Tennis news: Venus Williams, Bernard Tomic and Eugenie Bouchard

Equal pay was long-deserved in the women’s game at Wimbledon, and most other tournaments, to be honest, before 2007. Venus Williams and other key players should not have had to argue for getting paid as much as the men for playing the same sport at the same high level. But fought the players did and finally in 2007 Wimbledon conceded.

Why it took so long, who knows? The US Open had equal play since the early 1970s so it only took four decades for Wimbledon to catch up. That’s pretty awful.

Venus Williams addressed the situation this week at the US Open. During a press conference, she spoke eloquently (of course!) about how relieved she was once equal pay was achieved. According to Williams

"So I was playing this tournament, Wimbledon. I was arriving to the finals. Every year they have this meeting with the Grand Slam Committee. It’s very proper. You go into this room, it’s a boardroom. It’s a little bit boring, to be honest, but I didn’t say that. It’s not on record. It’s off the record, everybody.But you go in, they serve tea, it’s very English. You know how the English are more buttoned up than us loud Americans. There are a lot of formalities. We ask for equal prize money. Then a few weeks later or months, whatever the timeframe was, thank God I don’t remember anymore because it’s not happening, but they would just say no. It was year after year after year since the Open Era that this was going on."

Venus Williams talks about the fight for equal pay and other tennis news

There are still many tournaments – non-majors, mind you – that do not offer equal pay for men and women. This is the case even though the men and women both have to win best-of-three sets. So for those tournaments that do not offer equal pay, I say this: Change how you do business or you should lose the ability to hold a tournament.

In other sad news, Bernard Tomic got attacked by two men outside of a tattoo parlor on the Gold Coast of Australia. Worse, someone filmed the whole thing. Film the event instead of defending Tomic? The camera person is just a notch below the awfulness of the humans doing the attack.

So far there is no news on exactly what happened. The video footage has no time stamp. Maybe this happened some time ago. Either way, hopefully, whatever situation Tomic was involved in has been resolved and he is OK.

Finally, we all know pickleball is trying to overtake tennis courts everywhere. Say what you will about pickleball, but hopefully, it leads to more people being interested in tennis and older persons being able to enjoy a sport based on tennis. That said, Eugenie Bouchard appears to have joined the pickleball fandom.

According to the CBC. former top-10 player Bouchard will be joining the Carvana PPA pickleball tour in 2024. We don’t yet know if Bouchard will play in singles or doubles, only that she will play. Players can make decent money on the tour, however, as the largest pickleball tournament purse is $300,000. Not chump change.