Monthly Archives: July 2007

Does Tennis Need a Commissioner?

Three tennis experts think that tennis needs a commissioner, but I’m not so sure.

John Feinstein, columnist for the Washington Post and author of numerous books about sports, sat in for Jim Rome on his sports talk show for a few days last week. Feinstein thinks that there are a number of problems with tennis these days but he talked about two problems in particular and wow was it great to hear tennis on national sports radio, at least for a few days.

Feinstein interviewed Patrick McEnroe and introduced the first problem by asking him the following question: “What’s the biggest problem in tennis?” McEnroe’s answer? He thinks the biggest problem is the lack of a leader, or commissioner, who has enough power to change the tennis calendar.

Feinstein agrees with McEnroe. He wants a commissioner who will reorganize the tour structure to make it similar to the PGA tour. Smaller tournaments would be relegated to lower levels such as the Nationwide Tour which is second-tier to the PGA.

A commissioner could also establish and enforce a prohibition on appearance fees – money given to players to “appear” at a tournament in addition to prize money. That’s a good idea but even the commissioner of the PGA hasn’t been able to do anything about appearance fees yet.

Pam Shriver turned up at the open media session for the Countrywide Classic last Friday because she was being inducted into the Southern California Tennis Association Hall of Fame that evening. While we wandered over to a nearby fence so her young son could watch a huge construction crane in action, I asked her about McEnroe’s comments. Here’s what she said:

That’s always been a big criticism, the sport’s not unified enough. And then it’s so political that you just can’t get things moving these days with any momentum in one direction that makes good business sense. So I don’t know if that’s the most serious problem, not having a commissioner, but I would say that unified leadership would certainly be beneficial.

Most major sports have a commissioner and a players’ union and the commissioner is hired by the owners. If the owners are unhappy with the commissioner they get rid of the commissioner. Baseball owners got rid of Fay Vincent because, among other things, he accommodated players too much during the 1990 lockout.

If there was a commissioner of tennis, I’m not sure it would be much different than the current structure. Currently, ATP decisions are made by the board of directors. The CEO, Etienne de Villiers, has one vote, three representatives of tournament directors each have one vote, and three player representatives each have one vote. And only the tournament director representatives and the player representatives vote for the CEO so the players arguably have more power than major sports where the owners hire the CEO.

The problem is that the players don’t exercise their power. If they’re unhappy with the tennis calendar, they withdraw from tournaments. It sends a message to the tournament directors but since there’s no organized work stoppage, it’s not a strong enough message.

I support the idea of a commissioner but only if it’s accompanied by a players’ union with a leader who can organize the players well enough to threaten a work action. Of course, the players would have to vote for that and since they’ve shown no inclination to do that up to now, we might be stuck with what we have for some time to come.

What do you think? Does tennis need a commissioner?

By the way, the second problem Feinstein discussed is the lack of access to players and I’ll get into that later in the week.

Check out our new myspace page and add us to your friends network!

Safin, Nalbandian and Gonzalez Hit the Wall

Nalbandian is sliding, Safin is having trouble holding ground and Gonzalez can’t win a tournament.

We’re just about to start the third round here in Los Angeles at the Countrywide Classic and David Nalbandian and Fernando Gonzalez are already gone after losing the first round. Both appear to have hit a kind of tennis wall.

Nalbandian’s best result this year was a quarterfinal and he looks out of shape. This is a guy who’s been in the top twenty for the last five years and most of that time he was in the top ten. That’s a good career but he’s also the quintessential runner-up. He has only five titles and one Tennis Masters Cup to show for it. Again and again he went deep into tournaments and went up against the top players in the world and came up just a bit short.

Fernando Gonzalez is in a different place in his career. Since hiring Larry Stefanek as his coach last year, he’s jumped in to the top ten and stayed there and he’s reached the finals of two Masters Series events and a slam. But he hasn’t won a title since 2005. He might be stepping in and taking over where Nalbandian left off now that Nalbandian is slipping down the rankings.

Marat Safin is still in the draw here but these days he’s having trouble closing out matches with players like George Bastl, a 32-year-old who’s ranked number 255.

After winning the first set handily, Safin hit five double faults and a number of ill-advised drop shots in the second set and allowed Bastl to even the match. In the third set, Safin hit some wild forehands. He wasn’t moving well and he appeared to be tired. After one more drop shot ended up in the net, someone in the crowd yelled out: “You cannot be serious!” John McEnroe’s taunt has now become the de facto tennis insult.

Bastl hit his own double fault to give up a break in the third set and Safin pulled out the match, 6-2, 2-6, 6-4. The match ended too late to have a media session but Safin summed it up accurately in his on court interview: “I was lucky, actually.”

