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Women "equal" at tennis ?
"You've got to be joking!"

How women are now earning three times as much as men at Wimbledon

Every year at Wimbledon time we get some feminist-tainted nut case bringing up the question of prize money and demanding that men and women should get the same prize money. The prize money for 2007 totals over £7m. It's the largest of any of the four Grand Slam championships.

The men's singles champion, Roger Federer, will receive £435,000 having played 52 games in order to win, that is £8,365 per game.

The women's singles champion, Venus Williams, will receive £391,500 - 10% less - but having played only 17 games she will be paid £23,029 per game, that is three times as much as the men's singles champion.

The fact that women at Wimbledon get paid three times as much as men is not good enough for some people; they want them to be paid even more.

The All England Tennis Club, who run Wimbledon, says that women are paid less than men because men's tennis is more popular, and women just don't have box office appeal."More people come to watch the men's tennis than the women's," said spokeswoman Charlotte Fuller. She said that the club had yearly surveys that proved it. Last year, 71% of the Wimbledon spectators in the survey said that they liked the men's singles the best.

The chairman of the club John Curry explained: "One of our chief concerns is to offer a level of prize money wholly in keeping with the status of the event and recognising the talents and box office appeal of the world's leading players."

Joe Favorito of the Women's Tennis Association didn't agree with the decision of the Wimbledon authorities. He said, "If they have any surveys we've never seen them. Women's tennis has been getting tremendous media exposure and increased TV ratings. We feel that the men's game is in a little bit of a lull at the moment and women's is on the rise." Oviously a man with a great imagination!

Mr Favorito obviously is conceited enough to think that anything he has not seen does not exist. To make such a stupid remark he obviously did not see the thrill-a-minute men's singles final which put the women's dawdle in the shade. Now, I can understand him missing that; if he'd gone for a cup of tea it would have been all over by the time he returned.

Up to now, women, and girls of 14 or 15 have provided us with a low calibre entertainment and some rather feeble efforts at trying to play tennis. No-one, except BBC commentators, take them at all seriously. It's really a "knickers show" with pat-a-cake tennis and a bit of light relief between the real tennis which is provided by the men.

I don't suppose many people objected to the Equal Pay Act when it was introduced because it stipulated that there must be equal pay for equal work. Clearly men and women at Wimbledon do not work equally by any stretch of the imagination. Men play five sets and women three. Therefore, to award the same prize money to each is to pay women three times as much as men which is deliberately flying in the face of the Equal Pay Act.

It's not that men don't like watching women's tennis. They often talk about it to each other. "Who's got the best legs this year? Who's got the best boobs or the best figure?" and so on. I suppose it's what you'd call a marginal interest, nothing serious.