Reuters2 Minute Learn
NEW YORK — It’s time for the lads’s and ladies’s skilled tennis our bodies to merge, says former international No. 1 Kim Clijsters, who needs a united entrance within the game because the Girls’s Tennis Affiliation (WTA) celebrates its 50-year anniversary.
The Belgian’s remarks echo a sentiment lengthy held by means of the nice Billie Jean King, who pioneered the circuit part a century in the past and shall be available at Wimbledon this week to have fun the WTA’s many years of marketing fairness for girls in game.
“Would I really like to peer it [ATP/WTA merger]? Yeah I feel it will make the logo such a lot more potent,” the four-time Grand Slam champion instructed Reuters. “Numerous occasions to the out of doors international folks routinely think that it’s one group. You already know what I imply? Like individuals who do not know a lot about tennis, they are saying, ‘Oh yea, ATP and WTA’, however in the back of it there may be one unit.’ However that is, you understand, a long way from that.”
Clijsters, the honorary president of the Global Tennis Corridor of Popularity (ITHF), stated the have an effect on of the WTA can’t be overstated, and counts assembly King and German nice Steffi Graf a few of the greatest and maximum pivotal moments of her profession. The ITHF unveiled a video phase celebrating 50 years of the WTA this 12 months known as “TennisWorthy.”
“There may be such a lot of folks in the back of the scenes who’re all more or less dealing with in the similar route and who wish to see this pattern of, you understand, making [women’s tennis] cross upwards,” stated the 40-year-old Clijsters. “So long as all of us more or less have that mindset and it is not only one one that could make the adaptation, it is everyone in combination as a robust unit, team, I feel that is the most effective method that we will cross to get it to a spot the place mixed occasions are striking the same quantity of gamers — ladies as males — on heart courts or overdue evening fits.”
King will go back to the Millennium Gloucester Resort, the place the WTA used to be shaped at a gathering of gamers, on Friday forward of the beginning of the Wimbledon primary draw subsequent week. However she has lengthy felt that the 2 facets — ATP and WTA — can be more potent in combination, a controversy King reiterated after retired nice Roger Federer resurfaced the speculation 3 years in the past.
“There may be professionals and cons to the whole thing, proper?” stated Clijsters. “There were many, many, many conversations about doing that. And also you more or less at all times bump right into a wall the place, you understand, no longer a lot occurs and it remains with conversations. And naturally, I want to see, you understand, there being one group.”
