Posted by Peter Bodo, TENNIS.com
Tennis is the sport that loves to bash itself. This is odd, considering what a bashing it has always taken from the crowd that clings to the outdated image of tennis as the domain of country club weenies and divas.
The Lords of Tennis, ever anxious to reverse the stereotype, go overboard. Players are publicly crucified for doping offenses, often when the public spotlight is on the game (i.e., during majors), in an exercise best described as transparency gone wild. Never mind that some of those offenses are so minor they wouldn't even garner a yawn from the overseers of MLB.
Tennis officials have created Draconian rules governing how much pros must play, enforcing it with a ranking system that leaves the players no alternative but to grind it out. A few top players take a pass on Davis Cup duty, and the outcry goes up (and the hand-wringing in the halls of power begins):
Reform the Davis Cup!
But if the people running tennis just took a little break from their 24/7 agenda for people-pleasing, they might have pretty good reason for feeling good about their game. This is absolutely true at the institutional level, and qualified at the individual level by that recent flare-up of match-fixing charges, all of which occurred in tennis' equivalent of the minor leagues, and revolved, with one exception, around the bottom-feeders in the game.
Last time I checked, no tennis players had been subpoenaed to testify before Congress in a scandal comparable in its reach and resonance to the steroid mess in baseball. As far as I know, no tennis player has shot and killed his long-time limo driver or, for that matter, fired a bullet through his own thigh in a nightclub during just a few weeks before the start of Roland Garros. The most famous Roger in tennis is an Obama-esque world citizen named Federer, not Clemens.
The firestorms in tennis revolve around crises no more meaningful than that silly round-robin experiment of a few years back, or the inconvenient tweaks to the schedule forced by having to make room for the Olympic Games competition. Can you say, "non-issue?"
I'm thinking about this today because, like many of you, I read Rick Reilly's latest column on the NCAA-BCS national football championship controversy. That a sport as significant as college football can't get its act together and reach some form of consensus on determining a national champion, and that a team (Utah) might have been dealt such an egregious injustice -- is downright mind-blowing.
What's tennis version of the BCS controversy? Well, how about
Jelena Jankovic being ranked No. 1 (and declared the 2008 ITF World Champion) without having won a Grand Slam event? But in Jankovic's case, the computer doesn't lie. There's only one way to get to No. 1, and one way to get there on the magical date of Dec. 31. By earning more points (not votes, not dollars, not sponsor patches) than whomever winds up No. 2, and earning those points on the court, by winning matches. That's transparency for you.
Let the hand-wringing begin.
Peter Bodo