If I’d been able to interview Safin, I might have asked him about his new coach, Hernan Gumy. Check out the images on this site for beefcake photos of Gumy. When those two guys go out to clubs together, I imagine they set off a stampede of women.

Safin is 27-years-old, Gonzalez will be 27 later this month and Nalbandian is only 25 but they may be too late. Novak Djokovic, a 20-year-old, beat Gonzalez at the French Open last year and his young pals are just as good. Marcos Baghdatis beat Nalbandian at Wimbledon a few weeks ago and Tomas Berdych has already won the Paris Indoors which used to be Safin’s property – he won it three times and was also a runner-up.

Maybe Djokovic, Baghdatis and Berdych will have similar careers to Gonzalez, Nalbandian, and Safin, successful but not spectacular. Maybe we’re substituting one set of three players for another. If so, it’s a testament to the sport because Safin has been spectacular at times and Nalbandian’s tenure at the top has been exceptional.

Sometimes I’ll hear a person talk about a retired player in glowing terms and I’ll look up his record. If there aren’t many titles next to his name I tend to dismiss him but now I know better. Having watched Nalbandian go deep in the slams for the past five years has changed my mind.

Check out our new myspace page and add us to your friends network!

Read other articles about Los Angeles:
Interview with a Modest James Blake
ATP Fantasy Tennis: Do You Pick Nadal or Not?
The Greatest Road Trip in Sports Hits California

The Greatest Road Trip in Sports Hits California

The U.S. Open Series has begun and the first four weeks will be heaven for California tennis fans.

Last night as I was leaving the Countrywide Classic here in Los Angeles, I went into the underground parking garage and got lost looking for my car. I turned the corner to a lower level and found a group of students playing Taiko drums against one wall of the garage. They were drumming so quietly you barely noticed them but the vibration was enough to set off a few car alarms. As the drummers beat harder, more car alarms joined in and the space escalated into a crescendo of horns and beeps and whoops. If you didn’t know what was happening, you might have thought a battalion of police cars was speeding through the garage.

The drummers slowly brought the volume down and the cars all went back to their former quiet selves. It was a fitting symphonic prelude to the U.S. Open Series, a string of tennis tournaments leading up to the U.S. Open that bills itself as The Greatest Road Trip in Sports.

Tennis is the most global of sports these days but for a few months each summer, it stops off in the United States for the summer hard court season. And for the first four weeks, most of the tournaments are in California.

The Countrywide Classic is a men’s event and it’s probably the only tournament that takes place on a college campus, in this case UCLA. Yesterday you could have walked over to the soccer fields and watched the Chelsea soccer team from England’s Premier League practice for it’s upcoming match with David Beckham’s new team, the Los Angeles Galaxy.

This used to be a prestigious tennis tournament with past champions such as Bill Tilden, Rod Laver and Pete Sampras and it stills draws players like James Blake and Fernando Gonzalez, but it’s been pushed aside by the required Masters Events in Cincinnati and Montreal.

In keeping with our California theme, I went to this afternoon’s match between Southern California native Sam Querrey and Mardy Fish. Fish won the battle of the second serves. His kick serve managed to befuddle the 6’6″ Querrey and he came to the net almost every time Querrey hit a second serve. Fish won the match in straight sets, 7-5, 6-4.

This was Querrey’s seventh straight loss and it left him discouraged enough to talk about going down to the challenger level to regain his confidence. Fish won the match but he ended up sounding discouraged for a different reason.

I’d read a rumor in Tennis News that Fish had separated from his coach Todd Martin so I asked him if he was still working with Martin. He said he was not and I asked him if he’d talk about that. He was a bit testy and said, with a bit of attitude, “What would you like me to talk about?” A sign that this might an uncomfortable subject for him.

Usually it’s the player who fires the coach when his results are not good enough and Fish had just lost six straight matches – eight if you count Dusseldorf though that doesn’t count in the rankings. But this time it was the coach’s decision to move on. This is how Fish put it:

He [Martin] had spoken a lot about the mental side of the game and put a lot of emphasis on that. I think he really felt like he wasn’t putting a dent into me on the mental side of the game. I really felt like, the weeks that we were together, I got a ton better. And, you know, it was more of his choice, than it was mine.

It’s really an extraordinary thing for a player to say that his coach wasn’t make any progress with him and had dropped him. Most players would have said it was a joint decision and would probably have said their coach decided he didn’t want to travel so much. Fish tried to do that:

You know, maybe he didn’t want to travel as much any more with the two young ones and a young wife and, uh, I enjoyed every week and he treated me great.

But you can see that he doesn’t sound convinced. It makes me appreciate him much more and not just because I’m in the media. If he’s that honest with himself, he’s much more likely to make any necessary changes to his game.

