Hi there. Before you read any further, note that I won't be accepting comments on this post, because invariably some of you will want to challenge one or another part of it and we've endured enough controversy here about the subjects. But three things that I published during the Indian Wells tournament caused a stir, and I want to add a few thoughts on each just so you know how and what I was thinking. We'll start with the least important and work up from there.
1 - In an early post during the tournament, I wrote: Tsonga’s game degenerated; his focus softened to about what you get in a tacky soft-core porno movie. I think only one comment poster objected to this phrasing, and quite a few posters subsequently challenged his objection. It still matters to me.
You know, I struggled with the appropriateness of the phrasing myself. It did occur to me that we do have a number of young readers, but I decided that the comment was tame and probably humorously resonant to almost all readers, and not particularly corrupting for the others. I also believe that just because you can be vulgar, you don't have to be vulgar, which is why I sometimes double-check myself on these kinds of things. And, personally, I'm not really big on sex-based humor (partly because it's too easy to go there) unless it's so over-the-top that the sex part is the least of it.
So the is objection troubled me, less because of the validity of the poster's argument than because of the idea that someone out there in TennisWorld might have thought that the analogy just popped into my mind as a natural thing. Thanks to all of you who understood that it was intended as humor.
2 - In my Made of Struggle post, quite a few people called me out for characterizing Rafael Nadal as a "provincial" as if the only meaning of that word is pejorative. First of all, it would really take an exceptional circumstance for me to use that word pejoratively. That's because of the person I am, what my interests are outside tennis, and where and with whom I spend so much of my free time. "Provincial" is a vital part of my life. But here's something weird. TW has many cosmopolitan readers. Those who make an a priori assumption that "provincial" is a pejorative probably believe down deep that it really is, and pity poor provincials. This is a common and insulting form of condescension, especially among the intellectually inclined.
Secondly, Does anyone really think I am so stupid that I would suggest that a kid who has accomplished so much, and travels the globe as much as Nadal does, is "provincial" in any literal sense of that word? Nadal is provincial in roughly the same way as anyone else who comes from a place off the great cosmopolitan map and can't or won't betray his roots. I've always sensed and admired that quality; if anything, I may be more guilty of romanticizing Jet Boy than anything else.
3 - In addition to the agitated comments unleashed by my Hangover post and the way I described the Serbian fans, I had a number of emails from angry readers, including many Serbs. One thing I couldn't figure out is why everyone brought Slobodan Milosevic into the discussion, until it dawned on me that it was my use of his first name as generic stand-in for the Serbs in the stands (read those last three words carefully, please).
For the record, I used "Slobodan" for two reasons: first, it was in much the same way that you might say, of Americans, "those average Joes." There is nothing offensive about that construction. Second, Slobodan Zivojinovic was a Serbian player (great guy: nickname, Bobo), so I thought it would make the choice more appropriate.
Many posters took my remarks about a handful of people who were pretty disruptive during a tennis match as an insult to the entire nation of Serbia and all its people. While I regret that they did not read closely enough to see that my remarks clearly were directed at a few dozen unruly fans, I reject the idea that I stereotyped or insulted anybody. And just as an FYI, two Serbs seated close to the court, opposite the
louts up top, were as vocal (and flag-draped) as anyone, albeit in an
acceptable manner. I watched them frantically waving to the louts,
trying to shut them up, when that crew was disrupting the men's trophy
presentation with its tiresome bellowing.
As some posters noted, fans of players from many nations (including some with difficult pasts) have brought exuberance, enthusiasm and patriotic fervor to tennis matches (think Chile, during Rios's reign; or Brazil, during the heyday of Guga) without disrupting either player or infringing on the typical viewer's right to enjoy tennis under the prevailing values of the sport.
I was accused of "politicizing" the tennis, but in my view the opposite is true. The tennis match was politicized by those Serbian fans (recall that Kosovo banner), at the expense of the proceedings on the court. I just reported and commented on it.
A special thanks to those Serbs who understood this, and were sufficiently large-of-spirit and courageous to say so at the Hangover. And also to those two Serbian dudes who tried to keep things cool. I wish your country and people the best.
I'll have Crisis Center Miami post tomorrow. I'll be leaving for Key Biscayne on Tuesday of the second week, and posting from there the rest of the way.
Housekeeping note: Make sure you tune in tomorrow morning for an important, happy announcement that is sure to bring a smile to many of your faces! - Pete
As most of you already know, the ITF independent Anti-Doping Tribunal handed down its decision in the case against Martina Hingis yesterday. The Tribunal categorically rejected Hingis's appeal. Hingis, the 3,456th consecutive athlete who, after testing positive, vociferously denied the charge and proclaimed her innocence, has been suspended for two years - which has become a moot point given that Hingis also announced her retirement shortly after the original doping charge was made public.
I urge you to read the entire report of the Tribunal. I found that some parts of it read like the script of a Monty Python movie. There's this whole thing about the doping control officer being "Mr Snowball" (his wife, Mrs. Snowball, was the one who actually supervised the urine-sample delivery process). And how about that bit (paragraph 36) about how Mr. Snowball thought it "strange" when the Firekitten gave Mrs. Bosanquet a kiss. Anyway. . .
I'd be the last person to advocate lynching people who have used or even just tried cocaine (among other things it would make me a horrible hypocrite, wink-wink), but the recreational drug is a prohibited substance and, at the end of the day, either you have rules or you don't. (Excuse me, I need to run to the men's for a moment!). Many people will think it a shame that this positive drug test will become part of the Hingis legacy, but something that came up while Pete Sampras and I were working on his book has led me to re-consider that (Back in a sec, where the hail is that danged Kleenex?).
You may remember that Petr Korda won the 1998 Australian Open (it was his only Grand Slam singles title, and in winning it he prevented Marcelo Rios from taking one) and rose as high as No. 2 in the world rankings. Months thereafter, after a drug test administered at Wimbledon, he became the first high-profile tennis player busted under doping rules that finally acquired teeth when tennis became an Olympic sport again (in order to be an Olympic sport, tennis must embrace the stringent drug-testing policies of the International Olympic Committee). Korda tested positive for nandrolone, which is to dopers what a Big Mac is to fans of fast food. Banned for a year, Korda (like Hingis) basically said "To hail with it", and left the tour.
Now here's the funny part. In 1997, Korda hung a surprising loss on Sampras at the US Open of 1997. This was one of the strangest matches in Pete's career, and it played out under ugly conditions, including at least one rain delay. Korda hung in there to win the match in a fifth-set tiebreaker - it was one of the few times in Pete's career that he had a match under control and let a guy come back to win. But in light of the Korda bust of a few months later, its perfectly acceptable to speculate on what role doping might have played in that win by Korda. After all, one of the things doping can increase your strength and stamina - two critical areas for the human pencil, Korda.
Pete will re-visit this issue in his book, and it wouldn't be right of me to publish his thoughts here. But here are mine: Korda was a player who gave Pete fits on more than one occasion. The guy was a brilliant shotmaker who seemed to play his best when he had nothing to lose. He was also a weird dude - he defaulted from the US Open after beating Pete that year, on the grounds that he was "sick" (it was an incident reminiscent of the Gasquet default at the US Open; in fact, there are a number of similarities between Korda and Gasquet). Still, if you connect the dots, even Korda's upset of Sampras is tainted.
The funny thing, now, is that nobody made that big a deal out of the Korda suspension and fine back when it happened. And while Korda lost all his appeals and had to return over half-a-million dollars in prize-money, it's fair to ask if that was sufficient punishment for a guy who won over $10 million in his career - plus earned hefty sums in appearance feels, exhibitions and endorsement fees.
I'm not sure that's sufficient punishment, and it isn't because of how I feel about Petr Korda. It's because how I feel about Marcelo Rios.
Rios was denied his one and only major, and it may have been because his opponent had the benefit of doping. I wonder how Rios felt after Wimbledon in '98, seeing that the guy who beat him in Melbourne had been found guilty of doping. I think that the ITF should have stripped Korda of his Australian Open title and awarded it to Rios.
Of course, the ITF has no such protocol in place. So I would suggest that the ITF adopt a policy of awarding all the matches won by a convicted doper for a specific interval (three months? six months? a year?). I mean, dopers presumably benefit from their illicit actions, at least in some cases (nandrolone, as opposed to cocaine) for some time before they're busted. So why not let the record show that?
Here's something else to consider, if you don't think that a doper here or a doper there can really influence the game very much. The record that may very well be the foundation of Pete Sampras's legacy is his six consecutive years as the year-end No. 1 player. Pete sealed that record in 1999, tying Jimmy Connors in '98. Guess who was really pushing him, near the end of the year, and threatening to actually make Pete have to play him in the year-end championships in order to secure the top spot?
Correctamundo. Marcelo Rios.
Now, imagine if Rios had the added benefit of winner's ranking points at the Australian Open. That could have given him enough of a cushion to finish as the year-end No. 1, with a major to boot. This become critically important because Rios pulled out of some events at the end of the year, which helped enable Sampras to catch and surpass him in the rankings.
Personally, I'm not sure you could re-adjust things like ranking points in order to mete out justice to dopers. That gets awfully complicated. And who knows what Sampras himself would have done, if Rios had won in Melbourne? You certainly can't take Pete's No. 1 ranking away, because Korda was a doper and you had to make restitution to Rios.
