Chris Evert was right in saying that the top female players of her day couldn’t possibly hope to compete with the top males. And that’s still true today- Venus Williams would be whipped soundly by any male in the top 200. And yet…
Today, at least, the women’s game is more fun to watch, ESPECIALLY at Wimbledon. At a typical Wimbledon men’s final, we’re forced to watch the likes of Pete Sampras and Goran Ivanisevic firing 200 mph aces at each other, and that is boooooooriiiing! At least in the women’s matches, there’s some sustained rallying.
And it’s interesting to see how much the women’s game has changed just in my lifetime. I DREAD rain delays at WImbledon, and do you know why? Because during rain delays, NBC always shows re-runs of the “classic” 1970 match between Billie Jean King and Margaret Court! It’s a “classic” only in the same sense that “Plan 9 From Outer Space” is! When you see how lame, how pitiful how weak, how SLOOOOW the top two women in the game were just 30 years ago, you don’t know whether to laugh, cry or snore. Conversely, reruns of the great men’s matches of the 1970s are often as gripping now as they were then.
Today? Today, the men are TOO strong, fast and athletic for their own good. The very things that make them outstanding athletes now make them dull to watch. Meanwhile, the women of today are ALMOST as strong and fast as the men were in the 1970s. The wussy, namby-pamby, patty-cake tennis of Billie Jean King is long gone. Women like Venus Williams, Steffi Graf (yes, I KNOW she retired) and Jennifer Capriati could NEVER beat a currently ranked male player… but if they could get into a time machine and travel back to 1978 or so, I suspect they could give Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors a run for their money.