The Dewar Cup circuit was not what it used to be. British tennis in general was fighting a rearguard action against richer tournaments around the world, as players chose dollar signs over tradition. The Dewar’s-backed late-season mini-tour had once spanned six weeks and featured Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong. By 1973, it was down to four weeks, and the fields were considerably less star-studded.
It wasn’t all about the money, but the money didn’t help. The total purse for women at the Dewar Cup of Edinburgh, the second stop on the circuit, was $3,500 (£1,430), including $825 for the singles winner. By comparison, at the Virginia Slims Championships in Florida just a few weeks earlier, first-round losers took home $800. The same performance at a Whiskey circuit stop was worth a measly fifty bucks, or twenty pounds sterling.
Dewar’s, the booze-selling sponsor, tried to emphasize the opportunities that a lower-profile circuit gave to young players. (17-year-old Sue Barker took part, as did Romanian teens Virginia Ruzici and Mariana Simionescu.) Another positive aspect, at least for local fans, is that the events were increasingly dominated by British players. In Aberavon, Wales, the first stop, Mark Cox and Virginia Wade took the titles. In Edinburgh, on November 3rd, 21-year-old Brit John Feaver challenged Wimbledon semi-finalist Roger Taylor for the men’s title, while Wade faced Julie Heldman for the second week in a row.
In Wales, Heldman had tried and failed to outhit Wade, and she went down quickly. What fans didn’t know is that just about everything was going wrong for the 27-year-old American. The press had come down on her–unfairly, she thought–for her win by retirement over Billie Jean King at the US Open, she was going through a bad breakup, and she had a nagging cough, spiraling into a bronchitis that would take her out of action the following week. If that wasn’t enough, she hated her new haircut.
She might have disliked Wade even more. Decades later, she still prickled at the British player’s “arrogance and dismissiveness.” No matter that the odds were against her, Heldman would throw the kitchen sink at her leonine nemesis.
The London Observer‘s Shirley Brasher credited the American with “clever changes of spin and pace,” the sort of game to put Wade off balance. Heldman lost the first set, but when Wade started rushing into errors in the second, the American took advantage and forced a decider.
It became as testy a battle as the two ladies had ever contested. Words were exchanged in the third game of the deciding set; alas, the British press did not record them for posterity. In the end, wrote David Gray, “Miss Heldman concentrated so hard on winning the intellectual battle that she lost accuracy and concentration.” Wade took the final set, 6-1, despite the fact that, according to Lance Tingay, her “evenness of temperament was tried to the full.”
Wade hardly needed to call her accountant about another $825 prize, but there was one consolation. Taylor, the men’s champion, got the same amount. While the Whiskey circuit was on the way down–in a few years it would disappear entirely–the shrinking rewards of the Dewar Cup were distributed equally to men and women.
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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.
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