To me, the key thing is the titles anyway. So I would urge the ITF and other Lords of Tennis to agree that in addition to the usual punishment, dopers be stripped of any victories or titles they won for a specified time before their positive test. Give the Ws, if not the ranking points, to the guys they beat. In my mind, Rios is the 1998 Australian Open champion and Petr Korda is the doper who never won a major legitimately.
This rant began as a speculation on Hingis's legacy, so let's bring it full circle. Korda, who to my mind committed a far worse offense than Hingis, is happily playing on the senior tour, acknowledged as a Grand Slam champ, and (presumably) livin' large. Even Pete Sampras bears him no ill will, which speaks well for Sampras. I've always felt that it's much easier to forgive than to forget, but in tennis, people seem to forget with equal facility.
Mornin', folks. We have a Tennis magazine planning meeting this morning, so I won't be back with you until later. The big news this morning is that Martina Hingis, who has been slipping down the slope of the rankings so gradually and inexorably that you can almost hear her fingernails squeaking, is calling it quits. I'll post on that tomorrow for ESPN and have a more detailed appraisal here - after she officially makes her announcement. No point jumping the gun, right?
The big news at the French Indoors has been Andy Murray, who's blasted through to the Paris quarters and continues his drive to qualify for Shanghai. Murray was riding in a car that got rear-ended on the way into town from the airport when he arrived in Paris. He has complained that he subsequently experienced a little back pain. Is there anyone on the planet who has been in a traffic accident and hasn't experienced back pain, or neck pain? I once rolled a a car on Route 17, climbed out of the window (it came to rest on its roof) and, pausing for a moment, just shrugged and started walking toward the next highway exit. Didn't have a scratch on me, but the brand-new rental car had been transformed into something that looked vaguely like the string of vehicles I drove through my college years.
It looks like Murray is making a serious run at qualifying for the Shanghai Masters, although his life would have been made a lot easier if Ivo Karlovic had managed to upset top-seed-for-life Roger Federer (Karlovic bowed in three sets). Speaking of TMF, regular reader Jon R. alerted me to this sad and harrowing story out of Dubai, the UAE city-state that is Federer's base. Tennis has embraced as a showcase venue for its human wares - a relationship that has been bumped beyond the just-kissing stage by the fact that the movers and sheikers in Dubai apparently have unlimited amounts of dough, while the ATP and WTA tours (as I hear it), are usually in and out of financial trouble.
I don't know how many male ATP pros are gay; not a single one is openly gay. But there are many gay women on the WTA tour, including some openly, including Martina Navratilova and Amelie Mauresmo (a former champion at Dubai). I wonder how they feel about issue, and I wonder if similar laws and attitudes toward homosexuality prevail in Doha, Qatar, where the women will be playing their year-end championships after they leave Madrid.
Leave it to tennis, and the ATP in particular. What began as a potential "Match-fixing on the ATP Tour" controversy has degenerated into a "Mis-quotation over Match-Fixing on the ATP Tour Controversy." The amount of ink that Murray's ill-chosen words have attracted is astonishing (he said "everyone" - meaning all the players - know that match-fixing goes on, a claim that was later denounced and repudiated by various ATP pros and administrators). And now comes the most bizarre episode of them all: Nikolay Davydenko, a principal in the match (at Sopot, Poland) that launched this entire match-fixing saga, has come down hard on Murray
You know, I'm not buying Kolya's indignation. Maybe this is what you get when you make the guy the model for a terracotta statue, although there is something appropriate about that curiously hagiographic exercise because (I think) those terracotta statues are hollow - kind of like those chocolate Easter bunnies that are such a disappointment when you're a child: What, you mean this 36-inch tall bunny contains just enough chocolate to be compacted into my one tiny fist? Thats like Terracotta Kolya.
I guess Kolya the No Longer Obscure felt entitled to step out and rip Murray a new one because - well, because of exactly what? Some guilt-driven conviction that Murray was tacitly saying that he - Nikolay Davydenko - fixed or played along with the fixing of that match in Sopot? Impossible. You can't ready anything like that into Murray's comments, although they do, in a roundabout way, presume a certain amount of guilt among ATP pros. But why would Kolya take that so (obviously) personally?
Oddly, Davydenko's clear implication that Murray may know more about gambling in tennis than he has let on - clearly, an example of table-turning at its best , or worst - is a far more accusatory charge than anyone has really leveled thus far at Davydenko. I mean, the guy really goes after Murray, whose biggest transgression seems to have been speaking without thinking, and portraying his own presumed assumptions as the ATP canon. Still, Davydenko's outrage seems like a curious over-reaction; to me, it comes off as extremely defensive - like, Whoa, hoss, why are you getting so worked up about this?
All of which would be fine if the Sopot issue were resolved, or if somehow it could be shown that there was no potential gain to Davydenko from being involved in the Sopot fix-scheme, if such a scheme did indeed exist. The circumstantial evidence doesn't exactly exonerate Davydenko, which is partly why such a strident attack on Murray seems ill-advised as well as strangely self-righteous.
It's pretty hard to read a great deal of emotion or psychology into a printed story, but does anyone else think there is, in general, something fundamentally passive-aggressive about Kolya? Or that something down deep must be bothering the little bad dude to lead him to lash out like that. Is Davydenko trying to position himself as some kind of outraged, aggrieved guardian of the game's integrity? That certainly would raise some eyebrows, if for no other reason than that in Davydenko's position, he might better just keep his mouth shut and wait for his good name to be cleared in the ongoing investigation into the Sopot incident.
This is really pretty baffling, but it isn't the first time Kolya has flummoxed us. He did it as recently as last Sunday, when he won the Kremlin Cup. Oh, I know that this wasn't the first time he won the event, although it did represent his first tournament win of the year. That it happened on what is - for any Russian - such a great occasion was somewhat surprising to me. Maybe I don't give Kolya enough credit, but he just doesn't seem the type to step up and successfully deal the pressure of performing at the highest level, in front of his home crowd, often against players who are lionized to a much higher degree by the Russians. You might expect an Andy Roddick, Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic to thrive under those circumstances, but --- Kolya?
There is more to it than that, too. Davydenko has a history of lording it over the players against whom he has been successful (and therefore entitled to feel confident), and folding up like a cheap pocket-knife when he's facing the big dogs, or even medium-sized dogs - at least those that are capable of biting, which leaves out Ivan Ljubicic at Grand Slams but includes Tommy Haas, who drubbed Kolya out of the Australian Open quarterfinals last year.The overall rap on Kolya is: steady but uninspired, talented but prone to stepping down rather than up when finding a way to win is imperative. He also seems to be saddled with a Small-Man Complex that perpetually leaves him feeling like he's getting hosed, like nobody appreciates him, like nobody cares, like. . . I'll show them all, one day!
Yet for all those shortcomings, he's won the Kremlin Cup three times, and don't be fooled - that event is not just a big deal in Moscow, it also offers the winner the bragging rights to the entire Russian tennis landscape. Kolya has now won it three times, which is two more times than his revered rival, Marat Safin. Okay, so doing better than Safin at anything, tennis-wise, may not exactly earn you much in the way of bragging rights, but Davydenko's record in Moscow is surprising and impressive, and it does underscore the flip side of the Kolya argument, but may actually be more accurate and germane (but doesn't appeal to me as much): The guy gets the most out of a game that isn't quite good enough to beat the very top players; that is, he is to the top players what Andy Roddick has been to Roger Federer, and psychology, Small-Man Complex, and male-pattern baldness have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
I don't know, like other things about Davydenko, I just can't fully buy it.
I found it both odd and fitting that just days after our discussion about how the ATP has been handling the betting controversy, we experienced exactly the kind of public relations disaster that I had warned about.
As you all know by now, Andy Murray said in a recent BBC radio interview that “everyone knows it [match-fixing] goes on”, and the repercussions haven't died down yet. First, Rafael Nadal met with Murray and denounced the broad, general comment (Rafa insisted he is not part of that "everyone" whom Murray cited), and Murray is also scheduled to meet with ATP chief Etienne de Villiers later this week to explain the remark.
Some comment posters, most notably TW regular Todd and in Charge, took umbrage at my suggestion that the ATP (including the players) should have circled the wagons and developed a strategy for dealing with the gambling in tennis issue when news that triggered the crisis came out of Sopot, Poland. I felt that the ATP should have adopted the attitude that this is an "internal affairs" matter, and embraced an informal, self-imposed gag rule because of the critically sensitive nature of subject.
Instead, the ATP launched an "investigation." Meanwhile, any time a player wanted to come forward to relate experiences or disseminate rumors about potential match-fixing, the media was ready to jump all over the story. Frustrated celebrities and other stymied attention seekers take note: You want headlines, just call the press and tell them you want to reveal some (attempted) match-fixing incident on the ATP Tour.
So instead of exercising preventive damage-control (which was my suggestion) the ATP flew by the seat of pants and - poof! - it all blew up with Murray's remarks. So now the drill is post-disaster damage control. And don't for a moment think that Murray's meetings with Nadal and deVilliers, as well has his own furious backpedaling (when embarassed, just claim that your remarks were "taken out of context" or, preferably, you were "misquoted"), are anything but an attempt at damage control. If you're going to resort to damage control, why not do it before the damage gets worse?
