NEW YORK — After a rousing tribute from former first woman Michelle Obama, Billie Jean King on Monday celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. Open changing into the primary sporting occasion to supply equal prize cash to feminine and male opponents, promising by no means to cease preventing to take care of that hard-won progress.
“While we celebrate today, our work is far from done,” King mentioned in a speech to a packed Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd between night time matches. Echoing a quote from Coretta Scott King, she mentioned: “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and you win it in every generation.”
Obama launched the 79-year-old tennis legend by recalling how King, the U.S. Open champion in 1972, rallied her fellow ladies gamers to threaten a boycott of the subsequent 12 months’s event until ladies bought the identical pay as males. It was introduced that summer time that the ladies’s champion’s paycheck would enhance $15,000 in order that each males’s and ladies’s champions would every obtain $25,000.
It would take 34 years earlier than all the opposite Grand Slam occasions adopted swimsuit. This 12 months, the U.S. Open winners will every obtain $3 million, with whole participant compensation rising to $65 million.
“Let us remember, all of this is far bigger than a champions paycheck,” Obama mentioned. “This is about how women are seen and valued in this world. We have seen how quickly progress like this can be taken away if we are not mindful and vigilant, if we do not keep remembering and advocating and organizing and speaking out and, yes, voting.”
Obama, who earlier sat within the stadium together with her husband, former President Barack Obama, famous that King’s achievement got here the identical 12 months she went on beat Bobby Riggs within the “Battle of the Sexes,” when he infamously mentioned ladies “belong in the bedroom and the kitchen, in that order.”
“Billie Jean teaches us that when things lie in the balance, we all have a choice to make,” Obama mentioned. “We can either wait around and accept what we’re given. … or we can make our own stand. We can use whatever platforms we have to speak out and fight to protect the progress we’ve made, and level the playing field for all of our daughters and their daughters.”
The ceremony concluded with vocalist Sara Bareilles’ hovering rendition of her hit tune, “Brave,” and video tributes from the world’s biggest tennis gamers, together with Coco Gauff, Roger Federer, Iga Swiatek, Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic, all saying, “Thank you, Billie Jean.”
Content Source: www.washingtontimes.com