Professional tennis today operates through two parallel tour structures — the ATP for men and the WTA for women — that between them organize hundreds of tournaments annually across six continents, govern the ranking systems that determine competitive access and seeding, negotiate broadcast deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and represent the collective interests of the players who compete within them.
These organizations are so embedded in the fabric of professional tennis that it is difficult to imagine the sport without them.
They did not always exist. Both the ATP and the WTA were founded within a single remarkable year — 1973 — by players who were frustrated with the governance structures they had inherited from the amateur era and determined to build something better.
Their founding stories are inseparable from each other, from the broader history of the Open Era, and from the specific individuals whose vision and courage created institutions that have shaped professional tennis for more than five decades.
Understanding how the ATP and WTA were built — the circumstances that made them necessary, the individuals who created them, the early crises that tested them, and the evolution that transformed them from advocacy organizations into the commercial tour operators they are today — is essential context for understanding how professional tennis works and why it is organized the way it is.
The Governance Vacuum of the Early Open Era
The Open Era began in 1968 with a clear competitive achievement — the world’s best players competing together at the Grand Slams for the first time — but without a clear organizational framework for managing the professional sport that the Open Era created.
The institutions that had governed tennis through the amateur era — the International Lawn Tennis Federation and the national associations that comprised it — retained formal authority over the sport’s rules, the Grand Slams, and the international team competitions. But they had been built to manage an amateur sport organized around national clubs and national championships, not a professional sport organized around a global commercial circuit.
Their structures, their decision-making processes, and their institutional cultures were products of the amateur era, and they were poorly suited to the requirements of professional tennis.
The professional players who were now the sport’s commercial foundation — whose competitive excellence generated the television audiences, the sponsorship deals, and the ticket revenues that made the Grand Slams and other major events financially viable — had no formal voice in the governance decisions that affected their careers.
Tournament organizers could change conditions, scheduling, and prize money without player consultation. National associations could suspend players and affect their eligibility for major events without independent oversight. The ILTF could set rules that governed professional competition without meaningful input from the professionals who competed under those rules.
This governance vacuum — the gap between the players’ commercial importance and their institutional powerlessness — was the condition that made the founding of both the ATP and the WTA not just possible but necessary.
The Founding of the ATP
The Association of Tennis Professionals was founded in September 1972 in Forest Hills, New York, during the US Open. The founding meeting brought together a group of the world’s top male professional players who had been organizing informally for several years under the leadership of Jack Kramer — the former world number one who had turned professional in 1947 and had spent the subsequent decades as the most prominent promoter and advocate of professional tennis.
The ATP’s founding documents established it as a trade union and advocacy organization for professional male tennis players — an entity that would represent player interests in negotiations with tournament organizers, the ILTF, and national associations.
Cliff Drysdale was elected the ATP’s first president. The founding membership included virtually every significant male professional player of the era, representing a collective bargaining power that no individual player could have exercised alone.
The immediate context for the ATP’s founding was a series of specific grievances that had accumulated in the early Open Era years. Prize money at many tournaments was inadequate and inconsistently distributed.
Tournament conditions — court surfaces, scheduling, facilities — varied wildly and were determined entirely by tournament organizers without player input. The process by which players were suspended or disciplined by national associations operated without independent oversight or due process.
Players who were the sport’s most commercially valuable assets had no formal mechanism for influencing the decisions that most directly affected their professional lives.
The ATP was founded to change all of that. What it did instead — almost immediately — was something more dramatic and more consequential than any of its founders had anticipated.
The 1973 Wimbledon Boycott
The ATP’s first major test came less than a year after its founding, in the form of a crisis that had nothing directly to do with prize money or tournament conditions. It began with a disciplinary dispute between a single player and his national federation — and became one of the most significant acts of collective action in the history of professional sport.
Nikola Pilić was a Yugoslav professional tennis player who had been selected for Yugoslavia’s Davis Cup team but declined to participate, claiming a prior professional commitment. The Yugoslav tennis federation suspended him from competition for nine months — a penalty that would have prevented him from competing at Wimbledon, which was scheduled to begin while the suspension was in effect. The ATP challenged the suspension on the grounds that it was disproportionate, improperly imposed, and a violation of the player’s professional rights.
