Original 9

She and Billie Jean decided that they would just start their own tournament.

So that's how we got the original nine.

Nine women who broke off from the traditional world of tennis, one of them being Billie Jean King, and signed a $1 contract.

That's right, just $1.

It was the 70s.

Let them cook.

One tournament with those original nine turned into the Virginia Slims Tour Circuit, and that would eventually become the Women's Tennis Association that we know and love today.

But Billie wasn't done creating change.

It was the year, Clare, in which the first seeds of the revolution were planted.

And we hear often about the Original Nine, a group of nine players, including Billie Jean King and Rosie Casals, who signed symbolic $1 contracts with a promoter called Gladys Heldman, and then competed in an unsanctioned Virginia Slims Invitational event in Houston.

Uh, not without some risk because it didn't go down well with all the tennis authorities of the time, to say the least.

That led to a circuit of events in 1971, and then to the formation of the WTA tour in 1973.

...

when you look at all sports, where either deliberately or, you know, if one's being generous, uh, maybe just lack of thought, women were sidelined, they were diminished.

And it's pretty brave of this group, the original nine, and then encouraging everyone else to come along with them to say, "We won't have this anymore, and we are going to change it." And the great thing for women's tennis is it doesn't take too long before not just one, but two superstars emerge who have this great rivalry, and I'm talking about Chris Evert and then Martina Navratilova, and they make each other better.

This is the rivalry that I inherited when I first started to become aware and get interested in tennis in roughly the mid-1980s, and they were still the very dominant pair of the time, even though that rivalry was many, many years old.