I’m beginning to think that performance enhancing drugs (PED’s) should be a new category in sports columns and websites right after Nascar and just before rugby (is there a pro Quidditch league yet?).

Tennis is right there in the thick of PED culture. Argentine Guillermo Canas has just been suspended for two years after testing positive for the diuretic hydrochlorothiazide (HCT). He is the fourth Argentine to be supended for a drug violation. Juan Ignacio Chela, Guillermo Coria and Mariano Puerta all served suspension for banned PED’s.

Puerta was suspended the longest, nine months. That’s a long time but it’s nothing like two years. That’s a lifetime to a tennis player. Can you imagine if Rafael Palmeiro had received a two year suspension? End of career.

Canas received an automatic two year suspension because tennis adheres to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s guidelines, the same as those used in the Olympics.

If a two year suspension wasn’t bad enough, Canas also has to repay $276,070 in prize money and forfeit 525 singles and 95 doubles rankings points. How is this determined? Do they figure out how long the banned substance stayed in his body, calculate how much he won during that period then ask for the money back?

Mybe they should do that in baseball. Calculate how long the stanozolol stayed in Palmeiro’s body then go back and take away all of the hits he had during that period. By the way, you can see why the Major League Baseball union is fighting tooth and nail against being subject to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s policies.

Can you imagine if Rafael Palmeiro had received a two year suspension? End of career.

I am not convinced that steroids are bad for you. You can read more about that here. If it turns out that DHEA will extend my lifespan with few side effects and I find a doctor willing to give me a protocol for it, what right do I have to tell a ballplayer that he can’t use steroids under medical supervision? The bigger problem here is the decade or so of lies and the continuing lack of disclosure. The collective bargaining agreement between baseball and the players’ union has a confidentiality agreement. When a player tests positive, the test results are not released.

Tennis is smarter than baseball. As Harvey Araton pointed out in The New York Times this morning, if you go to the ATP website you can find all the information you want. Click on Press Room then Anti-Doping and you will see links to a list of banned substances and yearly testing reports. You can even print up your own anti-doping wallet card with a list of banned substances. There are at least nine categories and more than one hundred and twenty substances – including 18 _-homo-17ß-hydroxyestr-4-en-3-one and, yes, chlorothiazide.

If you click on Information, you get a list of every anti-doping decision, in English, Spanish and sometimes French, every player sanctioned and the substance they were sanctioned for. This is what we call full disclosure

A few years ago I read an article in the New Yorker about a military officer whose daughter died unexpectedly during a stay at a military hospital. The officer was convinced that medical personnel made a mistake and covered it up. He spent a number of years and all of his resources pursuing a legal decision in the matter. He was in the military, he knew that mistakes happen, but when you make one, the best way to diffuse the situtation is to fully disclose what happened.

No one has died here but if you want to make a situation much worse that it otherwise might be, screw up and then lie about it. Ask Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton about that.

At least it’s not as bad as the Mercedes Benz Cup last week. Only three seeds were left after the first round. Here at the Acura Classic we’re in the third round and we still have half of the top ten seeds playing. The number one seed, Lindsay Davenport, is injured and didn’t show up. Serena Williams and Davenport have both dropped out of next week’s JP Morgan Chase Open. I applaud the U.S. Open Series, the set of ten events leading up to the U.S. Open, but we shouldn’t be surprised that players drop out. It’s too much tennis in brutally hot weather. Maybe they should hold a few tournaments in Alaska, it is part of the United States you know. Or at least hang out in the Bay Area for a few more weeks. It’s freezing when the fog rolls in.

There are four players from France here and two of them are playing this evening. Mary Pierce is positively resurgent. She was the tear-filled runner up at the French Open and made it to the quarters at Wimbledon. She’s come a long way from the fourteen-year-old who turned pro, surely too early, then suffered through a split with her domineering father and a series of injuries that derailed her career for a few years. She is now a thirty-year-old with two majors and an almost regal bearing who seems very happy with her life and thrilled to be playing well on the tour.

That is when she’s not pissed off. Her opponent is Nathalie Dechy. On the first point of the match, Dechy hits a beautiful forehand return that lands on the sideline. Pierce is beside herself. She is sure the ball was out. I’ve had to create a new shorthand notation on my tennis chart, PPO, Pierce pissed off, because we will see it often this evening.

Dechy has great athleticism and solid strokes but Pierce has rocket-propelled shots, particularly her forehand. She gets so low to hit her groundstrokes that she looks like a Sumo wrestler stepping into the ring, minus a few hundred pounds. She also has a hard first serve. Dechy’s serve is serviceable. By comparing the two players, you can see one of the reasons that Dechy’s serve is weaker: she barely bends her knees. Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, some of us more of the weaknesses, but I don’t understand how someone could practice so hard for so many years and still not figure out how to bend their knees. It’s like Vic Braden says, “Whaddya mean you can’t bend your knees, how do you manage to sit down for dinner every night?”

Dechy hasn’t beaten Pierce in three tries. If she wants to win tonight, she must avoid errors and pressure Pierce with strong service returns else Pierce’s power will dictate the match. Dechy’s plan works in the first game, she hits three good returns and breaks Pierce. Unfortunately she gives it right back with groundstroke errors.