The ILTF sided with the Yugoslav federation after reducing the suspension to one month — still long enough to affect Wimbledon eligibility. The All England Club, bound by ILTF rules, announced that it would respect the suspension and bar Pilić from competing.
The ATP’s response was extraordinary. After the ILTF and All England Club refused to reverse the decision, the ATP called on its members to withdraw from Wimbledon in solidarity.
Eighty-one of the world’s top male players — including the majority of the top ten — withdrew from the tournament. The 1973 Wimbledon men’s draw was contested without most of its best competitors. Jan Kodeš of Czechoslovakia won the title in a depleted field that bore no resemblance to the competitive quality Wimbledon normally commanded.
The boycott was a demonstration of player power that had no precedent in tennis and few precedents in professional sport. It showed that the ATP — barely a year old — was capable of organizing collective action at the highest level of the sport, that its members were willing to sacrifice significant prize money and competitive opportunity in defense of a principle, and that the governing bodies could not manage the professional game without the cooperation of the players who made it commercially viable.
The consequences of the boycott extended beyond the immediate dispute. It established the ATP as a genuinely powerful institutional voice in tennis governance — one that could not be ignored or overridden without consequence. And it demonstrated that professional players had both the organization and the will to exercise collective power when their interests were fundamentally threatened.
Billie Jean King and the Founding of the WTA
The Women’s Tennis Association was founded in June 1973 — three months before the ATP’s one-year anniversary — at a meeting in a hotel room in London during the pre-Wimbledon grass court season. The founding meeting was convened by Billie Jean King, the dominant figure in women’s tennis of the era and the most prominent advocate for women’s professional tennis in the sport’s history.
King’s motivations for founding the WTA were rooted in a specific and concrete injustice: the persistent inequality between prize money offered to men and women at the same tournaments. Despite the fact that women’s matches attracted comparable television audiences to men’s matches at major events, and despite the commercial evidence that women’s professional tennis was a viable entertainment product, tournament organizers consistently offered women a fraction of the prize money available to men.
King had been fighting this inequality since the early Open Era. In 1970, when the Pacific Southwest Championships in Los Angeles offered women one-eighth of the men’s prize money, King organized a group of women players to boycott the tournament and instead participate in a rival event — the Virginia Slims Invitational in Houston — organized by promoter Gladys Heldman with sponsorship from Virginia Slims cigarettes.
That event became the foundation of the Virginia Slims Circuit — the first women’s professional tennis tour — which ran through the early 1970s and demonstrated that women’s professional tennis could be organized and commercially viable independently of the male-dominated establishment.
The Virginia Slims Circuit gave King and her colleagues the organizational experience and commercial proof of concept that made the WTA’s founding possible. When King convened the London meeting in 1973, she was not proposing a theoretical organization — she was institutionalizing a circuit and an advocacy function that had already demonstrated its viability.
The WTA’s founding membership included virtually all of the world’s top women players. Billie Jean King served as the organization’s first president. Its founding purpose — to represent women players’ interests, advocate for equal prize money, and provide organizational infrastructure for the women’s professional tour — was established from the beginning as both a commercial and a civil rights project. The WTA was not merely a trade organization. It was a statement about the value of women’s athletic excellence and the right of women athletes to be fairly compensated for it.
The Battle of the Sexes
The founding of the WTA in June 1973 was preceded by one month by an event that became the most watched tennis match in history to that point and that shaped the public perception of women’s professional tennis for a generation. The Battle of the Sexes — the exhibition match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs played at the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973 — was not directly connected to the WTA’s founding but was inseparable from the cultural moment that made the WTA’s founding both necessary and possible.
Bobby Riggs was a fifty-five-year-old former Wimbledon champion and self-proclaimed male chauvinist who had challenged the top women’s players to prove that women’s tennis was commercially and competitively worthy of equal treatment. Riggs had already beaten Margaret Court — the world’s top-ranked women’s player — in a widely publicized match earlier in the year, and his public campaign against women’s tennis had become a media phenomenon that the sport could not ignore.
