The 2024 ESPY Awards ceremony was largely a celebration of a terrific year in women’s sports. The South Carolina women’s basketball team was named best team of the year, gymnast Simone Biles won comeback player of the year, and WNBA rookie phenom Caitlin Clark took home two awards—one for best college athlete and the other for record-breaking performance.
But ESPYs host Serena Williams still made a point of highlighting disparities between men’s and women’s sports, most memorably in a joke directed at Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani.
In her opening monologue, the tennis legend had fun with what she called “the craziest story of the year”: when news broke this spring that the pitcher’s translator stole more than $16 million from Ohtani to pay off gambling debts.
“Sixteen million, y’all,” she said to the audience. “Male athletes get paid so much more than female athletes, they don’t even notice losing $16 million.”
For years, Williams was the highest-paid woman in sports, but the 23-time Grand Slam winner retired in 2022. The year she announced she was stepping away from tennis, Williams made $45 million, making her the second-highest-paid woman that year behind fellow tennis star Naomi Osaka ($59 million), according to an annual Forbes list. But Osaka and Williams were the only women to break into the top 50 highest-paid athletes that year, landing at 19th and 31st respectively.
Ohtani, meanwhile, signed the largest contract in MLB history in 2023, joining the Dodgers for $700 million a year for the next decade.
Because of the way the deal is set up, Ohtani’s on-the-field earnings for the past year topped just over $25 million, and the pitcher’s total earnings were around $85 million, according to Forbes. That wasn’t even enough to land Ohtani among the top 10 highest-paid athletes that year, though. The Forbes list was topped by soccer stars Cristiano Renaldo and Lionel Messi and golfer John Rahm, who raked in $260, $135, and $218 million in total earnings, respectively.
Since 2012, only four female athletes have cracked Forbes’ top 50 list—all of them tennis players. In 2024, with Williams retired and Osaka missing tournaments ahead of giving birth to a daughter, the highest-paid woman was Polish tennis player Iga Świątek, who made barely half of the $45.2 million needed to break into the top 50.
The joke about Ohtani wasn’t the only time Williams brought up the lack of parity between male and female athletes. Later in her opening monologue, Williams teased ESPN about the network’s lack of coverage of women’s sports.
“I should be fair,” she said. “ESPN does show women’s sports when there’s no football, or basketball, or baseball, or hockey, or golf—or cornhole.”
Williams also took a jab at Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who drew widespread outrage this spring over remarks he gave at a commencement speech asserting that most female graduates in the audience were “most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”
"So, go ahead and enjoy women's sports like you would any other sports, because they are sports." – Venus Williams
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) July 12, 2024
"Except you, Harrison Butker. We don't need you." – Serena Williams
"At all. Like, ever." – Quinta Brunson #ESPYSpic.twitter.com/RhvxfiHUWN
Addressing Butker, Williams said dryly, “We don’t need you.”