Do women players deserve equal pay at Wimbledon? It has little to do with deserving and even less with gender equality. In the world of corporate sports, if you draw a crowd then you get paid. Anna Kournikova was the biggest draw in tennis and she never won a tournament. Venus and Serena Williams were a huge draw because they were a good story: two sisters from Compton make it big in the white country club world of tennis. They were attractive, they had style, and they won majors. They were such a good draw that the US Open women’s final made it to prime time TV. Unlike Wimbledon, CBS didn’t say, “We won’t broadcast the women’s final because women don’t play best of five set matches.” A sport gets a TV contract if it can bring in viewers, it’s as simple as that.

Women last longer. Their life expectancy is higher and they’ve won co-ed ultramarathons – races longer than marathons. Do I need to add that they last longer in the bedroom?

And if a TV network can’t find a sport that brings in revenue, they’ll make one up. When CBS took the NBA away from ABC in the early seventies, the head of sports at ABC, Roone Arledge, created Superstars – made up competitions between professional athletes from different sports, and Battle of the Network Stars – competitions such as apple bobbing featuring TV celebrities, and scheduled them opposite the NBA broadcasts.

Speaking of five set matches, Sporting News Radio personality Dave Smith, a tennis fan, often asks why women don’t play five set matches. The answer to this question has two parts.

The highest priority for both the women’s and the men’s game is to reduce the schedule and give the players more than five weeks for an offseason. James Blake is on the ATP player’s council. He recently said that he doesn’t expect any changes next year but he expects progress in reducing the schedule the year after, 2008. I’m not hopeful. This year the French Open added a Sunday to its schedule so that it could get coverage over three weekends. What if other tournaments do that? A player would be playing in one final while the next tournament has already started.

Are women physically capable of playing five sets matches at majors? When you see Michelle Wie hit a ball 300 yards, the answer seems obvious. But women tennis players are breaking down at an alarming rate. The number of players who dropped out of the tournaments leading up to the US Open last year left those tournaments with exceptionally weak fields.

Women mature earlier. Jennifer Capriati won the French Open junior title when she was thirteen then Martina Hingis came along and won the same title when she was twelve. This is astonishing when you consider that they were competing with players eighteen and under. Capriati joined the tour just before her fourteenth birthday and Hingis joined just after her fourteenth birthday. Mary Pierce also joined the tour at age fourteen. The men typically make it to the main tour when they’re seventeen or eighteen. Hingis, Capriati and Pierce have all missed significant time due to injury. Hingis missed three years, Pierce missed most of one year and has missed most of this year, and Capriati is still missing with a shoulder injury.

Women last longer. Their life expectancy is higher and they’ve won co-ed ultramarathons – races longer than marathons. Do I need to add that they last longer in the bedroom? I didn’t think so. That should be a good reason to expect five set matches except that women are not as strong as men. Running around on cement courts for much of the year and repeatedly pounding a tennis ball leads to physical breakdown and injury. We won’t know how much is due to starting a career too early or playing too many matches each season unless we reduce the schedule. Even then it won’t be clear because there are tons of very young girls at tennis academies around the world pounding their body day after day so they can become the next Maria Sharapova.

If the WTA does succeed in reducing the schedule, I think it would be a good idea to have five set matches in women’s major finals. This could make the finals more uniformally competitive because it’s harder for one player to dominate for three straight sets than two. The men already do this in Masters Series events, they play best of three matches through the semifinals then play a best of five set match in the final.

But best of five set matches shouldn’t be a requirement for equal prize money. If Maria Sharapova draws a crowd, Wimbledon should bloody well pay her.