 per hour. It wasn’t specified whether the dollars were Australian or US, but that’s an arithmetic distinction without a substantive difference.
This is more than twice the hourly wage earned by her male counterpart, second seed Sasha Zverev. The two outside letters in DEI are working hard, but the middle one, which stands for Equity, has dropped out of the acronym.
However, the WTA and organisers of the majors insist that men and women should get the same prize money at every stage. At work here is an ideology that, like all other ideologies, is impervious to facts, logic or any moral considerations. This characteristic should appear in any dictionary definition of ideology, but, unless I do a Dr Johnson and compile my own, probably won’t.
This is my perennial theme, figuring in my pieces once every few years. But this year it’s different, for Swiatek’s obscene earnings have caused a public outcry. Well, perhaps not exactly an outcry, but certainly some commotion.
Ideologues of this outrage insist that Iga is so much better than anyone else that she hardly has to take more than an hour to dispatch her opponents, especially in the early rounds. That’s beside the point.
In their heyday, players like Sampras, Federer and Nadal also dominated their opponents, and Djokovic is still doing that. But even their one-sided matches hardly ever lasted less than two hours and usually closer to three.
One reason for that is that men play best out of five sets, and women best out of three. But another, just as important, reason is that the overall level of men’s tennis is infinitely better. A world number sixty or seventy can give a match to a top player and, on a good day, even knock him out. For a top woman, a match against such a lowly opponent is a warm-up session.
One fan who is aghast pointed this out: “Check all of the women’s scores from the year and you will be shocked at how many bagel and breadstick sets have been played.” (For those unfamiliar with tennis slang, in a bagel set the loser doesn’t win a single game, and in a breadstick set he only wins one.)
But most protesters insist that, if women want to deserve equal pay, they should play five-set matches too. That, I think, misses the point, or at least most of it.
An argument could be made that women are physiologically less strong than men, and they expend as much energy in three sets as men do in five. But people glued to their TV sets are only watching the results of hard work, not the work itself.
The real work is done behind the scenes, on the practice courts, running tracks and in the gyms. That’s how professional athletes hone the tools of their trade: not just strength, speed and endurance but also technique.
And, while the women can’t be expected to match the men’s physical properties, there is no reason for them not to develop the same technique. This means the ability to hit the whole repertoire of shots (and there exist dozens) with the right pace, touch and consistency.
Anyone wishing to argue that women have that ability should have watched the quarterfinal match between two burly, heavily tattooed ladies, first seed Aryna Sabalenka and twenty-seventh seed Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.
A typical point featured the two players, one of whom is the world number one, hitting hard, flat shots at each other, with no attempt at ever varying direction, length or spin. After a couple of such boring shots, one of the women would either dump the ball in the net or hit six feet out.
The match was technically inept, creatively nonexistent and invariably boring to watch. Sabalenka, who eventually won in three sets, tacitly acknowledged as much in her victory speech.
“Djokovic and Alcaraz are coming next,” she said with a self-effacing smile. “So you’ll be able to watch better tennis.”
She was right about that, except the next match wasn’t just better tennis – it was tennis from a different planet, nay universe, a totally different sport. Serena Williams, possibly the best women’s player ever, would know that as well as Sabalenka did.
When she was at the peak of her powers, Serena was asked if she’d like to play Andy Murray. “I’m not going to play Andy,” she laughed. “He’d beat me in ten minutes. It’s a different game.” Quite. The game is different. It’s the money that’s the same.
Unless you are prepared to argue that women are innately less talented than men (and if you are so prepared, I’ll report you to the Equality Commission), it’s clear that the men and the women display a different commitment to their profession.
Add to this the observable fact that many women in the Aussie Open draw are grossly unfit, and you’ll realise that it’s not just hours on court that separate the two sexes. It’s the total amount of work, and the women’s hourly wage is many times that of the men’s.
Anyone who has ever struck a tennis ball in anger knows this, and the tennis powers that be certainly do. Nevertheless, Sabalenka has no qualms about receiving as much for her QF win as Djokovic got for his – and twice as much as Alcaraz got for losing. She doubtless likes the money and is grateful to her feminist predecessors who pushed through this travesty of equality and fairness.
In this area, tennis is a microcosm of life in general. Loudmouth ideologues, whichever subset of the overall woke ideology they single out, aren’t after equality. They do battle not for equality but for the preferential treatment of the group they depict as an oppressed minority.
This is strictly political chicanery that has nothing to do with the intrinsic merits of the issue. As Thomas Sowell showed convincingly decades ago, there was no wage discrimination of either women or blacks even then, at least not in the private sector.
(Prof. Sowell can get away with publishing such research because he is black. Or perhaps he isn’t: as Joe Biden explained, negritude is a political, not racial concept. “If you vote for Trump, you ain’t black,” he once said to a black audience.)
Discrimination is merely the battle cry screamed by radical activists out to fulfil their political objectives, in this case the preferential, which is to say unfair, treatment of their flagship group. That is only an intermediate step along the way to their ultimate goal: wreaking destruction on tradition, common sense, justice and morality.
Trump knows this if he knows anything. And, to his credit, he is doing what he can within his own bailiwick, the federal government, to put an end to this political subversion, and inversion, of justice. Alas, most areas are outside his reach, and tennis is only one of them.
Still, watching woke lefties squirm is one of life’s greatest pleasures – even greater than watching tennis matches played by top men.