King accepted Riggs’s challenge and beat him comprehensively — 6–4, 6–3, 6–3 — in front of 30,000 spectators at the Astrodome and a television audience estimated at 90 million viewers in the United States alone. The match was a cultural event as much as a sporting one — a public demonstration that women’s athletic excellence deserved the same respect and commercial support as men’s, framed as a battle between the values of women’s liberation and the resistance to it.
King’s victory did not resolve the prize money inequality that the WTA was founded to address. But it transformed the public conversation about women’s tennis in ways that made progress on that inequality more achievable. It demonstrated that women’s tennis could attract massive audiences, generate enormous media coverage, and function as genuine entertainment on its own terms. And it gave the WTA a cultural moment of founding mythology that reinforced its commercial and advocacy arguments with emotional and symbolic force.
Building the Tours: The 1970s and 1980s
The ATP and WTA spent the decade following their founding establishing the organizational and commercial infrastructure that would eventually support the modern professional tours.
For the ATP, the primary focus through the 1970s was prize money advocacy and the establishment of a formal ranking system. The ATP’s computerized rankings — introduced in 1973 — were a significant institutional innovation that created an objective, transparent basis for tournament entry and seeding that had not previously existed.
Before the computerized rankings, entry and seeding decisions were made through subjective assessments that gave tournament organizers enormous discretionary power. The ATP rankings system transferred that power to an objective calculation based on competitive results — a change that served players’ interests while improving the competitive integrity of the entry process.
Prize money grew substantially through ATP advocacy during the 1970s. The total prize money available across the men’s professional circuit increased dramatically as the ATP negotiated with tournament organizers from a position of collective strength. By the end of the 1970s, the commercial scale of men’s professional tennis was beginning to reflect the popularity and competitive quality of the Open Era game.
For the WTA, the primary focus through the 1970s was building the women’s circuit — establishing a stable calendar of tournaments with adequate prize money — while simultaneously advocating for prize money equality at the Grand Slams and other major events where men’s and women’s competitions were run simultaneously.
The US Open’s adoption of equal prize money in 1973 was the first Grand Slam to do so, a victory that the WTA had advocated for and that established the standard the other majors would eventually follow.
The Virginia Slims sponsorship of the early women’s circuit was gradually replaced by other commercial arrangements as the WTA’s organizational infrastructure developed. The challenge of building a global women’s tour — finding sufficient tournament locations, negotiating adequate prize money, managing the scheduling interactions with the men’s tour — was substantial and was not fully resolved through the 1970s and into the 1980s.
The ATP Tour Revolution of 1990
The most significant organizational transformation in men’s professional tennis since the Open Era itself came in 1990 when the ATP — which had operated primarily as a player advocacy organization since its founding — took direct control of the men’s professional tour and restructured it as the ATP Tour.
The 1990 restructuring was the result of years of conflict between the ATP, the ILTF’s successor organization the ITF, and the Men’s Tennis Council — the trilateral body that had governed the men’s tour since the late 1970s through an uneasy balance of player, tournament, and governing body representation.
The ATP’s frustration with the Men’s Tennis Council’s decision-making and its determination to have direct player control over the tour’s commercial and organizational direction eventually produced a rupture.
The ATP negotiated agreements with a large group of existing tournaments to leave the Men’s Tennis Council structure and join the new ATP Tour, which would be governed primarily by the players and their organization.
The ATP Tour launched in January 1990 with a restructured calendar, a new tournament tier system — which eventually became the basis for the Masters Series and the current ATP Masters 1000 structure — and a governance model that gave players majority control over tour decisions.
The 1990 restructuring was controversial — the Grand Slams and the ITF remained outside the ATP Tour structure, maintaining the divided governance of professional tennis that persists today — but it established the basic organizational form of the men’s professional tour that has remained in place ever since. The ATP’s transition from advocacy organization to tour operator was the most consequential institutional development in men’s professional tennis since the Open Era.
The WTA’s Evolution Through Commercial Growth
The WTA’s evolution through the 1980s and 1990s followed a different path from the ATP’s — less focused on governance restructuring and more focused on commercial development and the gradual achievement of the prize money equality that had been the organization’s founding purpose.