After two more PPO’s and two more overrules by the chair umpire, both, interestingly, in Pierce’s favor, the players are even at 5-5. At one point the umpire shakes her head at a call. Hey, if the umpire has no confidence in the linespeople, the players certainly don’t.

Twice Dechy sets herself up for a winner and hits a swinging volley into the net giving rise to a huge collective groan from the crowd. The second volley would have given her a break point. Instead, Pierce is up 6-5 and Dechy has to serve to stay in the set. When Pierce is facing a break point, she serves hard and hits harder. Dechy doesn’t have a power serve and she doesn’t have a killer shot. At the very least she needs to move the serve around and play error free. In this game she can’t do either. She double faults, looks tentative on her other serves and loses the game at love to give Pierce the first set, 7-5.

She gets so low to hit her groundstrokes that she looks like a Sumo wrestler stepping into the ring, minus a few hundred pounds.

Dechy goes toe to toe with Pierce hitting the ball hard and running down most of Pierce’s arsenal. At one point Pierce approaches the net and Dechy hits a passing shot that Pierce barely gets over the net and onto the sideline. Dechy comes all the way from the opposite corner to hit a backhand down the line and past Pierce. But she keeps making critical errors. She gets broken at love to go down 1-3 after yet another errant overhead.

Dechy never gets the break back and the match ends the same way it started, with Pierce pissed off. She was halfway to the net to exchange pleasantries after hitting a match-ending ace when the serve was called out. Instead, Pierce pushes Dechy into a position where all she can do is hit an awkward lob over Pierce’s head. Pierce responds with a lob of her own that looks like it could jump over the Empire State Building. Dechy, again, dumps it into the net. Pierce wins 7-5, 6-3.

This is a Tier I event with $3.1 million in prize money. That’s a lot of money and there are fifty-six players here from twenty-six countries including Madagascar trying to get a piece of it. Eleven players, six of them seeded, are from Russia, but not one of them will make is as far as the semifinals. Instead, two of the four Japanese players and the one player from China will battle each other and Mary Pierce to get to the final.

This week the men’s tour has landed in Washington, D.C., for the Legg Mason Classic. Today’s quarterfinal match featured Andy Roddick against that humongous pituitary case, Ivo Karlovic of Croatia. All 6’10” worth. Size 18 shoes. Yes, I’m eating my heart out over that one. The announcers in the booth did a slowmo analysis of Ivo’s serve. It’s a wonderfully smooth, powerful serve, and by the time he makes contact with the ball, we’re talking about ten feet off the ground. For the other guys on the tour, it must appear that Karlovic is serving from the treetops. Or so Brad Gilbert described it.

That serve nearly carried the day for Karlovic. It had to, the temperature on court was around 100 degrees, with the usual heavy humidity of Washington at this time of year. Karlovic was not raised in a hot climate like Andy Roddick, and he suffered for that. He was counting on his serve, and it nearly pulled him through. The guy looked like he was about to croak though, like the woman in the stands who was stretched out on the benches, being fanned after she passed out.

Both guys came out ready to serve at least, if not to play. There were hardly any rallies today. It was just too exhausting to maintain them in this heat. They wanted to end the points as fast as possible. If you took a bathroom break, yawned, or maybe even blinked, you would have missed a lot. It was that kind of match.

Both guys held serve into the first set tiebreak. Karlovic was serving at 80% through the first set, Roddick was at 69%. They traded breaks, then Karlovic caught a lucky moment when Andy let down just a fraction. He double-faulted, giving the first set to the Croat. That should have inspired big Ivo, but instead he kind of melted down in several changes of shirts. Andy hung on, and his superior conditioning eventually carried him to the victory. Lately Andy Roddick has played (and lost) a number of matches that turned on a few dimes here and there. He’s had to keep his cool and mentally try and fight back from those little lapses in his attention. Today was such a day, and he managed to do that, winning in three sets, 6-7(7), 7-5, 6-4.

The American boys are performing well here this week. Roddick, along with James Blake and Bobby Reynolds, have made it into the quarterfinals. Who would of thunk it.

The match today was also of interest because of some of the commentary, particularly when former pro Donald Dell dropped by the booth. Brad Gilbert and Cliff Drysdale asked him, if you could change something about tennis today to make it better…..

And Dell replied that players pulling out of tournaments just before they start is killing the game. This week in Los Angeles a host of women players did just that, as have the men at the Washington event. Something probably has to give here, on the one hand the players complain that the season is too long. On the other hand, the tournament directors complain when players don’t show up. Both sides probably need to devise a middle ground here. Between Greed And Exhaustion, I guess we can call this movie.

Brad Gilbert’s peeve about the game was that the plans to start electronic line calls are now delayed for the U.S. Open and some of the tournaments leading up to it. Apparently the Powers That Be don’t feel the system has been quite perfected enough.

Hhmm. Most unfortunate. Guess we have another wretched summer to look forward to of imperfect human beings calling those lines.