{"id":241,"date":"2005-11-08T15:15:01","date_gmt":"2005-11-08T23:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=241"},"modified":"2005-11-08T15:15:01","modified_gmt":"2005-11-08T23:15:01","slug":"wta-2005-championships-billie-jean-come-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wta-2005-championships-billie-jean-come-back\/","title":{"rendered":"WTA 2005 championships: Billie Jean come back!"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the last year that the WTA women\u2019s tour championship will be held in Los Angeles due to lack of interest. The WTA must be getting desperate for coverage, they even gave me press credentials.
\n<\/a>
\nThat is why I was sitting at a round table with Mary Pierce and four or five journalists in the media center at Staples Center yesterday afternoon. This is Pierce\u2019s first appearance at the championship since 1999 so we were asking her questions such as, \u201cWhy do you think you\u2019ve been so successful this year?\u201d and \u201cWhat\u2019s the biggest improvement you\u2019ve made in the last few years?\u201d<\/p>\n

During a break in the love fest, a journalist sitting opposite Pierce asked in a very aggressive voice, \u201cMary, three out of the four grand slam winners are not here this week. How can you call it a championship without three of the four grand slam winners?\u201d Pierce said that there are many players who play well week in and week out and not just a few weeks a year, but that wasn\u2019t a satisfactory answer. \u201cHow can you say that it\u2019s a championship if three of the slam winners aren\u2019t here?\u201d the journalist asked again. Pierce bared her teeth and said, \u201cGo and speak to Larry Scott at WTA, he makes the rules.\u201d Scott is the CEO of the WTA.<\/p>\n

That shut him up for a bit but after another journalist asked Pierce a question, the grumpy guy chimed in again. \u201cGo ahead, give a politically correct answer,\u201d he said, in a sarcastic reference to Pierce\u2019s reluctance to answer his previous question.<\/p>\n

The missing grand slam winners are Serena Williams (Australian Open), Justine Henin-Hardenne (French Open), and Venus Williams (Wimbledon). Henin-Hardenne has a hamstring injury and the Williams sisters have other things to do.<\/p>\n

At the end of the session, I walked up to the man and introduced myself. He said his name was T.J. Simers<\/a>. \u201cOh\u201d, I said, \u201cnow it all makes sense.\u201d Simers is a sports columnist for the LA Times and is well known for lambasting anyone and everyone. He call Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt a parking lot attendant and refers to McCourt’s wife, Jamie, as the screaming meanie.<\/p>\n

Our roll models today are Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Neither player ever said an unpleasant thing about anyone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Simers did have point. He wasn\u2019t asking Pierce to change the ranking system or change the rules for getting into the year-end championships. He was asking her to state her opinion. Does she think this is a legitimate championships without three of the four grand slam winners present or doesn\u2019t she?<\/p>\n

If Simers had been a bit less grumpy and followed up on his question, he could have gotten to the heart of a big problem with the WTA tour. Everybody agrees that the tour is too long but nobody does anything about it. The US Open Series, for instance, has five tournaments \u2013 six for the men \u2013 that lead up to the US Open then two weeks for the Open itself. That’s seven straight weeks of tennis.<\/p>\n

The problem is that the WTA represents both the players and the tournament directors. Amelie Mauresmo said that players have had many meetings with the WTA but the only thing they\u2019ve done is reschedule Fed Cup, which shortens the season by two weeks for some players only. Changing the Fed Cup schedule, that\u2019s not quite the same as eliminating the Bank of the West Classic in Palo Alto or the Rogers Cup in Toronto. The result is that players skip a significant number of tournaments, sometimes pulling out at the last minute, and WTA doesn\u2019t stop them because their job is to support the players.<\/p>\n

If the players want to challenge the WTA, they need to take some kind of job action, boycott a tournament or threaten to create a players union separate from the WTA. But that requires someone who is willing to speak out and, as we saw with Pierce, players are not willing to speak they\u2019re mind let alone mount a challenge. Our roll models today are Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Neither player ever said an unpleasant thing about anyone. Jordan refused to support a black senatorial candidate running against Jesse Helms because \u201cRepublicans buy shoes, too.\u201d When Woods was asked to criticize Augusta National, the site of the golf Masters Tournament, for refusing to allow women members, he said, \u201cIt\u2019s not the players\u2019 fault.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pete Sampras is the best tennis player of all time but Billie Jean King is my number one because she was the most important player in tennis. She was the leader in the movement to start a separate women\u2019s tour and, in so doing, played a huge roll in the creation of women\u2019s sports as it is today. She became a lighting rod of controversy for the feminist movement, and, unwillingly, for the gay and lesbian movement after a former lover bought a palimony lawsuit against her. Even with all of that psychic baggage, she was able to win twelve grand slam singles and twenty-five grand slam doubles titles.<\/p>\n

Players today don\u2019t have to be pioneers, they only have to threaten job action and be willing to go through with it. They will be criticized for being whining millionaires but that’s a small price to pay for getting reasonable working conditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the last year that the WTA women\u2019s tour championship will be held in Los Angeles due to lack of interest. The WTA must be getting desperate for coverage, they even gave me press credentials. That is why I was sitting at a round table with Mary Pierce and four or five journalists in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tennis-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}