The body objection has been decisively knocked down since Martina Navratilova and then Venus and Serena Williams out-biceped Henman among many other men. The strongest argument for equalising the rules as well as the loot is that the shorter women's game was at first dictated by the prejudice that skirted contestants were physically weaker, and sustained more recently by a belief that the women's tour was less exciting. As the traditional objection to equal prize money - apart from primitive chauvinism - has been the fact that women play best of three rather than the five required of men, the question now is whether the cheque should be dependent on the sets. This raises an issue more interesting than prize money. Steffi Graf and her husband Andre Agassi, in their primes, were equally famous and interchangeably attractive to advertisers. What's strange about tennis taking so long to achieve financial equality is that, apart from athletics, there is no other sport in which the major indicators - fitness, skill and television exposure - have for so long been so equal for both men and women. This fact is not sexism but merely sex, and is underlined by the history of crippled female athletes who have tried to close the gap through chemical intervention. The fact that men are biologically hard-wired to bulk up has given them an advantage in tests of strength.
Hormones are more directly implicated in the difference between the profiles of male and female games. The sports that involve physical contact or some risk of death - major ball games and motor racing - simply seem more susceptible to testosterone. The truth is that - however assiduously women's football, cricket and rugby are encouraged - it is unlikely that millions of viewers will ever tune in to see a Paula Gascoigne or Andrea Flintoff in the finals of their tournaments.
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Professional sport was a creation by men for men and those underlying assumptions have proved tough to break. The wage gap, though, existed for inevitable historical reasons. Logically, Wimbledon should have balanced its payouts then, but the considerable age gap between King and Riggs complicated the issue, allowing the sexist economics to survive. Challenged to a match by 55-year-old former champion Bobby Riggs, who had declared the absolute superiority of men in the sport, she whipped him in straight sets. Mrs King also featured, almost 35 years ago, in a key moment in this debate.
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