I’ll be here the rest of the week and I’ll see what else I can unearth but meanwhile, here’s the rest of the California itinerary.

If you live in northern California, go to Stanford next week – the town, not the university though they’re next to each other – and check out the Bank of the West Classic. Kim Clijsters is the defending champion but now that she’s pregnant and newly married and retired, she’s not likely to repeat.

If you do go, say hello to my co-writer, Pat Davis, who will be covering the matches. Hopefully her sense of humor won’t get her into too much trouble. Just kidding, Pat.

The week after that I’ll be at the Acura Classic in Carlsbad north of San Diego. This event takes place at the beautiful La Costa Resort and Spa which is just a few minutes walk from the Pacific Ocean. As soon as I get there, I’m heading for the Spa half of the hotel to get a Rice-Bran body wrap, a Reveal Peel, and a cup of Bamboo-Ginger Green Tea. Look me up too if I’m not too blissed out to respond.

Maria Sharapova is the defending champion and she’ll be here along with Justine Henin and Serena Williams. Eight of the top ten players have committed to play the tournament which has to be the first time that’s happened since this was a Virginia Slims event. That is if they all turn up.

The last tournament in the California swing is the East West Bank Classic in Carson just south of Los Angeles. This event takes place in the fourth week of the U.S. Open Series at the Home Depot Center. Maria and Serena will be here too and If you wander around, you might see David Beckham practicing for that soccer match I mentioned above.

Now, if we could only get a Roger Federer–Rafael Nadal exhibition and convince the Minnesota Timberwolves to trade Kevin Garnett to the Los Angeles Lakers, California would be in true sports heaven.

Check out our new myspace page and add us to your friends network!

B**tch and Sing Dept: A Handful of Girl!

Serbia’s Jelena Jankovic has jumped to the top of her sport – time to take a look at “Our Favorite Alien”

It was barely a year ago when Jelena Jankovic began to turn her moribund career around. Her start to 2006 was so abysmal she contemplated quitting the game altogether and returning to her studies. Then she started to play better, and capped her Wimbledon last year with a solid win in the fourth round over Venus Williams. She was ranked Number 26 then; now she is Number 3 in the world. Amazing what a little confidence can do for a girl!

This year she had another good Wimbledon, even though she lost in singles in the Round of 16 to surprise finalist Marion Bartoli. Jankovic then hooked up on the spur of the moment with Jamie Murray, brother of Andy. He needed a partner for the Mixed Doubles. Never one to enjoy the practice courts, Jankovic figured it would give her some practice, now that she had been bounced from the singles. Low and behold, this rather quaint pairing got all the way to the finals, where they beat Jonas Bjorkman and Alicia Molik.

Jamie and Jelena became the talk of London. Are they dating, the British press wanted to know. They were all set to babble deliriously over yet another Murray. Brother Andy had to pull out just before the tournament began, so the Brits were on the lookout for anything or anyone from their tribe who could take up the slack. Jamie and Jelena were Heaven sent. Jankovic played coy about the rumors; Murray sounded just relieved he had found a decent partner who could, basically, carry the team. Mommy Murray just sounded…well, annoyed her son had to share the limelight.

Judy Murray is probably going for The Gloria Connors Tennis Mom Award. And nobody will stand in her way, for sure. Have you seen the chin on this chick? It’s made of granite, at least. I bet it takes a punch pretty good. Mom poo-pooed the rumors, basically implying like any good mom that my son – that’s MY SON, got it? – is way too good for that strange-looking girl with the long sculpted face that could have been lifted from a Modigliani painting. He drew roomfuls of elegant long women with elegant long faces. Some of us refer to Jankovic as “our little alien,” a term of endearment and ownership.

Where does she get those rather Asiatic-looking cheekbones? Her mom is a pleasant, plump bottle blonde who travels everywhere with Jelena. She looks nothing at all like her daughter. I figured she got the look from dad, but we never saw dad. Then he showed up just before Wimbledon at an event, and he looks pleasantly relaxed and also nothing like his daughter. Jankovic says she doesn’t know where her foreign looks come from. “Maybe it was the postman,” she quipped to Ubaldo Scanagatta.

Joking around seems to be a big thing for Jankovic. Also perhaps an excellent way to relax yourself in a sport that gives you little opportunities for relaxation. The notion that one can “have fun” in tennis these days is nearly non-existent. Sadly, it may be part of why interest is draining out of the sport. Thank God for Jelena, who takes the cake in the personality department. Why not, she’s probably baked it too. The girl is a ham. Wherever she hatched from, we are glad of it. But where does she go from here with her game?

