Shadow Slams

Greetings, Tribe. Rough morning here, my Outlook email crashed, and then I had to segue to a different topic on an ESPN post (it should be up now or very soon, here); upshot was that I haven't watched a whole lot of tennis. I did get hook up briefly with renowned TennisWorld author Todd-and-in-Charge, and may see Toronto Kate later. TaiC is a fit, clean-cut guy with striking blue eyes (he's married, with four boys), he's almost big enough to make you think maybe he had played football.

Also this morning, I ran into ESPN broadcaster Cliff Drysdale. We had a chat and he told me he really enjoys reading TW. I suggested that he say "Hi" to y'all during his broadcast, and shortly after the Henin vs. Chakvetadze match ended, Pam Shriver told me that he'd done just that. I imagine the vast majority of you missed it, because nobody threw it in the Comments. Pam might come on and comment sometime soon.

I guess i didn't miss very much by working during the Henin match. It was another of those awful yawners; Henin won two-and-three,and you could have written the script in your sleep.

Keeping in mind that this is, theoretically, the fifth or sixth most important tournament of the year, that's kind of a bummer, and it undermines the argument that everyone really, really wants to believe: that the women's tour has evolved since the days when a handful of top players (2 to 3)  routinely cruised to finals, eliminating journey women who are obviously talented by maddeningly poor competitors.

I have no real idea why this hasn't really changed, but suspect that it's more of a "cultural" thing in the narrow sense of that word (tennis culture, not culture-at-large). I once thought the lack of competitive depth had a lot to do with the fact that, unlike the men, the women just don't generate enough power to be able to blow superior players off the court on a good day. Now I'm thinking the roots may be be just as much psychological as mental. That is, the women players may be more willing to accept the pecking order and find their place in it than do the men. Maybe it has something to do with gender hard-wiring, maybe not.

The bigger problem I see is the one I address in the ESPN post: the "commitment drift" that has led so many of the women players, tennis administrators, and pundits to conclude that the schedule is overloaded and the women under too much duress to play too many tournaments. The numbers (matches played in 2006) I posted at that blog item are telling. And so is the new Roadmap 2010, which the WTA unveiled a few days ago.

The main features of the Roadmap, which will kick in in 2009, are: a longer off-season (nine weeks instead of the present seven), fewer first-tier tournaments (20, down from the current 26), more combined, mandatory events (four: Miami and Indian Wells, which already are combined, and newbies Beijing and Madrid), and a structure intended to deliver more "top stars and rivalries" (the words are those of WTA CEO Larry Scott). It's great that we'll have four, mandatory, combined "shadow slams" and I like the idea of having a transparent suspension (and appeal) process in place for dealing with players who try to avoid the mandatory events. But I keep getting hung up on the player commitment issue.

The complicated system of player distribution that the WTA has endorsed, and the specific form of "streamlining" it represents, are potential minefields. The WTA right now is proposing that the players commit to 10 tournaments (down from 13 two years ago), in addition to the four combined, mandatory events. Theoretically, this is a sound idea. The WTA will offer 20 "Premier" events (down from the 26 currently called Tier I events), with an entry system that will guarantee X-number of stars for each event, although it won't guarantee X-number of rivals.

But right now, there are only six legitimate "stars" in the WTA ranks: Serena and Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova, Justine Henin, Amelie Mauresmo, and Martina Hingis.

One of them is a star but no longer a top player (Venus), another is a formerly retired star who hasn't been to a Grand Slam final since her return (Hingis). That is, they are "stars" only in the most basic, tabloid sense of the word. So we are down to four stars. I think you are starting to see the problem.

The WTA can say what it wants about Top 10 players being "stars" by definition; the reality is that at an event that features, say, Patty Schnyder, Hingis, Nadia Petrova and Svetlana Kuznetsova (all year-end Top Tenners) is not the same as one that features Serena Williams, Henin and Mauresmo. In other words, the idea of "distributing" talent , wide a net as it casts, is at odds with the idea of promoting rivalries. There is only one way to promote rivalries: create an acceptable number of mandatory events. For all the problems the ATP faces, and they aren't entirely different from the WTA in this regard, they have a better model. Every aspect of the WTA Roadmap seems workable only if the players embrace the system. And they have been abusing the system, often flagrantly, for a long time now.

I wrote at ESPN's site that "equality" is not just about prize money. The essence of meaningful equality is an environment in which the women players, ostensibly as professional, dedicated and focused as their male counterparts, compete on the same general terms, by the same general ground rules. That is, you remove the gender component from the debate on the premise that male and female tennis pros are capable of working comparably hard (despite the useful  best-of-three vs. best-of-five distinction) in a comparably challenging, credible, "fan-friendly" (Scott's term) system. That has a lot more to do with true equality, if that's the goal, than does the same size paycheck or similar playing opportunity (that already exists).

I keep getting back to the same problem here. Given the realities at play, the ATP has come up with a fairly transparent, stable, acceptable tour structure. It is built on the Grand Slams, nine mandatory events, and good-night Irene - the rest is take-the-money-and-run, and god bless the takers and runners. I don't really understand why the WTA can't come up with a mirror-image tour (I don't care where or when the tournaments take place, at least not for the purposes of this discussion). It would send a signal of true "equality" far more powerfully than equal prize money or any other comparative standard. In fact, comparative standards are by nature testaments to inequality, as they rely on constantly measuring yourself against a standard set by someone else.

You want equality? How about this: both the ATP men and WTA women have the same tournament and ranking structure, based on a set number of mandatory events. You want rivalries? Make the players meet  each other frequently.  Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, the top men, might have met in at least three mandatory finals this year: Australian Open (being a Grand Slam, it is mandatory in the best sense of that word), Indian Wells and Miami.  Both of them played all three, partly because of the ATP rules. The same could be said for the top two women, Henin and Sharapova. They put themselves in a position to meet just once. That, right there, is the WTA problem in a nutshell. I don't think the Roadmap addresses it with sufficient resolve.

So what's wrong with the WTA telling the women that they have nine mandatory WTA events to play, and the rest is up to them?  Why design all these convoluted formulas and player-delivery mechanisms, based on questionable goals?  Just make the top women play each other, like the men do. Strike a blow for real equality. It isn't rocket science.

I suppose there are commercially-driven reasons for the way the Roadmap evolved, but the bottom line is that the WTA seems to be ducking the towering, chief mandate in tennis: create the tour that ensures that the top players - the real "stars" - meet as frequently as possible, in the most meaningful contexts. That's the Grail in tennis, and the WTA culture should embrace the quest. It sounds an awful lot like there's a "spread the wealth" sensibility at the WTA, which may be good economics but isn't necessarily great for tennis.

Somehow, the WTA players, especially the top women, have to be led back to the wellspring. You're supposed to play a lot of tournaments when you're a tennis pro. You're supposed to meet each other often. You're supposed to revel in the challenge. Just ask Chris and Martina.