Billie Jean King, the 82-year-old tennis champion and lifelong equal-pay advocate, has spent decades pressing the case that female players deserve prize money on par with the men. In a sharply worded essay for American Thinker, retired tennis professional Selwyn Duke argues that she has the equation exactly backward — and that her own activism may be helping push the women’s tour toward financial ruin.
Duke’s central claim is simple: the gap between men’s and women’s tennis earnings isn’t a moral failure but a market outcome, and no amount of agitation can repeal it.
The Federer Complaint
Duke’s piece takes its cue from King’s recent criticism of Roger Federer, the 45-year-old former men’s number one. According to Duke, citing Tennis World, King said she wished Federer would “fight harder for equality,” pointing out that he has two sons and two daughters and telling him, “There is equality in your home.”
Her remark — “I would like to earn more, too” — is the line Duke seizes on. He frames it as the tell: a self-described independent woman asking a man to help her make more money.
Duke also questions the premise of King’s appeal. How, he asks, does she know what equality looks like inside Federer’s household? His answer is that equality isn’t the norm nearly anywhere, and that in most families chores break down along traditional lines anyway.
A Selective Concern
The heart of Duke’s argument is that King’s commitment to equality is not general but targeted. He offers two illustrations of disparities she has not, in his telling, raised a fuss about: female fashion models earning substantially more than their male counterparts, and the fact that only men in the United States are required to register for the draft — an obligation that can end in combat, injury, or death.
On both, Duke writes, King has been silent.
His conclusion is that her complaints track only those disparities that disadvantage the group she identifies with. From there he makes the cynic’s case explicit: that “equality” functions less as a principle than as a lever — a means of securing preferential treatment and special dispensations for women, even when the result is unfair to someone else.
This is not, Duke notes, a new move for King. He recalls that decades ago she pressed Arthur Ashe to take up the same cause. Ashe declined, explaining the economic realities on The Dick Cavett Show in 1980. Nearly half a century later, Duke writes, King still doesn’t accept the argument — because she doesn’t want to.
The Lightweight and the Heavyweight
Duke reaches for a boxing analogy to make his economic case. Lightweight boxers command smaller purses than heavyweights not because of injustice but because their market is smaller and less lucrative. If a lightweight wanted heavyweight money, the answer would be to fight in the heavyweight ranks — take the punches, win, and get rich. If he can’t, Duke writes, he should stop complaining.
In tennis, Duke argues, the men are the heavyweights. And he suggests King should understand this better than most. He cites a pre-Battle of the Sexes match in which Eugene Scott, a top amateur man, allegedly spotted King ten points in a 21-point game, gave her a service advantage, and still won 21-17.
Her most famous victory, he adds, came against a 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in 1973 — a matchup he describes in dismissive terms.
The WTA’s Balance Sheet
Duke’s strongest factual claim concerns the Women’s Tennis Association’s finances. He writes that the WTA has been losing money in recent years and may not have liquidity by 2027. The culprit, in his account, is partly the equal-pay subsidy itself — WTA cash used to lift women’s prize money closer to the men’s at certain events. King’s agitation, he argues, is helping bankrupt the very tour she claims to care about.
He anticipates the counterargument: that the ATP, the men’s tour, should subsidize the WTA the way the NBA effectively sustains the WNBA. In his framing, the WNBA wouldn’t exist without the men’s league’s largesse — something he presents as a cautionary example rather than a model.
Why Some Disparities Get Noticed
Turning philosophical, Duke notes that disparity is the default condition of the world, not the exception. He lists biological and statistical differences: men are four times more likely to be struck by lightning and tend to die younger; men are more prone to hemophilia A and B, gout, abdominal aortic aneurysm, and autism spectrum disorder; women are more likely to develop lupus, multiple sclerosis, post-midlife osteoporosis, and autoimmune thyroid disease.
If disparity is everywhere, Duke asks, why are only certain disparities labeled unjust and targeted for elimination? Why equalize workplace wages and not workplace deaths, 92 percent of which he says involve men?
His answer is that privilege consists of having only the disparities that harm you noticed and cherry-picked for correction.
The Problem With ‘Equal Work’
Duke also takes aim at the phrase “equal pay for equal work,” arguing that determining what counts as equal work is far harder than the slogan suggests. As a former player, he contends that men on tour train notably harder than women do. He adds that he himself was considered a workhorse in his playing days, yet was not paid like the sport’s biggest names — proof, in his view, that effort doesn’t set pay.
He points to high-level junior boys who can beat the women’s professionals — a claim he attributes to former number one Garbine Muguruza — and yet earn nothing. And he contrasts tennis players of any gender with police officers and emergency-services workers, whose work he considers far more important and who make comparatively little.
The through-line: neither the seriousness nor the scale of the work determines the pay. The market does.
That holds, Duke concedes, except when activists pressure society into overriding market forces on behalf of a favored group. He calls that a dangerous road — one that, followed to its end, is communistic.
The Audience Question
Duke closes by confronting a common feminist explanation for women’s sports’ lower profile: that the market is dominated by male viewers. His rebuttal is arithmetic. Women outnumber men in the population; if they wanted women’s sports to be bigger than men’s, they could simply watch. They choose not to — and, in his telling, that is why men are expected to fight that war on their behalf too.
Whether readers find Duke’s argument persuasive or repugnant may depend on whether they accept his foundational premise: that prize money is a market signal rather than a measure of justice. King, for her part, has spent more than fifty years insisting the opposite — and shows no sign of stopping.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/feminist-icon-billie-jean-king-needs-a-man-far-more-than-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle/