Author Archives: nrota

The Case for Minor League Football and Basketball

I’ll be right back with a Davis Cup preview but let’s look at college sports for a quick moment.

My 95 year old mother is in the hospital so I’m flying home to help in any way I can and that’s why I was sitting in the airport when a woman next to me said into her phone: “So, no news on the kidney transplant yet?”

The words “human rights or somethin’” popped up in the conversation a few minutes later. I can only hope the subject was not illegally harvested organs. My week has been dominated by medical talk. It has also seeped into sports.

National Football League (NFL) player Sean Taylor died from a bullet wound to his leg fired by an intruder who broke into his home. There’s been a lot of discussion about Taylor’s past problems and his college days at Miami, a college known for recruiting rough and intimidating players. Taylor is the third Miami player to be murdered since 1996 and Miami helped start a bench clearing brawl against Florida International that was memorable by any standard.

There are rumors that Taylor’s murder might be linked to gang activity from the neighborhood he grew up in. We don’t know whether that’s accurate or not but you can be pretty sure Sean Taylor was more likely to end up with a bullet in his leg than Heisman candidate Tim Tebow who was raised by missionaries and home schooled.

I’m not espousing religion here, in fact I don’t believe there is a creator. As far as I’m concerned, the universe is continuous with no beginning and no end and therefore no need for a creator. No, I have a different take on the situation.

I believe that many football and basketball players would be better served by going to a minor league out of high school rather than a big-time college sports program. By that I mean a minor league similar to baseball minor leagues.

Or, if you will, tennis minor leagues. A young tennis player has to go through three steps to earn his or her way into an ATP tournament draw. They start by playing futures events then move on to challenger events. When they’ve earned enough points, they can enter the qualifier for an ATP tournament and win they’re way into a main draw.

If the tennis player starts losing too many matches, its back to futures and challengers again, just like a young baseball player who isn’t hitting in the bigs goes back to the minor leagues.

A college football or basketball player, instead, gets a scholarship to college and is immediately handed an easy class schedule and a tutor for every course. This was basketball star Greg Oden’s course load his first semester at Ohio State: The History of Rock’n’Roll and Sociology 101. He got two more credits for playing basketball.

Colleges not only cater to players but sometimes they contribute to their criminal behavior. Tony Taylor had a history of sexual assault when Jim Harrick gave him a basketball scholarship to the University of Georgia. When Taylor was accused of sexual assault again while he was at Georgia, Harrick denied knowledge of Taylor’s past history even though he’d been recruiting Taylor since high school.

Here is a question from Taylor’s final exam in a basketball course – yes, basketball course – he took while he was at Georgia: “How many points does a 3-point field goal account for in a basketball game?”

If players, instead, went to a minor league, they’d be responsible for feeding and housing themselves instead of spending the night at a luxury hotel the night before the big homecoming game. If they got into legal trouble, they’d be on their own. If they didn’t play well, they’d be dropped from the team.

In short, athletes would have to mature well enough to manage their own lives. For many players that would be far better preparation for the life of hero worship they’ll find in the pros than three years of a suffocating college sports program that caters to their every whim.

They’d also avoid the misleading designation of amateur student-athlete and be what they truly are: professional athletes.

This is not a conclusive take on the subject. Professional athletes from poor neighborhoods have a difficult time divorcing themselves from childhood friends with criminal records for a number of reasons and I’ll go into that some other time. And my take would shrink the huge commercial operation known as NCAA football and basketball. Good luck with that.

But we owe it to athletes to provide them with job opportunities other than big-time college sports programs. These programs recruit problem players and make a lot of money off them without giving them the tools they need to be mature professional athletes.

Justine the Reality TV Show

Twenty-five game winning streak, 63-4 record, 14 out of the 16 tournament wins, two slams and a year end championship title. This is not the ATP, this is not Roger Federer, this is Justine Henin and it could have been three slams if she hadn’t skipped the Australian Open to deal with her divorce.

I spent a fair amount of time looking up comparable records on the women’s side this morning. As far as I can tell, Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova are the only women players with a better won loss record. Graf’s record was 86-2 in 1989 and Navratilova was 86-1 in 1983. Notice how many more matches women played in that era, by the way, and yet they didn’t appear to break down anywhere near as much as today’s players do.

We’ll see if Justine goes on to surpass, say, the Williams sisters in slams – go to the sidebar and cast your vote on the question – but it’s more interesting to look at Justine’s emotional arc than her numbers.

The Williams sisters have their own compelling story: hardscrabble childhood, crazy like a fox tennis coach father, competing careers in fashion and entertainment. But Justine has somehow managed to play out her emotional life in front of us as she’s made her way to the top, and unlike Serena and Venus, she’s done it by revealing as little as possible about herself. No reality show for Justine just yet.

These days Justine is a veritable fountain of sharing relative to the early part of her career. At that time we knew her mother had died when she was 12 years old, and we knew she was estranged from her father and siblings, but that’s about it, and she wasn’t going to tell us much more than necessary. If you saw her in the players’ cafeteria, there she was with her coach, Carlos Rodriguez, the two of them a little island in a sea of players. Even now she’s one of those people who close her eyes when she talks to you as if to be sure she doesn’t give away too much.

Many players fall apart when life intervenes in their career. Nikolay Davydenko is buckling under the pressure of an ongoing gambling investigation as we speak. Henin, though, just appears to be getting stronger.

This year she divorced her husband and created a bit more independence from Rodriguez and his family – which was her substitute family after all. At the same time she welcomed her father and siblings back into her life. In the process of opening her heart a bit more to herself and to the public, she seems to have learned that the stoicism that carried her through the early part of her career was a brittle strength. It didn’t allow her to stand on her own.

For most players on the tour, though not all, tennis is an all-consuming passion. For Justine I think it goes one step farther and it’s the key to why she’s been able to keep rising up the ranks despite an emotionally wrenching journey.

Tennis has been the substitute for some of Justine’s life outside of tennis and now that the outside world is creeping back into her life, her tennis is secure enough that it enhances her game. Most people need their personal lives in order to perform well in their career. Some people do it the other way around. Success in their career gives them the confidence to open their hearts to those in their personal lives.

Justine doesn’t need a reality TV show, we’ve been watching it all along.

Volatile Tennis

Which players have the most volatile games and what does it say about them?

Not volatile temper, silly, volatile game. Volatile in the sense that a volatile player will break serve often but will also lose his serve a lot.

I, for one, believe that we are much better off embracing gambling and educating ourselves than bemoaning the trend and pointing fingers. To that end, I’ve been reading gambling advice on Betfair.com’s blog and found an interesting piece about volatility.

Matthew Walton rated all of the ATP players as follows: if the player broke serve or lost his serve, his volatility ranking would increase. If he held serve or failed to break serve, his volatility ranking would go down.

As you can imagine, big servers who don’t move all that well had low volatility rankings. Andy Roddick has the huge serve but he doesn’t break his opponent’s serve that much. Sam Querrey is in there too and so is Benjamin Becker who depends on his serve far too much. That may be why he’s slipped down to number 87 in the rankings. Querrey might want to take note of that and spend a lot more time on the clay developing his sliding skills.

Clay court players, as you’d also expect, since it’s harder to hold serve on clay, are the most volatile and Filippo Volandri is the most volatile of all. He’s already pretty popular with the bettors if you look at the number of suspicious matches his names pops up in but this is one more reason he’s popular and here’s why.

Betfair is a betting exchange. Bettors offer bets to each other rather than making bets with a bookmaker. A betting exchange is also different than the usual betting operation in that you can make bets throughout a match, not just before a match starts.

As Walton points out, there are a lot more mid-match betting opportunities on a match with volatile players than non-volatile players because Roddick and Querrey are in trouble if they lose their serve so the outcome is more predictable. If Volandri loses his serve, no big deal, because he breaks serve a lot too.

Why should you care if you’re not a day trader in the tennis market? The volatility ranking tells us some interesting things. As Walton also points out, if you’re in the middle of the pack it probably means you hold your serve well and break your opponent’s serve, which is a good thing.

Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are in this group but so, surprisingly, is Ivo Karlovic. You’d think that being 6ft 10in would automatically put him in the “doesn’t move so well” category but apparently it doesn’t and that explains why his ranking has shot up in the latter part of this year.

Two other people in that mid-group are Paul-Henri Mathieu and Marcos Baghdatis and that means one thing: they have the potential to be top players, they just aren’t fulfilling their potential.

I don’t have time to lay down hundreds of bets but I would love to be on Betfair because they stream tennis matches from around the world. I can’t use Betfair, though, because I live in the U.S. and offshore gambling is illegal. If you have a few coins in your piggy bank and you love tennis, it could be worthwhile to set up an account just so you can see tennis matches from Beijing and Bangkok on your computer screen.

Just don’t come complaining to me if you lose your pennies. In other words, if you have any addictive tendencies, stick to the telly.

Is Tennis Boring?

Not the game of tennis itself. That’s not boring.

Serena and Venus Williams took home a pair of slams and we had a fantastic final at the women’s year-end-championships. Roger Federer still got his three slams but he missed out on four Masters Series titles by losing consecutive matches twice to an unexpected player. One of those unexpected players, David Nalbandian, not only resurrected his career, but he improbably took it further than it had ever gone before.

