It wasn’t simply the unprecedented trend through which {the teenager} stormed to her first Grand Slam title after beginning out as a qualifier in New York, nor the imperious method through which she received all seven matches with out conceding a set.
As an alternative, it was the affirmation in her positivity and real ardour for the sport and the mix of energy, precision and panache which she displayed in opposition to opponents together with the Olympic champion Belinda Bencic and Leylah Fernandez, whom she defeated within the last, that right here is an athlete with the potential to dominate tennis for the following decade if – and this may be the onerous half – she will be able to ignore the hype.
The mass outpouring of pleasure and celebration in response to Emma Raducanu’s outstanding triumph on the US Open has been one of many nice sporting tales of this or another decade.
Martina Navratilova was one of many first to congratulate the British participant, however she additionally despatched out a brusque message to those that criticised Raducanu at Wimbledon – together with outdated ‘Superbrat’ himself John McEnroe – that kids who emerge into the highlight deserve time to develop and adapt to their new existence in a world goldfish bowl.
She was talking from expertise. As certainly was Billie Jean King, whose new autobiography All In gives a stark reminder of how not too long ago the concept of girls being taken severely in organising their very own tennis circuit was derided and decried.
King, who was among the many driving forces in remodeling attitudes inside a notoriously chauvinist setting, has outlined in graphic element the attitudes which prevailed when she met Bobby Riggs in what was billed the Battle of the Sexes in 1973.
At that stage, the spirit of Ron Burgundy’s Anchorman was flourishing all through American society. Riggs, a former Wimbledon singles, doubles and combined doubles winner – in 1939 – may need been 55 by the point he signed a contract to sort out King on the Houston Astrodome in Texas, however turned a nationwide superstar by saying: “Males are supreme and girls ought to keep within the kitchen and take care of the youngsters.”
As King, who amassed somewhat matter of 39 Grand Slam titles in her profession, recalled: “Riggs wasn’t the one man saying that girls belonged within the house or that we had been constitutionally incapable of dealing with robust jobs and stress.
“By the mid-Nineteen Seventies, solely 9% of physicians in America had been feminine as a result of medical faculty admissions had been withheld from them for years. Ladies’s illustration was additionally abysmally low in legislation, politics, CEO positions, piloting a passenger aeroplane and numerous different endeavours.
“Bobby’s male chauvinist pig act tapped into anxities about males’s altering standing, and a number of what he mentioned wouldn’t be tolerated immediately. However I turned a logo for individuals who had been bored with seeing ladies dismissed en masse, demeaned as second-class residents, and shut out of alternatives in all places and never simply sports activities.
“Ladies had been nonetheless incomes solely 56.6% of what a person earned for a similar job in 1973 and the hole was worse for ladies of color.
“Sexism and racism abounded. The glass ceiling was actual.”
Some individuals have dismissed the competition on September 20 as a trumped-up irrelevance, but it surely actually wasn’t that to Billie Jean. The group of 30,472 was a report for a tennis match, whereas an estimated 90 million viewers watched worldwide on tv.
When King made her grand entrance, and the band performed I Am Lady (the Helen Reddy hit tune), the TV viewers was handled to the next Burgundy-flavoured commentary from Howard Cosell, essentially the most well-known announcer within the States of his classic: “And right here comes Billie Jean King….a really enticing younger woman.