Alright - the problem isn't that Murray, either in or out of context, misrepresented the reality of match-fixing in men's tennis (at least at the lower levels of the game). I'm sure he meant exactly what he said, because you would have to be a charter member of the Flat-Earth Society to deny that tennis has a problem. The real issue is, how big a problem is it, how do you fix it and, meanwhile, how do you portray the nature of the problem in the public forum?
The problem is that Murray's loose-lips both maintained and advanced the scandal and the general impression that "tennis" (meaning the ATP Tour and Grand Slams) has a gambling problem. Is it really worth it, on some vague and largely sentimental grounds of free speech? I know Todd and others see the players as potential whistle-blowers, and believe that their access to the press somehow can serve to keep the ATP honest. But in this case (as opposed to, say, an issue like under-the-table appearance fees), it's impossible to imagine that the ATP would actively ignore or try to sweep the problem under the rug. Some people believe that preventive damage-control efforts are really a form of censorship. I just don't happen to be one of them, when something like a gag-rule is self-imposed and voluntary. Sometimes, control of the message is critically important.
So what do we have here, at the end of the day? Murray makes some poorly considered and widely broadcast remarks, casting further doubts on the integrity of the game. A few days later, the Lords of Tennis issue this terse and oddly "no-news" news release:
The ITF, Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, ATP and the Grand Slam Committee have
full confidence in the integrity of our sport. Today's meeting
reaffirmed tennis's unified approach to protecting that integrity.
While we do not believe that our sport has a corruption problem we do recognise that a threat to the integrity of tennis exists.
We
believe that an independent situation analysis of this risk is
necessary and intend to utilise external expertise to assist us in
conducting this analysis. We will make a further announcement in due
course.
I support the idea that tennis ought to have an anti-corruption wing although I don't admire the way the promise to develop one has come along. This is a vivid example of how the Lords are still trying to catch up to the story, rather than get ahead of it - that is, it illustrates exactly what I meant when I suggested that the ATP at-large ought to have taken a really disciplined approach to how it conducts the dialogue about gambling, especially in public. It should have done far more to control the message.
By the way, it isn't as if more rigorous policing is going to solve this problem, either - just check out the the thoughts of some bookmakers on that subject. It's funny, but just this morning I read a small item in the front of the New York Post about disgraced rogue NBA referee Tim Donaghy, who has struck a plea-deal with federal authorities over charges (since admitted) that he bet on games that he officiated, which is as close to game-fixing as you can come. I'm not a big NBA fan, but the fact that I've heard so little about this scandal makes me think that the NBA handled it well. The league prevented the fire from becoming a conflagration, on which everyone from players to team officials kept throwing gasoline.
Sometimes I think tennis would be better off with DCU (Damage Control Unit) than a CCU, although both would be welcome.
Many of you already saw, linked to, and probably commented on this latest episode in the ongoing, increasingly sordid match-fixing scandal haunting the ATP Tour. It seems that there's a new report of this kind popping onto the radar every second or third day, dating back to the summer, when the unusual betting patterns surrounding a match in Sopot featuring Nikolay Davydenko caused Betfairto close shop on the action and alert the ATP.
This is not the first time TennisWorld has addressed this issue; in fact, I mentioned it in this antediluvian post. I remember doing at least one other post that addressed the match-fixing issue, but I haven't been able to find it in our admittedly hit-and-miss archival system (Again, My Kingdom for a Search Engine!). But I do remember this about that post: I called out the ATP for allowing a booking agency (it might even have been Betfair) to sponsor a small-ish European tournament. At the time, former ATP vice-president of communications, David Higdon, pooh-poohed my concerns and cavalierly dismissed the idea that tennis might have a "betting problem", or by allowing a booking agent to sponsor an event, create the illusion that the ATP is cozy with the gambling establishment.
I can't tell you how many gambling and match-fixing stories I've heard, shared, or speculated about since Sopot. In good conscience, it's impossible to relate them here because they automatically cast suspicion on the players involved, and as far I know, nobody who has stepped forward and gone on record to say that this or that player has thrown a match. But I can talk about the overall situation in broad terms.
One man who looked quite deeply into the subject is my long-standing friend and premier Italian blogmeister, Ubaldo Scanagatta (Man, do wish his blog were in English; I speak some Italian, but not enough to get more than the gist of his writing). Ubaldo was atop all the rumors, many of which involve Italian players. He knew enough about some of the individual cases to outline for me a number of potential betting scenarios that seemed impossible to either control or prove, short of a directly involved party actually stepping forward with a confession - the truth of which might also be impossible to verify because, in so many cases, it would come down to the word of one man against that of another.
When the Sopot story broke, I was somewhat skeptical that throwing matches could be a chronic and pervasive problem on the tour, although I had not doubt that isolated incidents had occurred. Since then, I've just heard - and, like you, read - so many admissions that I've changed my mind. Most of these confessions have come from players who claim to have been approached about throwing matches, which also means that the stories are only being shared by those players who refused to throw matches. I believe tennis has a problem. The real question is, how big of a problem is it?
To wit, I know of only one rumor that implicates top players at major events. I'm not going to leave you hanging (entirely), so just take a look at Grand Slam finals over the past ten years, and see what result - if any - leaps out at you.
One of the most insidious aspects of the alleged match-fixing is the common practice of bet-matching, whereby an intermediary like Betfair acts solely as an agent to bring together two or more parties who want to bet against each other in real time. There are scenarios in which Player A can appear to be losing or winning, thereby influencing the liquid odds, and then either lose or win in a way that enables a co-conspirator to cash in.
The result is that even if player A didn't actually throw a match, he helped lure a bunch of suckers into making bets they were destined to lose because of the collusion between the winning bettors and Player A. Of course, Player B can also be brought into the loop, and promised a sizable chunk of cash to play along with the scam. With bet-matching and changing odds, a player so inclined can play the bettors (or at least the targeted suckers) like a fiddle. The only solution for this is for the facilitators, like Betfair, is to abandon the role of intermediary between willing bettors. Perhaps the solution is for the booking agencies to shut down betting the moment a match begins. That would fix part of the problem, although it can't keep players from throwing matches outright.
Right now, the ATP has a curious problem on its hands. Usually, an investigation is like a microscope, dialed in little-by-little to bring a specific object of study into focus. It seems to me that this cornucopia of stories about players being approached to throw matches reverses that process. This is like a murder investigation that keeps turning up corpses and clues at such a rate that the investigators don't know which dead body or lead to follow next.
It isn't unusual for investigations to widen rather than narrow in scope, but it seems like this exploration keeps opening up newer and nastier fronts all the time. It cannot any longer be about a specific incident involving two players. It must be about a pervasive culture that involves not only corrupt individuals ready to throw matches, but a host of agents who actively seek to recruit match-throwers at every level of the game.
That every level bit raises an important point. We all know that many people gamble, and any sport or competitive endeavor has so many interested parties that fixing results is an inevitable occurrence. Up to now, the ATP could take (cold) comfort in the fact that most of the fixing stories involved the equivalent of minor-league players at obscure events - sort of like those boxing scandals involving tomato can fighters in small towns. Or, as El Jon maintains, it's been like finding out that some Double A ballplayer with no major league prospects has tested positive for steroids. Is that stop the presses news?
But all that that changed with the Davydenko investigation, and allegations like the ones linked to at the top of this piece now bring the scandal to significant events and world-class players.
Still - and this is El Jon again (we just talked about this over lunch) - one of the distressing elements in all this is that tennis appears to have an enormous public relations problem on its hands. It has become the go-to sport for scandal. Roger Federer could be pounding Rafael Nadal on clay but the sports ticker of many networks won't touch it; but if a player is found guilty of an admittedly minor, inadvertent doping offense, it's right there, crawling across the bottom of the screen in your living room.
The big problem here is that when it comes to most major sports, nobody pays much attention to what happens out in the bushes, where the minor characters grimly ply their trade. But all of tennis seems to be fair game, as if there were no appreciable difference between regular tour players and the characters who drift on and off the tournament radar. This is a problem that the Lords of Tennis ought to address, although in so doing, even with the best of intentions, some people will insist that the Lords merely want to keep the lid on the controversy.
I'm not making excuses or trying to rationalize away an obvious, right-here, right-now problem. I just don't see how the game of tennis can solve it, given the flourishing and diverse gambling industry, and the nature of the sport.
Well, it turns out that everyone in New York is getting into the tennis blogging act at the US Open, including the venerable New Yorker magazine. My wife, Lisa, adores the New Yorker. In fact, I have to remove the current copy from her hands every night, right before I douse the light, because she falls asleep reading it. This is not a comment on the quality of the writing the New Yorker as much as on the sleeping habits of my wife. She simply can't imagine going to sleep without reading some pages from her beloved New Yorker. I imagine Planned Parenthood loves this magazine, but we needn't go there just now. Anyway, I recognize the name of one of the two fellas writing the blog, Nick Paumgarten. He's written some very nice stuff, both for the magazine and blog.