It’s not over yet. Next week Andy Roddick gets a chance to lead the U.S. to its first Davis Cup title since 1995 and leave his mark on the game as one of the great Davis Cup players of all time.

No, it’s the other stuff that’s missing. Look at the rest of the sports world, for instance.

Barry Bonds was indicted and Michael Vick reported early for his jail sentence in the past week. Alex Rodriguez’ superagent screwed up and upstaged the baseball World Series thereby damaging A-Rod’s reputation so badly that A-Rod sidestepped his agent and asked the Yankees to take him back. University of Alabama football coach Lou Saban got in trouble for comparing two straight losses to disasters such as 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. England lost to Croatia knocking them out of the 2008 European Championship and fired its coach.

Tennis has had a few drug suspensions this year but, hell, the entire peloton at the Tour de France was probably juicing up their blood. Last year’s champion was barnstorming the U.S. to raise money for his defense fund and this year’s yellow jersey holder was sent home because he’d lied about his whereabouts to avoid pre-race testing then got caught lying about his lies.

Tennis does have a gambling controversy. Nikolay Davydenko is buckling under the pressure of the investigation into whether he fixed a match and Alessio Di Mauro got a nine month suspension for laying down $15-20 bets on tennis but that’s all we got. Baseball had the Black Sox scandal which had eight players fixing games. And they also had Pete Rose who bet on baseball and lost his guaranteed place in the Hall of Fame.

Tennis is like ice skating: we have one criminal. Ice skating has Tonya Harding and we have Roscoe Tanner, though he’s old news. There is actually some new news about him and I’ll get to that in a few weeks.

Is tennis culturally relevant? Other sports are.

Baseball reflects cultural and political changes in the U.S. The number of Latino ballplayers is increasing yearly while the number of black ballplayers is decreasing. That reflects the U.S. culture as the Latino community is passing the black community both in economic and political power. The NBA reflects the growth of the global market with its high number of international stars including a new star from China this year, Yi Jianlian.

Same thing in tennis. Tennis in the U.S. is losing popularity and losing tournaments while the huge Asian market is getting new tournaments. Shanghai gets a new Masters Series event in 2009 and Roger Federer and Pete Sampras flew all over Asia – not Europe or the U.S. – for their barnstorming exhibition this week.

Tennis is exciting to watch and more or less culturally relevant. Two out of three ain’t bad don’t you think?

Roger Federer Is the Ten Million Dollar Man

Roger Federer and Pete Sampras make a lot of money in the biggest new tennis market: Asia.

Roger Federerappeared to be taking it easy on Pete Sampras in the first of their three exhibition matches in Seoul, Korea, on Tuesday. Roger isn’t the biggest server on tour and he took something off his serve. He still managed to beat Pete rather easily by the score of 6-4, 6-3, but the question I have is: why is he doing this?

Roger is the ten million dollar man – the first player to earn $10 million dollars in one season on the ATP tour. That means he could easily afford that gorgeous vehicle you see pictured above I happened to see on the street in Los Angeles today. It’s a McLaren Mercedes Benz and it runs about half a million bucks.

He doesn’t need it because he won a Mercedes for taking the title at the year end championships but he does need an offseason. He should be on his way to Australia for the Kooyong tournament in about six weeks. After three exhibitions this week in Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, and Macao, that’ll be five weeks. Assuming Roger needs a few weeks to prepare for the new season, that gives him a three week vacation.

Roger is the ten million dollar man because he got $1.5 million from the ATP Masters Series Bonus Pool for winning the most Masters Series points and playing both Madrid and Paris. He hadn’t played Paris since 2003 so you’d think he’d want a month off.

I suppose I should be generous and thank him for raising the profile of tennis in Asia but I’m guessing it’s more about the money. I’d love to know how much Roger and Pete will take home for their exofest. If anyone knows, please leave a comment.

And anyway I’m jealous. The world of tennis – and basketball – used to run through the U.S. at one time and now the money is drawing both sports to Asia. Well over a million people in China watched the first matchup between Chinese NBA stars Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian earlier this month. You can even buy 24 karat gold coins commemorating the event. Gold coins are usually reserved for championship collectibles.

Shanghai gets the new Masters Series event in 2009 which is a true money grab because the 2009 calendar was supposed to have one less Masters Series event. The idea was to take it easy on the players by reducing the number of required tournaments but just the opposite will happen. There are still nine Masters level events, one of the clay court events has been eliminated and clay is easier on the players’ bodies, and now they have to travel to Asia instead of getting on a train from Monte Carlo to Hamburg.

My neighbors are taking off for Singapore tomorrow morning on a “frequent flyer points run” so they’ll have enough points to fly first class next year. I might have to do the same thing if I want to sit in the stands at top flight tennis tournaments in the near future.