She needs to start beating the very top women on a regular basis. She’ll be seeing a lot of them now as she gets more and more into the later rounds. She has beaten some of them, now she needs to beat more of them. Especially someone like Justine Henin. Although Jankovic has yet to beat the Belgian, they have had a medley of interesting, competitive matches. It’s only a matter of time. She had a good win over Maria Sharapova at Birmingham, a run-up event to Wimbledon. Jankovic had to come back in that match, and it gave her a ton of confidence. She needs to gather herself better at the big moments in big matches.

There is one specific change I would suggest: work on that serve, honey! She is so solid off both wings, she can hold her own at net, and her retrieving capabilities are tremendous; she can run down any ball because of her great movement and athleticism. Her fearlessless and ability to compete are top flight. But her serve should be as powerful as her ground strokes, and it’s not. Her second serve is about as horrible as Elena Dementieva’s, and we all know how horrible that is(!) It needs to be more of a weapon, not something that merely starts the point off.

Because she doesn’t like to practice much, Jankovic enters a lot of tournaments. Way too many. She should take a page from the Federer playbook: longer periods off, but go for quality play in challenging tournaments that you select carefully. A little discrimination is a good thing. It will add longevity to her career while keeping her energy level high. Besides, I for one am looking forward to a good decade with Jelena, she is certainly the most fun we’ve had on the women’s side for a while.

Roger Federer, Tim Duncan and the ESPYs

Roger Federer fails to win the ESPY Best Male Athlete award and has about as much buzz in the U.S. as Tim Duncan

When I spoke to James Blake on Friday he said he’d been to the ESPYs the night before. He mentioned hanging out with his friend Kevin Garnett but refused to say whether K.G. wants to play for the Los Angeles Lakers this coming season. Can’t imagine why he wouldn’t tell us.

The ESPYs are the U.S. version of the Laureus World Sports Awards. The award is named after its creator, ESPN. This year Roger Federer was nominated for Best Male Athlete.

Needless to say, Federer did not win. The U.S. doesn’t like giving athlete of the year awards to foreign players. Sports Illustrated has given its Sportsman of the Year award to nine foreign players in its 53 year history and two of those awards were for off-the-field activities.

Last year they gave it to NBA player Dwyane Wade instead of Federer despite the fact that Wade has one NBA title to his name. Wade’s teammate Shaquille O’Neal, who has four NBA titles and is arguably the most dominant center in NBA history, has never won the award. Federer, meanwhile, had just won three of the four slams two years running and was dominating his sport as no other athlete has since his friend Tiger Woods took over the world of golf.

The ESPYs dealt with foreign players by creating a Best International Athlete award in 2006 and gave the award to Albert Pujols, a Dominican-born baseball player. Baseball is the quintessential U.S. sport and Pujols plays for the St. Louis Cardinals in the heartland of the U.S. How much more home grown can you get?

Admittedly ESPN is based in the U.S. and should reward its players but U.S. sports are increasingly international. At the beginning of the 2006 season, 27.4 percent of Major League Baseball players were foreign born. All but two of the ESPY awards were determined by online fan voting. One of those non-fan awards went to a pair of men in Northern Ireland who are helping to heal the Catholic/Protestant divide using the game of basketball.

This is a hint to the problem because Federer does not have “buzz” with U.S. fans. If you want to know why that is, all you had to do was to stay tuned to ESPN after the ESPYs broadcast last night and watch a show called Who’s Now: Determine the Ultimate Sports Star. The show pairs athletes off against each other in a bracket format and fans vote for the player with the most “on-field success and off-field buzz”. The eventual winner is the ultimate sports star.

A panel of sports experts debated the current pairing of Tony Parker and Federer. At one point, one of the experts compared Federer to NBA player Tim Duncan in terms on-court charisma and I almost fell off my chair. Duncan is famous for his vacant stare and stone face demeanor. Perhaps these guys never saw Federer break down in tears after winning a slam or scream after a brilliant point.

Duncan is known for a commercial in which he’s stopped by police and stares wordlessly into space during the officer’s interrogation. Federer can be seen in a print ad walking away from his private jet. Earlier this year he was featured in a Men’s Vogue layout shot by Annie Leibovitz. You see him posing in his high rise apartment in Dubai and hanging on to the mast of a speeding boat in the Persian Gulf. This guy is a worldwide celebrity yet that compares favorably to Tim Duncan in the U.S. and unfairly to Tony Parker mainly because Parker is married to Eva Longoria and the best Federer can do is call Tiger Woods his friend.

Who’s Now is a lame made-for-TV show but it makes a good point. Sport is entertainment and buzz is as important as skill. Federer will have to settle for his third straight ESPY as Best Male Tennis player unless he drops his girlfriend and starts dating Paris Hilton.

Check out our new myspace page and add us to your friends network!