No Last Name Necessary

Billie Jean King once said her heart sank when she opened a check. She'd just won Wimbledon in 1968 and taken home the equivalent of about $1,800. Rod Laver, the men's champion, walked away with roughly $4,800. King decided right there she had to fight.

Fifty-eight years later, that fight has a new address: Rock Creek Park. Thursday night, my good friend Stacy Wooters invited me to the DC Open, and the room was full of accomplished women. I spent the evening thinking about how far this sport has come since King cashed that check.

The WTA's 500-level DC Open runs at the William H.G. FitzGerald Tennis Center July 27 through August 2. Jessica Pegula headlines as the top seed, in a field that also includes Naomi Osaka, Elina Svitolina, and Venus Williams, still playing at 46 and still opening doors King pried apart decades ago.

My good friend Stacy Wooters invited me to an event at the DC Open to celebrate women’s tennis. Her friend Valerie Camillo is the WTA's new chairperson since November 2025. Before tennis, she ran business operations for the Philadelphia Flyers, drove $304 million in revenue for the Washington Nationals, and worked at the NBA league office. King herself endorsed the hire, calling Camillo "a winner" with "a fresh perspective for our future."

Thursday night, Camillo made a point that stuck with me: tennis is one of the only sports where women are famous enough to go by first name alone. Serena. Venus. Chrissie. Billie Jean. Coco. No last name needed. That kind of recognition doesn't happen by accident, and it's the foundation Camillo is building on now.

That fresh perspective inherits an old problem. King's Battle of the Sexes win over Bobby Riggs, watched by 90 million people worldwide, forced the U.S. Open to offer equal prize money in 1973, the first major to do it. It took until 2007 for all four Grand Slams to follow. Most tournaments below that tier still don't, DC Open included in some years past.

The numbers Camillo inherits are rosier than other sports where the difference between men and women’s pay is a chasm.

The top ten men on tour earned $87.8 million in 2025. The top ten women earned $71.3 million, a 23 percent gap that has actually narrowed in recent years. Men still benefit from ATP bonus pools with no WTA equivalent.

But the audience has changed. Seven of the ten highest-paid female athletes in the world play tennis. NCAA women's sports drew a record 235,735 athletes in the 2023-24 season, up from an era when only 22 percent of American colleges offered women's sports at all.

King picked tennis because it let her fight for something bigger than a trophy. At 12, watching an all-white, mostly male tennis club from the stands, she decided she'd spend her life on equality. Camillo now runs the organization King built to make that fight permanent. Sitting courtside Thursday, thanks to Stacy, I watched that fight play out one match at a time, a few miles from the Capitol.