2007 Indian Wells: Round Robins, Roadmaps And Leadership

I got to the media center here at Indian Wells just in time to see Maria Sharapova fall apart in the third set against Vera Zvonareva and lose the match. P.J. at californiatennis.com joked that it might have been one of the Maria Sharapova look-alikes Canon hired to roam the tournament grounds instead of the real Sharapova out there on the court.

Ivan Ljubicic and David Nalbandian were up next on the stadium court and I was stuck, should I stick around and see the first match of the tournament between two veteran top ten players or should I go to Sharapova’s media session and ask her about the Roadmap 2010? Roadmap 2010 is the WTA’s answer to the ongoing problems with player injuries and withdrawals. For the full picture with historical notes that are critical to the discussion, tune into Peter Bodo’s column today.

The upshoot of Roadmap 2010 is that the US could lose a number of its Tier I tournaments because US tournaments are not willing to put up the money necessary to host a top level tournament under the new plan.

Look at California for instance. There are three WTA tournaments in California outside of Indian Wells: Stanford, Los Angeles (actually played in Carson) and San Diego. San Diego is the only Tier I tournament and this is it’s last year Roadmap 2010 or not. The other two are Tier II and there are problems for these tournaments in the Roadmap too. They would have to increase their price money precipitously if they wanted to field more than two or three top players.

San Diego, Stanford and Carson are all part of the US Open Series, the series of WTA and ATP events that lead up to the US Open. If the smaller tournaments can’t afford to attract top players, they’ll suffer and the US Open Series will suffer and that brings us another California tournament in the Open Series: the ATP tournament in Los Angeles. In years past it was a top tournament – Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg and Pete Sampras are past champions – but now it struggles to attract top players and it will struggle more if the US Open Series suffers.

There is a parallel between round robins and Roadmap 2010: they address the same problem. Both the ATP and the WTA have too many tournaments and that leaves small tournaments without top players. The ATP experimented with round robins to help small tournaments market their players by keeping them around for at least two rounds. The WTA wants to create a more exclusive group of top level tournaments and penalize players heavily if they skip them.

It’s a good idea because Justine Henin just played Dubai followed by Doha and skipped Indian Wells to play Miami. Dubai and Doha may help players’ pocketbooks but tennis would be better served if all of the top players were available for Indian Wells and Miami, the “fifth and sixth grand slams” if you will.

Next week in Miami, the WTA will formally announce Roadmap 2010. At the same tournament, the ATP brass will be convening to consider what to do about round robins since their implementation has caused so many problems. It’ll be interesting to see whose plan works best but there might not be a winner because neither plan includes thinning its calendar and the WTA could be hurting one of its grand slams.

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Ljubicic ending up beating Nalbandian despite an inflamed patella tendon that caused him to take a medical timeout after the first set. I was going to talk about Ljubicic and Nalbandian and their tendency to lose in the semifinals or finals – neither of them has a Masters shield though Nalbandian did win the year end championships in 2005 – but after hearing Ljubicic hold forth about the state of tennis during his media session, I think I might nominate him for the CEO position when Etienne de Villiers steps down.

Someone at the media session asked him his opinion about the leadership in tennis at the moment considering the recent problems with round robins and the ITF’s resistance to moving the Davis Cup cup a week earlier despite a petition signed by nineteen of the top twenty players (the ITF runs Davis Cup and the grand slam).

His take on the leadership:

The ATP is always trying to do something new, trying to improve the sport, the ITF is just sitting there and resisting, they never want to accept any kind of change… I don’t mind testing things and trying things. The round robin, we tested it, we figured out it’s not working so we probably gonna get rid of it. I think Etienne is a good leader and I think in the future we are going to improve our sport.

I’m not sure I’m in total agreement but I’d vote for Ivan and this sounds like a good campaign speech to me.