Also on the blogging front, my long-time friend Texas Kate McElroy is blogging for the New York Times website. To use a phrase Times hands might recognize, the newspaper is "flooding the zone" with its tennis coverage. Check it out.
Here's an item Kate will appreciate, because the subject is another Texan, and the New Yorker guys might also enjoy because (or in spite of the fact that) it's a little like one of those front-of-the-book, Talk of the Town pieces that have become no less a trademark of the New Yorker than that oppressor- class dude with the top hat and monocle.
Anyway, almost all of you know that Sam Querrey this summer whacked 10 consecutive aces, sending the ATP's go-to stats guy, Greg Sharko, scrambling to find out if this was, in fact, a new record. The result of that search was inconclusive, although it's certainly the most consecutive aces hit sincre the ATP and ITF began tracking such things. At the time, various names were tossed out as players who might have equaled Querrey's feat, including John Newcombe, Slobodan Zivojinovic, Mark Edmondson, Roscoe Tanner and Kevin Curren or his long-time doubles partner, Steve Denton.
My own "best bet" in that regard was Denton, the Texas Ace Machine who battled McEnroe and Connors in his heyday on the tour in the early 1980s. I happened to run into Denton just the other day in the player lounge here at the USTABJKNTC; he was having lunch with another guy who knew a thing or two about hitting The Great Unreturnable, Peter Fleming.
Steve is now coaching the Texas A&M tennis team, and he was dressed in his finest Aggie maroon-and-white (Texas Kate is an Aggie as well). He told me the story of the time he hit 13 aces in a row (well, 12 for sure) in a doubles match in 1982, at the Stockholm Open (an event that remains a staple on the fall, European indoor circuit).
Denton would be inclined to remember, because 1982 was the high-water mark of his career. Coming into the U.S. Open, he explained, he had beaten John McEnroe in the semifinals at Cincinnati, and was in turn beaten by Ivan Lendl (who had beaten Jimmy Connors in the Cincy semis, by an improbable score of 6-0,6-0). At the Open, Denton recalled, he had Guillermo Vilas by two sets to none but let him slip away. Still, Denton won the U.S. doubles (with Curren), beating the Gullikson twins in the semis and Hank Pfister and Victor Amaya in the finals. That final, BTW, may have represented the most service firepower ever assembled on a court for one match.
Anyway, riding high as recently crowned U.S. Open doubles champs, Denton and Curren were a tough assignment for anyone on the fast courts of Stockholm's Kunglia hall. Shortly before they played their quarterfinal match against doubles icon Frew McMillen and Sandy Mayer, Denton's coach, Warren Jacques, took away his Prince Woody racket and shoved one of those new graphite models in his hand, suggesting he play with it instead.
Denton shrugged; if coach says so. . .
Denton served first in the match, and he clobbered four aces ("Not bad," he thought, appreciating the new racket). In his next service game - the fifth - Denton served four more No See Ums. Hmmmm. . . Of course, this wasn't exactly uncharted territory for Denton, who, despite his bulk (he was a good 6-2 and broad at the shoulders), looked a bit like leaping fish flicking its tail as he delivered that hard one. On more than one occasion, Denton found himself down, love-40, and ended up serving five consecutive aces. Demoralized much?
With a break in hand, it was up to Denton to serve out the match. He hammered out three aces, for a 40-love lead and set point, at which point his partner Curren shrugged and went to sit down in his chair (back in those days, players still did those kind of things). Meanwhile, McMillen and Mayer flooded the zone, trying to unnerve Denton by placing one man inside the service box. The ploy failed. Denton whistled another ace past his opponents.
By the time Denton hit his last ace of the set (thereby having played an entire set without having allowed his opponents to so much as touch a ball on his service games), the Swedish crowd were aware that something unusual was in progress. So they started that slow, staccato clapping. "I think the King of Sweden was even there that night," Denton said."But I don't know if he took part in that clapping thing they do."
Naturally, Denton was given the ball to serve first in the next set. And this is where he gets a little uncertain about the details. He believes he hit another ace, bringing the total to 13, but is not sure. What he does remember clearly, he says, is how the ace streak ended. He hit a fault and, in a desperate attempt to keep the string going, he went for too much on a second serve. And there it ended.
"It was just one of those freak days," Denton said. "If you put a dime down on the court, I could have hit it for you. I could never do that again in a million years."
I jokingly asked if, with all the recent attention on John Isner, Denton was at all tempted to try a comeback. He replied: "Nah. I've put away my gun for good. But hopefully, one day I'll come and see one of my (Aggie) boys play here."
The reports coming out of Poland and London concerning irregular betting patterns on a match involving a TW favorite, Nikolay "Kolya the Obscure" Davydenko are somewhat disturbing. A stat in one of the comments at the Fox site (wait until you get a load of those!) caught my eye. The poster wrote: In todays Vasallo match he (Davydenko) was leading 6-2 4-1 [note that Davydenko lost the set, 6-3, so this cannot be accurate; hat tip to Comment poster Sophie for that catch. But I am allowing it to stand, because I assume it was just a typo - PB] and was traded at 1.8 (means 55% winning probability) normal would be 1.2 (83%) That means he was traded 4 times higher than usual and he lost the game from that point on!
The other disturbing thing here is that it was a second-round match in Sopot, not a Wimbledon quarterfinal, yet it attracted $7 million in betting action - roughly ten times what is usually bet on a this kind of match. My guess is that there is some kind of story here, for sure. But just what kind, I'm not sure.
The most interesting element in this story grows out of a hypothetical: What if somehow the match was fixed? Just how would the ATP, Betfair - or anyone else - establish that, short of someone with insider knowledge approaching them. Think about it. The ATP and/or Betfair will say they are "investigating." But how, exactly, does the ATP investigate something like this?
My guess: they interview the principal and, unless one of them,for some reason, hands the ATP a smoking gun, the case is immedaitely closed. The only meaningful investigation would seem to be one that followed the money, but the ATP isn't the FBI or CIA - or a deep-pocketed entity like the NFL. And I doubt that Betfair would plow significant resources into a comprehensive investigation - mainly because it has the right to suspend and terminate betting, and even renege on payouts. So the only cost to Betfair has been the commissions it would have collected. It isn't like the firm had to swallow a huge hit by paying out to winners of a fixed match.
So who would really be motivated, or sufficiently flush, to conduct and finance the kind of full-blown investigation that might actually make potential match-throwers fear reprisals?
Here's a chilling bit added to the Associated Press feed on this story:
Allegations of match-fixing in tennis have cropped up in the past.
In 2003, bookmakers reportedly suspended betting six hours before Russian player Yevgeny Kafelnikov's match in Lyon, France, against Fernando Vicente after a big wager was placed on the Spaniard. Vicente, who had been winless for several months, won in straight sets. There was no suggestion either player was involved in wrongdoing, and no investigation was made by the ATP. advertisement.
Several Russian tennis players were photographed a few years ago with Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a suspected mobster from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan who was accused of fixing the pairs and ice dancing events at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.
Photographs of Tokhtakhounov with Kafelnikov, Marat Safin and Andrei Medvedev were taken off Medvedev's Web site in 2002 after the man's arrest. Tokhtakhounov spent nearly a year in a Venice, Italy, prison but escaped extradition to the United States in 2003 on the Olympic rigging charges.
I don't know much about this gambling netherworld. The whole thing creeps me out.
PS - update as of 4:06 PM. this BBC story has Betfair officials saying that after Davydenko won the first set, his price "drifted out, not in", which is unusual because you would think it would be the opposite when the World No. 4 is hammering on some journeyman. So it seems entirely possible that people who picked up on Davydenko being hurt (as Vasallo did, according to his own admission in the Fox story) early in the match flooded the betting site, taking a calculated gamble on Kolya NOT being able to finish or win the match.
The U. S. Open hasn't even started and we're already embroiled in a headline-generating controversy, CBS commentator Mary Carillo’s charge that Roger Federer tanked his match against Andy Murray at the recent Cincinnati Masters event. The story slowly took on a life of its own, which was a bad deal for The Mighty Fed and a not-so-bad deal for the CBS publicity honchos.
For Carillo herself, it’s basically a wash: the attention, including Federer’s forceful denial of her charge, enhances her status even as, in many quarters, it has hurt her popularity and, possibly, her credibility.
I got a sense of just how big this story is yesterday, when I met my friend Liz for a drink after work (it’s always Monday at TennisWorld!), and she brought up the subject. Liz is a big Mets fan, a sometimes tennis fan, a discerning consumer of sports news and always smart as a whip, with a great BS detector and an almost disconcerting ability to cut to the chase in any given story.
So let’s de-construct this Tempest in TV-teapot. As the quotes show (including the one in the story by my buddy, Marc Berman, linked above), Mary herself never used the word “tanked”. But she undeniably confirmed John McEnroe’s assertion that she said Federer “threw the match.” There’s no way around that, and therefore it’s accurate if not literally true that she said he tanked. And that’s a very serious charge.
In this, I think Mary made a critical error. Tanking or throwing a match means choosing to lose, or not put forth the effort required to win. It represents the crossing of a very fine and almost impossible to draw line between throwing a match and being unable to muster the energy or will to compete in one. We see relatively few examples of the former, at least among the top players. But examples of the latter abound (look under “S” for “Safin”).
