They were incredible players, but they didn't only care about themselves. They wanted to take women's tennis - women's sport in general - higher and make it better. It's thanks to them that we are where we are today."What, however, would tennis's feminist pioneers of 30 years ago have made of Anna Kournikova? As the WTA circus pitches its tent on the lawns of the All England Club, the 18-year-old Russian is a star turn of a distinctly post-feminist type - adored less for her hard-driving grass court game than for her golden hair, golden tan, golden frock and, when she wins, golden smile. Kournikova can play, all right, and is worth her seeding at Wimbledon. But what people are really watching for is the moment when the sweat seeps through the silky fabric of her dress, darkening it to the precise colour of her flesh. "That's crumpet in any language," the man next to me breathed as he beheld the phenomenon.

Principally, then, she is the babe who magnetises the tabloids, inspiring them to produce spreads of today's young players, either in swimsuits or photomontaged to look like the Spice Girls - Anna as Baby, Martina Hingis as Posh, Venus Williams as Scary and the pumped-up Amelie Mauresmo as Sporty, with Novotna, clearly the senior, as Ginger. (Ironically enough, this is just the sort of joke their predecessors might have turned into an satirical party skit at Eastbourne.)All this may seem as frivolous as Gussie Moran's lace knickers in the Fifties, but in today's world, where sport and showbiz and commerce are inextricably linked, the renewed interest of the tabloids is a sure sign that the women's game is serious business - tennis's current success story, in fact. Attendance records were set at Eastbourne last week, and for the next fortnight the men will find themselves with a fight on their hands for an equal share of the crowd's attention and the media's interest.Yet Wimbledon, in common with three of the four Grand Slam tournaments, refuses to award the women the same prize-money as the men (the honourable exception is the US Open). Campaigners against this historic injustice received support from an unexpected quarter earlier this month when John McEnroe wrote an article for the New York Times in which he advocated fiscal equality. "If I were advising the guys," he wrote, "I'd tell them to take the equal prize-money - while they still can. Fans buy tickets to watch great tennis played by great playing personalities competing for titles in great events.

And the women are selling the tickets."According to McEnroe, the dramatis personae of the women's tour - Hingis, the Williams sisters, Kournikova, Seles, Davenport, Graf - easily outshines the men's cast, in which Sampras and Agassi are poorly supported by the likes of Kuerten, Kafelnikov, Medvedev and Rios, who have failed to build a significant fan base. "The women have always worked harder at marketing and promotion than the men," he continued "It was a necessity This ethos is paying dividends today... the women are carrying the promotional load and bringing the fans through the turnstiles. They should be paid accordingly."The compliment was warmly accepted "The players talked about it quite a lot," Novotna said. "It's nice to see the support we got from a past champion like him.

It's a sign that it's not only the people who're directly involved in women's tennis who feel that way."Bart McGuire, who gave legal advice to the WCT for many years before becoming its chief executive at the beginning of 1998, was similarly delighted "It wasn't something we'd expected," he told me. "And it was very encouraging, coming from someone who was outspoken in his criticisms of the general standard of the women's game some years ago. It's a dramatic indication of how far the women's game has come. Another one is Richard Krajicek, who once called the women `lazy, fat pigs' but recently commented that they were now doing so well that their success is actually helping the men's Tour."Seven years ago, when Krajicek made his notorious remark, the women's game was looking rocky. The Graf-Seles rivalry, which was supposed to have taken over from the Evert-Navratilova era, had been destroyed by the on-court stabbing of Seles and by Graf's various tribulations.