Tennis History | Houston Racquet Club — nine players signed for one dollar each, 23 September 1970

The dispute that produced the women's professional tour was about a ratio, not a principle.

At the Pacific Southwest Championships in Los Angeles that September, run by the promoter Jack Kramer, the men's champion was to receive $12,500 and the women's champion $1,500. The International Tennis Hall of Fame gives both figures. More than eight to one is what the players were actually arguing about, and it is worth keeping the two numbers in the same sentence, because the argument was never abstract.

Gladys Heldman, who published World Tennis magazine, arranged a rival event in Houston for the same week. Philip Morris put its Virginia Slims cigarette brand behind it, and the purse was $7,500 — half of what the Los Angeles men's champion alone would collect. The tournament is recorded under two names, the Virginia Slims Invitational and the Houston Women's Invitation. It was unsanctioned, and entering it meant defying the United States Lawn Tennis Association.

On 23 September 1970 nine players signed contracts with Heldman for one dollar each: Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals, Nancy Richey, Julie Heldman, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Valerie Ziegenfuss, Judy Tegart Dalton and Kerry Melville Reid. The dollar was the consideration that made a contract a contract. Its effect was to make them Heldman's contracted professionals rather than amateurs the USLTA could discipline. The WTA's own account of the episode says the association threatened to curtail the careers of everyone involved, and that Australian administrators said much the same to the two Australians in the group. Read that as the association's account of itself, which is what it is.

Rosie Casals won the tournament.

The sequence is the argument. Three years later the US Open became the first of the four major championships to pay its two singles champions the same — $25,000 each — and it did so after King threatened a boycott. Parity at the majors was not granted to players who asked for it. It was granted to players who by then had somewhere else to play.

Status note, current at 3 September 2026: several of the nine are living. Nothing above goes beyond the tournament record and the published accounts cited.

**Where this is pinned.** The Houston Racquet Club, 10709 Memorial Drive, Houston, Texas. Two independent sources: the US Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returns 29.766243, -95.499342 for the street address, and the OpenStreetMap sports-ground polygon centres on 29.765260, -95.499201. They are about 110 m apart. The pin is set between them at 29.765751, -95.499271, with a precision radius of 250 m covering the club grounds. The pin is the club, not the room — this is a large private club with many courts, and no source consulted here places the signing in a particular building on it.

**Cover image.** Button, Virginia Slims Circuit, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, object 1986.0773.100 (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_682491). Public domain.

It is not an image of the Houston meeting; it is an object from the tour that meeting created, and it is worth looking at closely. A figure drawn in 1920s dress holds a wooden racket in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other, beneath the words the brand used in its advertising: "You've come a long way, baby." The women's professional tour was launched on a tobacco company's marketing budget for a cigarette sold to women, and the badge its players wore said so in the sponsor's own words.