Virginia Ruzici’s Roland Garros victory in 1978 was the first time a women’s Grand Slam champion received prize money equal to her male counterpart at the same event — a milestone that marked progress on the equality agenda while illustrating how far the other Grand Slams still had to go. Wimbledon and the Australian Open moved to prize money parity in the 1980s, and Roland Garros followed in 2006 — thirty-three years after the US Open had established the standard.
The commercial growth of women’s professional tennis through the 1980s was driven significantly by the rivalry between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova — two players of exceptional quality whose contrasting styles and personalities generated sustained public interest that was commercially transformative for the WTA.
The Evert-Navratilova rivalry demonstrated that women’s professional tennis could sustain long-term narrative interest and commercial engagement comparable to the men’s game, and it provided the WTA with the commercial foundation needed to build the tour’s organizational infrastructure.
Steffi Graf’s dominance of women’s tennis in the late 1980s — including the 1988 Golden Slam — and the subsequent emergence of Monica Seles, Jennifer Capriati, and the broader field of the early 1990s maintained the commercial momentum that the Evert-Navratilova years had established.
The WTA’s prize money, tournament calendar, and commercial partnerships grew substantially through this period, establishing the foundation for the globally prominent women’s professional tour of the modern era.
The Tours in the Modern Era
The ATP and WTA entered the twenty-first century as fully established commercial sports organizations with global calendars, billion-dollar prize money structures, sophisticated media operations, and significant institutional authority within the professional game.
The ATP’s structure — the Masters 1000 events, the ATP 500 and ATP 250 tiers, the year-end ATP Finals, and the computerized rankings that govern entry and seeding across all of them — was essentially in place by the early 2000s and has evolved incrementally rather than radically since then.
The primary tensions of the modern ATP era involve the relationship between the tour and the Grand Slams — which remain outside the ATP’s direct authority — and the ongoing player welfare and calendar debates examined elsewhere in this series.
The WTA’s modern structure evolved through several significant commercial partnerships and organizational changes in the 2000s and 2010s, including a landmark partnership with Chinese commercial interests that expanded the women’s tour’s presence in Asia significantly.
The WTA’s organizational independence from the men’s tour — maintained since the founding — has been a periodic subject of merger discussions, with advocates of a unified men’s and women’s tour arguing that organizational consolidation would serve both tours’ commercial interests. Those discussions have not produced a merger, and both organizations continue to operate independently.
The emergence of Serena Williams as the dominant figure in women’s tennis through the 2000s and 2010s — and the broader competitive depth of the women’s tour in that era — gave the WTA a commercial and narrative foundation comparable to what the Evert-Navratilova rivalry had provided in the 1980s.
Williams’s twenty-three Grand Slam titles, her sustained dominance across four decades, and her cultural significance beyond tennis provided the WTA with its most commercially powerful individual asset since King herself.
What the ATP and WTA Built
The history of the ATP and WTA is ultimately a history of what professional athletes can achieve when they organize collectively in defense of their interests and in pursuit of a vision for their sport that goes beyond the immediate commercial interests of the institutions that govern it.
The ATP was founded because professional male players had no voice in the governance of the sport they made commercially viable. The WTA was founded because women athletes were being systematically undercompensated for competitive excellence that the market clearly valued.
Both organizations were created by individuals who were willing to take professional and financial risks — the boycott of Wimbledon, the creation of a rival women’s circuit, the confrontation with established governing bodies — in pursuit of something better than what existed.
What they built — the global professional tours, the ranking systems, the prize money structures, the player representation mechanisms — is the organizational foundation on which everything in modern professional tennis rests. The Grand Slams are more prestigious and the individual rivalries more celebrated, but the ATP and WTA are the institutional infrastructure without which neither could function as they do.
Understanding their history is understanding why professional tennis is organized the way it is — and appreciating what it cost to build it.
Part of the Tennis History series. Previous: How Professional Tennis Became Open — The Story of the Open Era. Next: The Greatest Men’s Tennis Players of All Time.