Stepping on the court with you’re the needle on your mental or emotional tank (or both) on “Empty” is a common hazard for the round-the-calendar tennis pros, and the more volatile or artistic players in particular struggle with the condition. The more moody you are, and the more your performance – in anything – is tied to your emotions, the more liable you are to have these “no go” days. This is, fundamentally, a form of impotence.
TMF is a genius, no matter how you cut it, in each of the only two departments that count: technically (as a champion with the physical skills to play at level that routinely touches the breathtaking) and mentally (as a competitor, able to find ways to win even when his technical genius is not firing on all cylinders). The wild card in all this is the emotions – that inchoate, ever-shifting combination of feelings, instincts and impulses that can work together, almost like one of those computer viruses running in the background in your software, to corrupt the integrity of your technical and/or mental program.
Usually, the emotions degrade your mentality first, and then your technique begins to disintegrate until critical mass is attained and you become, well, a basket case. And one of the signature qualities of TMF is that he’s much more artistic and emotional than his persona suggests. Players who are both artistic (think Evonne Goolagong or Ilie Nastase) and emotional (think Martina Navratilova or Boris Becker) never produce the degree of off-the-charts consistency that the very best players (think Pete Sampras, Steffi Graf, Ivan Lendl or Chris Evert) achieve, unless the their minds are strong enough to clench the handle of greatness so tightly that their emotions rarely accumulate the kind of critical mass it takes to loosen it.
But that, I think, is precisely what happened to Federer in Cincy. He shut down, uncharacteristically and – in this, Carillo was right – conspicuously. But that’s a very different thing from consciously deciding not to compete. Or, as Liz put it, “Tanking is a whole different ballgame and a very specific thing, and she (Mary) should have been very careful about that. You just don’t say somebody tanked unless that’s exactly what they did.”
I agree with her, and I’m not saying that to pile on Mary. I’m focusing on it, though, because it underscores something else that I’ve been thinking about, which is that tennis is a monotheistic religion, presided over by a god called Effort. All the other gods – and they include Artistry, Charisma, Empathy – appeal to some, and, in the eyes of tennis pantheists, may have equal or even superior value (how else can you explain the very common preference for Safin over TMF, or Jennifer Capriati over, say, Justine Henin-Hardenne?).
But in the end, Effort is lord – both the ticket to salvation for players (which is why the most talent-blessed rarely are the greatest of players) and the deity before whom most fans, most of the time, ultimately bow – even if they don’t know it. It is why so many people adore Nadal. Effort is rarely as sexy as Artistry (unless it's in a container like Nadal's), nor as flagrantly sentimental as Empathy; it isn’t a warm and fuzzy god; it’s potent one. Effort is, ultimately, awesome. And isn’t that what being god is all about?
Effort is the hallmark of the greatest of champions, period. It's why we love Jimmy Connors, Graf, Sampras (see “C” for Corretja) et al, the playing company that TMF keeps. And that, I think, is why so many took umbrage at Mary’s charge. It implied that Federer is a sinner in the hands of the angry god called Effort. It tarnished his virtue, and Federer has been nothing if not a paragon of virtue.
If, on the other hand, Mary had just said that Roger showed up without his game, or even that on the day he was an impotent competitor, it would merely question his heretofore nonpareil consistency. After all, in losing the match, he squandered his chance to build upon a record just slightly less impressive than his rival Rafael Nadal’s clay-court streak: his streak of 55 straight match wins in North America.
At the end of the day, the wisest thing Mary did was choose to say "no comment" once the story took on a life of its own.
These musing seem especially relevant to me on the eve of the U.S. Open, where once again I'm posting the famous Man in the Arena passage, from a speech by former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, and dedicating it to all the players in the draw, right down the the ones who will be history by tomorrow night at this time:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Since the level of discourse at TW has been so high (and still rising!)lately, I’m throwing in a subject for you all to weigh in on over the next few days: coaching.
I didn’t want to get sidetracked by this issue in my earlier Rogael Naderer posts, and I also avoided the subject because I just wanted to celebrate the glory of the recent Rome final, and the two superb combatants in it.
But those of you who saw the match and read the presser transcripts – and thanks, Ronnie, for posting the full text of both interviews in the Comments section of my post, “Your Service Has Been Interrupted” – surely noticed the way The Mighty Fed called out Toni Nadal for coaching Rafael.
In case you didn’t, here’s the exchange, and bear in mind that while Federer did not bring up this subject, he sure as heck didn’t dismiss or wave it off, either:
Q. In the sixth game of the third set, you said, I assume to Tony Roche, "Is that all right, Tony?" Do you remember that? ROGER FEDERER: That wasn't for Tony Roche. That was for Tony (sic) Nadal.
Q. Tony Nadal?
ROGER FEDERER: He was coaching a little bit too much again today. Yeah, I caught him in the act, so...
Q. Did that upset you a little bit?
ROGER FEDERER: Well, not the first time. I told him many times already, through the entire match in Monaco already. But it seems like they don't keep a close enough eye on him.
My main reaction to this was: what is there about Nadal’s game that benefits from “coaching?” I mean, what do you do, scheme up some elaborate hand signal meaning, “run faster” or “slide and reach farther” or “get more stoked?” I look at Nadal’s game and I don’t see the kind of strategic nuance or technical variety that would warrant serious coaching. Sure I exaggerate, but you know what I mean.
More to the point, I never really saw Nadal as the kind of guy who wants to be coached. He’s seemed too much the fire-breathing stud to be shooting all those helpless, covert glances at the coach’s box, a la the toweringly insecure Ilie Nastase. Rafael always seemed a big boy, a warrior. You’d think he needs Uncle Toni’s tactical and emotional support (for courtside coaching always has an emotional component) about as much as he needs another wedgie.
But Federer is pretty clear on the issue – apparently, Toni really is coaching Rafael, so at some level Rafael is in touch with his inner weenie.
Okay, some of you are going to blow a Gasquet over that. I don’t care. The bottom line is that the last time I checked, coaching is prohibited, and Uncle Toni is, plain and simple, cheating. This reflects badly on both Uncle Toni and Rafael. They know the rules. Either they made a cold, hard choice to violate them, or they somehow don’t think the rules apply to them. Either way, they’re diminished.
I vacillate on the coaching issue. I think something of the grandeur of the game really is lost when it isn’t just you and another guy – or woman – out there, clawing and kicking and scratching, and having to think it all through as you’re doing it. Real men (and women) don’t need – or want- courtside coaching, legitimate or clandestine.
Lately, more and more pundits seem to be extolling the virtue of courtside coaching, a la Davis and Fed Cup, but for what is really an extraneous reason: the added “color” and drama it might bring to televised matches.
I just can’t bring myself to embrace that, although the argument is logical and supportable: Since coaching is almost impossible to police anyway, why constantly embarrass the sport with video shots of parents and coaches madly communicating with the players? There’s a lot to be said for the philosophy that if you can’t – or don’t want to – control it, legalize it – or at least “de-criminalize” it. The worst thing is to have laws that don’t have the will or desire (or both) to enforce.
My own take is that coaching of the kind that routinely occurs (as in the Rome final) can only be reduced in one way: if players have some kind of mechanism for lodging a formal complaint against their opponents for, in effect, unsportsmanlike conduct.
That means that, in a reprise of the Rome incident, Federer could go to the chair and formally complain that Nadal was being coached. The umpire could then direct a person dressed like Ronald McDonald or Sesame Street’s Big Bird, toting a big sign that reads “Cheater!”, to go and sit next to the offending coach/parent.
We’ll see how much hand-signaling, or feverish stage whispering, goes on then!
But seriously, nothing short of that can be done. The tradition of clandestine coaching is as firmly entrenched in tennis, starting in the juniors, as the tradition of winning by your own wits. The only real way to halt coaching is to shame the coaches into giving it up, but given the nature of some of these characters, the last thing you could do is make them feel shame.
Every now and then you come across a story so bizarre that it’s almost impossible to make a meaningful comment on it. A few comment posters in other entries have already noted or linked to this story out of France. I came across it last week, but the server issues we had to deal with left it on the back burner until now.
Deliciously tempting as it may be to leap on a soap box at this stage and to start railing against obsessive tennis parents, the naked and sad fact is that this tale is such a one-off horror story that it doesn’t really say much about anything. There but for the grace of God go I. The line between sanity and madness sometimes appears to be more finely drawn than we want to believe.
Think I’ll save my outrage on this one and just say I feel very sorry for the victims, as well as this character’s poor kids.
I went round to the ESPN Zone restaurant on Times Square about a week ago to catch up with the Bryan Brothers, who were fresh off their doubles triumph at the Australian Open. Last year at this time, they had just completed the first leg of what they would later dub the “anti-slam” – losing in all four major finals of the same year. They narrowly averted that distinction cum anti-distinction by winning at the last major of the year, the U.S. Open.
By the time I arrived at the festivities, the only press pariahs left were a couple of girls from MTV; they were busy pumping Mike for gossip on, I think, Andy Roddick and Jessica Simpson. I, ever the mature and serious tennis journalist, was asking Bob really important questions, like, “So what do you do when the Leander Paes goes crosscourt instead of down-the-line with his backhand half-volley?”
