The newly named Billie Jean King Cup honors a player and coach who has always been equal parts champion, teammate and advocate. It becomes the first major annual global team sports event to be named for a woman, according to the International Tennis Federation.

Steve Simon, the chief executive for the WTA, said on Monday that he welcomed an effort to bring the two tours together when the sport emerges from the coronavirus shutdown.

The idea of combined tours has been around since at least the 1970s. The issue has never gotten much traction. But now even Roger Feder is asking, “Am I the only one thinking that now is the time for men’s and women’s tennis to be united and come together as one?”

“There haven’t been any specific rule changes on any front, but I do think last year’s final has certainly brought a level of awareness to some of the issues that the sport faces,” Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA, said in a recent interview.

Gauff, the youngest woman ever to qualify for Wimbledon, said in a postmatch interview that at the net with Williams “I told her thank you for everything that you did. I wouldn’t be here without you. I always wanted to tell her that.”

“As I looked around on the Volvo boats and at the positions the women were doing, I realized that if you put them on one boat we’d have the skills to cover all aspects of racing at the highest level. So why not put them all together and do a Hobart with them? A lot of these people are my picks for that position, and it just so happens they are female.”

Men have been fined 646 times for racket abuse and 287 times for unsportsmanlike conduct. Women have been fined 99 times for racket abuse and 67 times for unsportsmanlike conduct during that span. The disparities are similar for audible obscenity fines (344 for the men, 140 for the women) and, most relevant to Williams’s complaint, verbal abuse (62 for the men, 16 for the women).

The around-the-world race, formerly known as the Whitbread, was first held in 1973, but this is the first time the rules allow a team to race with a larger crew if it sails with a mixed-gender crew instead of an all-male one.