The Bryans were coming off a busy few weeks during which they also played a few exhibitions; I assumed they had just been making hay while the sun shined - cashing in on what fame they have, while they have it.
But it turns out that the boys were on a more serious mission; the exos were fundraisers. The Bryans were looking for a way to recoup some of the legal fees they had poured into the lawsuit that became their big gun in the counter-offensive they mounted against the ATP’s move to kill doubles last summer. To further that end, an Atlanta exo may be in the works. So if you're a doubles fan, or simply appreciate the Bryans for taking matters into their own hands at considerable financial risk, you might want to attend.
The Bryans, together with their dad, Wayne, really stepped up and, working in conjunction with a few other activists, including Mark Knowles and Mahesh Bhupathi, saved doubles as we know it - that's Big Daddy Wayne playing tennis hat/tambourine, with Bob and Mike, in the picture.
“I felt especially bad for Mark (Knowles),” Bob told me. “He was in the trenches, lobbing grenades, and it got to him. It started to affect his play to the point that he had a kind of meltdown at Monte Carlo. He was exhausted. Beaten down.”
One of my regrets is that I didn’t get around to doing a “Man/Woman of the Year (2005)” post before I went off to the Australian Open. If you remember, I did cover the doubles controversy in “Zaniest Story of 2005: the Doubles Mess” (it’s available in the archives). If you read that, you’ll see why Wayne Bryan deserved to be 2005’s Man of the Year. Thanks in large part to Wayne’s leadership and tireless lobbying, the Band of Doubles Brothers succeed in swinging the doubles issue in an astonishing 180-degree turn. They held the ATPs feet to the fire and percipitated a doubles renaissance, instead of allowing the doubles to succumb to a pre-emptive strike.
Ultimately, the only concession the doubles players made was accepting no-ad scoring and a super-tiebreaker instead of a third-set. That’s no small matter, especially to purists. On the other hand, the scoring change means that doubles has a far better chance now of being seen, both live and on television, by a significant, prime-time audience. With matches that can now be counted on to last for no more than an hour and change, tournament directors can now schedule doubles with no fear of diminishing their marquee singles schedule.
“You have to remember that the scoring change is just an experiment,” Bob said. “We just decided we were willing to go along with it for a year. The no-ad system does introduce a little bit more luck into it, I think, but I don’t mind being the test monkey for it.”
Significantly, though, the ATP insists that it researched the issue and can empirically show that the statistical difference between results employing the two systems (traditional vs. no-ad) is negligible.
Bob Bryan cited two other key players who helped get the new doubles deal done - one a usual suspect, the other anything but. Etienne de Villiers, the new ATP CEO, was a key player in bringing peace to the valley. As we at Tennis learned during his visit to our offices last week, de Villiers is a pragmatist and open-minded executive who doesn’t bring significant prejudices and predispositions to the job. His approach was simple: Doubles players unhappy? What can we do to make them happy without harming some other segment of the game?
“Etienne was the guy on their side who really turned it,” Bob said. “He came to the table asking, ‘what can we do to help the game?'.”
The unusual suspect was Roger Federer. The Mighty Fed apparently sat in on a bunch of meetings, and the Bryans (among others) were very impressed by his contribution to the debate. “A lot of Number One players, they steer clear of the politics,” Bob said. “Roger showed us he was really interested in helping the sport, because doubles isn’t just some luxury. It’s part of the sport.”
So here’s the million dollar question: If the statistics show that no-ad and traditional scoring produce virtually identical results (as well as rankings, etc.) would Federer go along with best-of-three, no-ad, super-tiebreaker singles, knowing that the altered scoring system has so many advantages?
Absolutely, positively, definitely. . . not.
Federer’s position apparently is that, at least on reasonably fast surfaces, traditional scoring ensures that a player still has a good chance of winning a game even if he’s down, love-40. It's a condition he doesn't want to sacrifice.
Of course, the obverse is also true; with no-ad scoring, a player has that more of a chance of winning if he’s up 40-love.
But nobody felt like pressing that point on Roger. At least not yet.
Because of the high volume of comments on my "Sania of the Times" post, I feel obliged to do a brief update. A number of posters shot me links to the Yahoo! Sports site where Mirza’s agents at Globosport issued a simple denial of the thrust of the original story, which ran at an Israeli website. I might have noted the source of the original story, but generally I'm not comfortable doing that; it highlights the source in a negative way, implying that it may not be reliable. I had no reason to think that was the case here, despite the obvious issues involved.
Besides, I wouldn't have had any more - or less - of a problem with the facts of this story if it came from a conservative Muslim website celebrating Mirza's decision, and I don't think you would either.
The key to this entire story is the money graph:
Mirza initially agreed to play with Pe’er in Bangalore, but later retracted, telling Pe’er, “It’s best that we don’t play together this time, to prevent protests against my cooperation with an Israeli. There is no reason to arouse their ire (Muslims).”
The direct quote from Mirza should have been sourced, because it doesn’t turn up in the public record: Who exactly did the reporter get the quote from? Mirza? Her coach? Pe’er or her coach, relating a conversation with Mirza? Was it at press conference, public appearance, in a private interview? If it came second-hand from someone who didn’t want to be identified, that should be noted, even if the source is unimpeachable.
At the same time, there is no reason to dismiss this report as a fabrication. It’s hard to believe that the money quote from Mirza is made up out of the thin air (By whom? For what purpose?), Mirza’s history is relevant, and the direct quote from Oded Yaakov, Pe’er’s coach, strongly supports the story.
Yaakov can’t have any clear ulterior reason (if anything, he would be wise to stay mum of he really hopes to see Mirza and Pe'er play together again) for saying what he did. There’s also the chance that the reporter milked the quote out of Yaakov and fitted to suit his needs, but we can't assume that, either.
My gut feeling is that the reporter was fed this story by someone familiar with it, who felt entitled to pass on Mirza’s money quote. I’m still working on this and will post any new developments as they occur or, as they say, close the file.
Just about a week ago, in a meeting with Tennis staffers, new ATP President Etienne de Villiers responded to a question about the credibility the tour lost when so many of the top men skipped the “official” ATP Championships (Shanghai) with a fairly light rejoinder: “Well, I would hope that next year Lleyton Hewitt isn’t expecting his first child again, that Andre Agassi will realize he’s not meant to be a racquetball player, and that Rafael Nadal will have avoided the kind of injury he suffered this year. . .”
Next week, I’ll be posting a more thorough report on the state of the game following our first meeting with de Villiers, but on the issue above I’m not exactly convinced that it was merely a case of the stars being out of alignment. An alert TW reader sent me this link in which there’s an extremely interesting discussion about Nadal having pulled out of Rotterdam.
Keep in mind that this thread is especially revealing because it takes place at the official RN Kool-Aid drinkers fan site, whose webmistress, Susan Seemiller, put on a full court press to convince us of the severity of the foot injury that caused Nadal to miss the Australian Open. At least one poster at the fan site picked up this curious comment posted by at the Men's Tennis Forum by someone (Galaxystorm???) who purports to have serious knowledge of Rafael’s situation, plans and short-term strategy.
A caveat is in order here: this is the internet; we all know people can get up to all kinds of mischief, so I wouldn’t take anything I read on a message board to the bank. But even apart from that comment, it’s fascinating to read what the Kool-Aid drinkers say and think about the withdrawal when they're just talking amongst themselves.
In some ways, Nadal is the ideal guy to take the growing “I’ll do what I want, when I want” movement to the next level. He's a great clay-court player who can stay within his athletic and cultural comfort zone without leaving Europe, where people often put a higher premium on quality of life than success. At that next level - and I'm not sure we're there yet - players will simply cast aside all pretense of accepting the implicit obligations that became part and parcel of a tennis star’s life in the Open era.
Those obligations include taking part in a requisite number of tournaments and, more importantly, having a strong sense of professionalism and ethics – the latter being the only protection fans have against players allowing tournaments to use their name to sell tickets when, in reality, they have no intention of playing in the event.
Curiously, I heard just the other day that a top name player accepted the equivalent of a “promotional” fee for allowing a Tournament Director to use his image and alleged entry into an event to fatten the coffers, even though both parties implicitly understood that the guy wasn’t going to show up. It was rumor. Let me repeat. It was rumor. But it would hardly surprise me if it turned out to be true, given where the game appears to be heading.
And before you get all worked up about this being just an excuse to slam Nadal, ponder recent history. The drift has been as clear as it has been gradual: the pioneers of the Open era built a tour, and fell to their knees each night, thankful for every new tournament opportunity that came their way. Imagine that! Once the vaults filled with riches and the calendar filled up, stars began to want to play less, for greater compensation, and more on their own terms. Each generation pushes the envelope that much further. If Nadal and Bjorn Borg were to change places in time, this post would be about Borg.
The WTA has an even more pressing, glaring problem than than the ATP, as we saw last year. The Williams sisters are MIA from the tour. Many top players, starting with Justine Henin-Hardenne, seemed to play only at those times when they chose. Oh, I know there were injuries involved, and some of them undoubtedly were real, and serious. But you have to be really naïve to deny that the present commitment and injury rules simultaneously force players to commit to events and give them an easy way to bag those committments.
You know, I accept the fact that you can lead a tennis player to a tournament, but you can’t make him play. Tennis players should not be coerced into playing any more than I should be coerced into writing more stories than I’d like to post. It’s the hypocrisy and the incessant screwing of the ticket-buying public that I despise – that, and the increasing role that money plays in this tableau.
I know why, but I fail to understand why, players don’t just block out the Grand Slam and Davis Cup/Fed Cup weeks, fill in the other weeks they are willing to play, and honor those commitments.
P.S. - I had to edit this item after posting because in the original I attributed the MTF quote on Nadal to the wrong poster.
I’m amazed that this recent news story regarding Sania Mirza’s decision to drop Shahar Peer as a doubles partner for the Bangalore Open didn’t get more traction in the press.
Sign of the times, I guess.
I’m going to say right up front that this is such a sensitive topic these days that I’m going to suspend my customary habit of reacting to what I see as really dodgy behavior with the (theoretically) hyperbolic, biting wit of the satirist. It isn’t just that I never cease to be amazed at how literally so many TW readers take my words; I also think that letting it all hang out when it comes to Mirza is apt to exacerbate a situation that must be very difficult for her.
So I’m not going to ignore or smugly underestimate the stakes in Mirza’s actions and words these days, just because I live in an open society where I can say anything I like with consequences no more serious than getting dirty looks from the angry lefty heiress who owns the entire penthouse floor in my apartment building and reads The Nation.
Mirza’s problems as an individualist and “liberal” Muslim are real (punch her name into the search box to track previous posts on this issue), and composed of stuff we Westerners are not likely to have to deal with, at least for some time yet.
Still. It makes me feel hollow and creepy to contemplate what Mirza did. For there’s only one real way to interpret this: She is deferring to the Muslim faction that believes that the sole significance of the person called Shahar Peer is that she is Israeli, and therefore not just beneath contempt, but worthy of annihilation. A Muslim woman is too good to play with an Israeli, isn't that the point? In this, Mirza is denying her friend’s humanity. What a strange position to take, by someone as conspicuously given to expressing her “individuality” as is Mirza.
Look, I know how easy it is for me to take the moral high ground on this. Trust me, I know. But at what point does silence, even if it’s out of consideration for Mirza’s dilemma, become complicity? We aren’t talking about cartoons denigrating Muhammad and enflaming the passions of millions of the downtrodden here. And didn’t two men, Israel’s Amir Hadad and Pakistan’s Aisam Ul-Haq, make a huge statement about Muslims and Jews—and sports—by playing doubles at the U.S. Open just a few years ago?
It’s funny, but just this morning, I was forced to make some changes in my credit-card billing information. I engaged the Citibank “service representative” on the phone in conversation (one of my secret vices is this penchant for initiating personal conversations with the unfortunate human beings I end up reaching after touch-toning my way through 16 different menus). Of course, I knew full well that the SR was sitting in a cubicle somewhere in New Delhi or Calcutta.
He said he liked and admired Mirza, and sympathized with her position. I asked if he was Muslim; it turns out he was Hindu. And at the end of our friendly chat, he said, “Sir, we always appreciate art and culture, this is why I like Sania Mirza. And we encourage all kinds of religion. That’s the best part of being Hindu!”
What a far cry that is from Muslim fundamentalists who also constitute a significant segment of the Indian population. Yet they’re the ones to whom Mirza is kowtowing.
There’s another dimension to this, which is the debate about the wisdom of mixing sports and politics. I was never in the camp that holds that sports and politics can be kept apart. Politics, not sports, is the dominant and pre-emptive reality of our lives, and there comes a point where sports inevitably are influenced or enslaved by that—would you be comfortable with the Anti-Jew Games, just because it's a sporting event? How about a no-Jews doubles team, featuring Sania Mirza?
What we have, really, is a kind of gentleman’s agreement that we shouldn’t mix sports and politics, and like all gentleman’s agreements, it’s been shown to be worth the paper it’s written on. Sometimes we break with the gentleman’s agreement for good reasons. Does anyone really believe it was wrong—at least in theory—for some nations to refuse to play Davis Cup against South Africa because it officially embraced apartheid (ironically, India lost a great chance to win the Cup because it did just that)?
Sometimes we break with the gentleman’s agreement for insupportable reasons: Mirza refuses to play with a girl, a friend no less, because she's an Israeli. A Jew!
It’s a sad, sad story, this one, and, I suppose, a sign of the times. I have to confess, I really liked Sania Mirza when she first popped onto the scene last year. Since then, just about everything this girl has done has rubbed me the wrong way. But until now, it's just been silly, transparently self-absorbed stuff.
At the very least, it seems to me, Mirza could have chosen not to play doubles at all. Instead, she capitulated, and gave the fanatics a PR coup. It's a sad day for women's tennis and the WTA. Mirza, I guess, will work it out for herself.
Slovakia’s Karol Beck, as predicted way back when Beck mysteriously withdrew from the Davis Cup squad that played (and lost) last year’s final against Croatia, has been hit with a two-year suspension for testing positive for steroids.
Beck denies any wrongdoing and is appealing the decision. I guess you’ve got to leave a crack in the door of another seemingly open-and-shut case, but isn’t it just a teensy-weensy bit weird that there has never been a single accused or convicted doper in this history of the universe who ever owned up to cheating and—simply—getting caught?
Check that—the most sensational doper of them all, Canadian sprinter and former Olympic champ Ben Johnson did ‘fess up not long after his positive test at the Seoul Olympic Games (he was eventually stripped of his gold medal and world record). His public apology was simple and it touched me deeply, for he showed genuine repentance and remorse. The money quote, in response to why he decided to tell the truth after vociferously protesting his innocence is almost achingly humble:
Because I lied and I was ashamed for my family, other Canadian athletes, and the kids who looked up to me. I did not want to tell what the truth was. I was just in a mess.
BTW, if you doubt how shadowy the world of big-time sports can be, read the entire Wikipedia entry on Johnson; the stuff about Carl Lewis is fascinating.
Anyway, Beck thinks maybe somebody slipped him a steroid in a drink, or that he inadvertently slugged down some of his mom’s asthma medicine. It sounds like another “the dog ate my homework” defense.
In case you’re wondering, I’ll still turning over rocks for a doping post to come, hopefully by the middle of next week. Meanwhile, if you think I’m on some kind of witch-hunt here, keep in mind something that I admit I’d forgotten myself. Petr Korda, Grand Slam champion (Australia, 1998) was the first high-profile dope bust in tennis. Think about it—this is a Grand Slam champ who was caught doping (in fact, he was busted right after his big moment), not some journeyman who claims he mistakenly drank his uncle’s anti-balding medication and then got to the third round in St. Poelten.
And how do you think Marcelo Rios felt when he got the news? He had lost to Korda in straights in that final Down Under.
Rios had one of the strangest and saddest of all sagas in tennis, and he remains the best player in recent memory who never won a major. So what if he was a jerk; tennis results are about performance and this guy may have been cheated him out of his career moment.
Meanwhile, the ATP media guide has no asterisk alongside Korda’s name as the Australian champ (nor does the Australian Open media guide), and the disgraced Grand Slammer is happily competing on the senior Delta tour.
I’m not saying a doper has to be stoned to death, or hounded for the rest of his life by the doping stigma. But it makes me feel like the sport is a little cheap and dirty when people are not just willing to forget, so quickly, but when they're unwilling to make a point of highlighting a tainted victory.
It’s a terrible bind, trying to decide the degree to which we should forgive and forget, but it’s a conflict not of our making. You can thank Korda for this one . . .
My final thoughts on firestorm my last two posts created are:
I never accused Nadal of anything except skipping one of the year's four preeminent tournaments for reasons that are somewhat baffling (Insoles. Insoles?).
At the same time, I absolutely, 100 percent insist that nobody in tennis is above suspicion these day when it comes to doping. Not Federer, not Roddick, not Nadal. And reserving the right to harbor suspicions is very different from making an accusation. And this isn't my personal crusade; tennis has brought this upon itself. Check out Kamakshi's post in Court Coverage re. Sesil Karatantcheva's "defense" (you have to scroll down to the "websites" header to find it, but stop and sample on the way!).
Here's another thing. I have both a desire and obligation to share with my readers the burning issues of the day in tennis—both in the public arena, and also in the trenches of the game. Trust me. Doping is a hot, hot topic. It is what people are talking about. And you have every right to know that.
On a more personal level, I feel that I owe it to the Doping Argies, on whom I've been relentlessly tough, to make sure that I—or anyone else—doesn't turn them into convenient scapegoats for a sport that may have a far larger and more comprehensive problem.
It's official. Our game is one in which a 16-year-old girl has been busted for taking PEDs . . . . What do you want me to do, make it the Doping Argies and Bulgar and go my merry way?
But let's give it a rest for now, kick back and enjoy the Australian Open. You know I'm going to get some of your noses out of joint in the next few weeks (remember, I'll be blogging live from Melbourne for Week Two of the AO), but don't for a minute think I underestimate how difficult it is for the players—all the players—and how easy it is for the critics, myself included.
So I leave you for now with the quote I like to ponder before the onset of every major event.
It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
It’s theoretically a day off for me as I gear up to cover the Australian Open (I’ll be blogging live from Melbourne during Week Two of the season’s first Grand Slam). But the strikingly thoughtful responses and comments to my last post, along with some of the critical, entirely legitimate questions they raise, call for some clarifications and further comments.
First of all, keep in mind that the doper's best friend is the benumbing complexity and unavoidable ambiguity of the anti-doping effort. A few months ago, I linked to this Outsidemagazine story that makes painfully clear how difficult it is for the dope police to keep up with the bent doctors and juicers; in fact, the effort to police the use of performance enhancing drugs is borderline futile.
But what are you going to do? Allow doping? Talk the talk, but look the other way as soon as there’s even a hint of a problem (as I believe the ATP and WTA have done for years)?
Some of you would like me to delve into the science of doping, and/or present more facts and concrete evidence instead of speculating and trafficking in innuendo. Here’s a question for you: When was the last time a newspaper or magazine broke a major doping story? The recent spate of exclusives from the French sports daily, L’Equipe, don’t count—all they did was jump the gun on announcing positive test results for some athletes thanks to a friendly leaker somewhere in the anti-doping establishment.
Many major, resource-rich newspapers and magazines in this country and abroad employ full-time, highly trained investigative reporters—something I am not. Yet even they have broken precious few primary-level doping stories— that is, I don’t know of any that actually discovered that someone was doping, and proved it. What stories we have all seem to be driven by either announced test results or individuals stepping forward to confess—or fire the first salvos of accusation. This tells you how tough it is to catch a doper red-handed, or to make specific, supportable accusations.
In fact—and this is a constant theme of mine—doping is such an ambiguous subject that the real danger lies in falling into a train of thought that runs something like this: We know doping exists. We haven’t caught anyone doping. Therefore, everyone must be doping. That’s the allure of conspiracy theories—the very lack of evidence becomes a form of evidence.
Why have I wandered into this morass, then? The answer has two related parts:
First of all, at this site I am a blogger—an opinion journalist and commentator. I have neither the mandate nor the responsibility to deal strictly and exclusively with facts and/or the thoughts or opinions of others about those facts. At the same time, though, my opinion cannot ignore or fly in the face of what facts exist. The moment that the facts and my opinion are in demonstrable conflict, my opinions is invalidated. Two plus two equals four, we’ve all agreed; if I insist it adds up to five, that’s my problem, not the number four’s.
Secondly, I am supposed to be a kind of interface between tennis fans and the pro game. Someone higher up in the food chain has decided that it’s worth paying me to comment on the pro game for the benefit of the folks who troll TENNIS.com and/or read TENNIS Magazine, which makes it incumbent on me to report what people in the game are thinking and saying. Trust me: Doping is a burning, omnipresent topic on the pro tour these days. I owe it to you to tackle it, and I am proud that as a blogger I can do that in a way that a newspaper reporter cannot.
Now, for some specific issues. I fear the worst about doping because it appears that the floodgates of bad news have been opened by the change in the anti-drug testing protocols. The player organizations (ATP and WTA) are no longer in charge of testing; when they were, all was quiet on the doping front. It's a different landscape now. You can read why and how this came about at this page of the ITF’s anti-doping website.
Is it mere coincidence that we’ve had a sudden explosion of positive tests? Why have the increasingly puzzling scheduling habits of so many players suddenly become front-burner issues? Draw back and look at this in perspective; it seems to me that we’re in the midst of an undeclared, unannounced shake-up.
The ITF anti-doping website will give you access to lots of valuable information on doping, if you’re interested in details on banned substances, penalties, procedures, etc. This just isn’t an area in which it makes much sense for me to play the expert. Read that article I linked to in Outside; it’s a great primer on the nature of the doping problem.
When it comes to the players, nobody, but nobody, is above suspicion; this doesn’t mean that I suspect everyone—or, for that matter, anyone. It just means that I don’t believe anyone is immune to the temptation of dabbling in performance-enhancing drugs. Top pro athletes, like fabulously wealthy venture capitalists, exist in a different world. They are playing for much higher stakes, with much deeper pockets, which opens up possibilities unimaginable to many of us. I’ll never forget Boris Becker, a close friend, telling me about the transfusions of calf blood he took as part of his drive to remain “fresh” for the game (it was not illegal) when he was making a big push for the No. 1 ranking. Boris was very matter-of-fact and blasé about it; he had to do what he had to do. But it struck me as pure science fiction.
So, as far as I’m concerned, everyone from Roger Federer on down to the most desperate journeyman is a potential doper. It just wouldn’t be fair to look at it any other way. In this regard, some readers accused me of “protecting” Andre Agassi while planting suspicions about Rafael Nadal when I analyzed their withdrawals from the Australian Open yesterday.
The fact is that up-and-coming champs and aging ones are vastly different, and driven by vastly different priorities. I’m not going to rehash the details, but I’ll say that in ways related strictly to his career and family life, it makes a lot of sense, in lots of different ways, for Agassi to skip the Australian Open and start his year a full two months after his younger rivals.
By contrast, the upcoming Grand Slam event offers Nadal his best shot at winning a major on a surface other than clay, and moving one step closer to challenging Federer’s ascendancy—something Agassi is unlikely to do in the foreseeable future.
Given the amount of time he’s had off and the fact that Nadal’s own doctor said in an official ATP press release that his foot is healed, I find his withdrawal from an event that will be without the defending champ, Safin, or Agassi, baffling.
Whether or not there's anything more to this story, I can't say. But I'm going to make a point in Australia to pin down some folks on some of the more compelling issues—like whether or not it's possible to duck out-of-competition testing by simply not answering the door when the testers come around.
OK. Years ago, I decided I wasn’t going to engage in the increasingly popular game of “Spot the Doper.” You know how it works: You check out the way someone looks, or plays, and then declare him—or her—a doper.
In fact, that’s the most depressing thing about the doping issue in any sport; once doping is established—or even universally perceived—as a “problem,” the stigma is firmly applied, and no amount of Ajax, gasoline, detergent, WD-40, Goo-be-Gone, or Octagon is going to get rid of it.
As has often been observed, it’s not just important to avoid wrongdoing, it’s vital to avoid the perception of wrongdoing. And in that regard, I think tennis is starting to lose the war of perception as well as reality. Within a year, it has gained on cycling (the king of all sports tainted by doping associations) as rapidly as if it were, well, riding Lance Armstrong’s bike.
The latest volley from the Clean Team came booming over the Internet this morning, regarding the case of 16-year-old aspiring sensation, Sesil Karatantcheva. This is not a new story (we reported it weeks ago, as did the rest of the world). But it’s yet another persuasive bit of evidence that things are not what they seem in TennisWorld. The ITF release makes it official: We have in our midst a 16-year-old who has just been suspended for two years for using performance-enhancing substances.
Those of you who have followed my series of posts on "The Doping Argies" (enter the term in the Search box to track the posts) will understand why I am particularly sensitive to this issue. I was very tough on the Argie dopers, and my posts provoked a lot of anger and bitterness, particularly from those who would argue that the drug testers, and I, were singling out or scapegoating the Argentineans.
Through the criticism, I maintained a hard line. But I promise you that my sense of right and wrong, and of fairness, was churning away and asking me all kinds of questions every step of the way. Which is partly why I feel obliged to restate my position. My gut feeling is that the Argies, while not exactly scapegoats, are merely the dumb losers who got busted while a lot of other dopers are going free. The tip of the iceberg is still part of the iceberg, right?
I’m not just sitting here, a blogger in pajamas, to borrow the famous phrase, freely speculating, either. For there is a buzz running like an electric current through the game, and it’s about doping. It’s about the way—and the reasons why—players increasingly are taking long periods away from the game, or pulling out of events claming everything from injury to fatigue. We've had players accusing each other, players' parents accusing other players, tennis officials accusing players—and a rash of positive tests.
Any questions?
At the end of last year, when the WTA and ATP championships were plagued by no-shows and pullouts, everyone blamed the usual source—the calendar. But how do you explain the continuation of this trend at the Australian Open? Well, Reuters found a way to blame the lack of an off season and the Australian Open dates and organizers. That’s hooey.
I’ve made the case in detail before, so I’m just going with the short version here: The players are not forced to play insane schedules. Fulfilling their basic commitments leaves them plenty of room to rest, recuperate, and travel. The insanity kicks in when they are unable to resist huge appearance fees or offers to play exhibitions—or when other factors come into play. I’ve now officially joined the crowd that suspects there’s more going on here t
Mornin', folks. We have a Tennis magazine planning meeting this morning, so I won't be back with you until later. The big news this morning is that Martina Hingis, who has been slipping down the slope of the rankings so gradually and inexorably that you can almost hear her fingernails squeaking, is 
As you all know by now, Andy Murray said in a recent BBC radio interview that “everyone knows it [match-fixing] goes on”, and the repercussions haven't died down yet. First, Rafael Nadal met with Murray and denounced the broad, general comment (Rafa insisted he is not part of that "everyone" whom Murray cited), and Murray is also scheduled to meet with ATP chief Etienne de Villiers later this week to explain the remark.
Sometimes I think tennis would be better off with DCU (Damage Control Unit) than a CCU, although both would be welcome.
