Larcher de Brito talented beyond her years
Three Points
Teen phenom loves Armani
Michelle Larcher de Brito might be only 15 years old, but she appears to have a good head on her shoulders.
Clearly talented beyond her years, the Portugese teenager could be moaning about the fact that the WTA Tour sets limitations on the number of tournaments a young teen can play.
But instead, Larcher de Brito, ranked No. 226, steadfastly supports the rule.
"I think I can only play 10 tournaments a year," she said, speaking on the phone just an hour after setting up a second-round outing against recent Wimbledon finalist and former world No. 1 Serena Williams at the Bank of the West Classic in Stanford, Calif., last week.
"I'm not really against that rule. I think it's a good rule because they're trying to protect the players from overplaying. I actually don't like that many tournaments in a row. I like playing a couple of tournaments and then going home. I don't want to get too tired."
After winning the Orange Bowl title in December, Larcher de Brito ended her junior career, despite having three more years of eligibility.
She participates only in select pro tournaments and otherwise spends her time training at home in Bradenton, Fla., where she is attached to the Nick Bollettieri Academy. Her father, Antonio Larcher de Brito, is her full-time coach, and her entire family -- dad, mom and older twin brothers -- lives in Florida.
Michelle Larcher de Brito started the summer by playing the qualifying at the Bank of the West Classic, then won her first-round match against seasoned Gisela Dulko 7-5, 7-6 (1).
That provided her with the opportunity to face off with Williams, an eight-time Grand Slam champion. Larcher de Brito did not lose face against her notable opponent -- she won the opening set before surrendering 4-6, 6-3, 6-2.
Earlier in the year, Larcher de Brito scored a significant top-20 victory over Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland in the first round at the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami, her favorite tournament thus far in her career.
"It was a really great win," she said of beating Radwanska, also still a teenager. "I was playing really well that day."
When she's at home, she goes to school at the academy and spends time going to the mall and movies with friends, just like any teenage girl.
"I don't have much time for it, but whenever I can, I go to movies and to the mall," Larcher de Brito said. "I love Armani Exchange. I actually have a Siberian Huskie, and his name is Armani."
Dancevic eyeing a ponytail
It was exactly one year ago at the Indianapolis Tennis Championships that Frank Dancevic certified his stature as the top player from Canada.
AP Photo/The Canadian Press
At No. 82, Frank Dancevic is the only Canadian player currently ranked in the top 200 on the ATP Tour.
Dancevic was a last-minute entrant in the 2007 Indy draw, drove about 500 miles Friday night from his Niagara Falls home to the event and then made a whirlwind trip to the final before losing to Dmitry Tursunov.
Dancevic's biggest achievement in 2007 at Indy was claiming his first top-10 scalp in beating Andy Roddick en route to the final.
He followed that success by heading to the Canadian Open, where he reached his first quarterfinal at a Masters Series-level event.
This year, following a four-month layoff with a bad back, Dancevic discovered that Indy wasn't going to be as kind.
But part of that was due to his success on the grass, which prevented him from having enough time to practice on hard courts. Dancevic won the Surbiton Challenger, reached the semifinals in Newport and then fell in the first round at Indy.
"Absolutely, Indy is always going to be a special event for me," said Dancevic, who does his heavy-duty training at the Bob Brett Tennis Academy in Italy. "I had a great time here last year, and I'll play there a lot more times in the future. Montreal was also a great experience for me last year. I love playing there. I'm excited to be back at home and playing a tournament on my home soil for once."
This year, he scored another top-10 victory when he upset former All England Club finalist David Nalbandian in the first round of this year's Wimbledon Championships.
"It was fun," Dancevic said. "Going into the match, I was like, 'Oh man, shoot, I'm playing Nalbandian, and he's a really tough player.' But I knew I was playing well on grass. I had just won Surbiton, and that gave me a lot of confidence."
He isn't worried about his ranking since the Newport semifinal provided him enough points to stay firmly entrenched in the top 100.
Dancevic says that Niagara Falls is "an everyday thing" for him, as opposed to the wonder it is for tourists who trek to the area to gape at the astonishing site. But it is a favorite place for him to spend time fishing for salmon and trout when he's at home.
And if you are wondering about Dancevic's most immediate goal, it's not about tennis -- he just wants to tame his curly locks.
"It's grown a lot," Dancevic said of the wild mane he currently is holding back with a wide headband. "I want to see if I can get it into a ponytail, because my 'fro is getting a little bit out of control."
Blake the fundraiser
James Blake is honoring his beloved father, Thomas, who died from gastric cancer in 2004, in the most fitting way possible: He started the Thomas Blake Sr. Memorial Research Fund.
The fund, designed to support cancer research, is organized in conjunction with the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York City.
From memorabilia from his most ardent fans -- the J-Block -- to a tennis tournament, Blake will attempt to raise money in many ways. He hopes to deliver $1 million next year. The charity already has raised $500,000.
"My father's role in shaping my life and my values continues to have an ongoing impact," Blake told ESPN.com. "Establishing the Thomas Blake Sr. cancer research fund is not something that he would have asked me to do, but I felt it was the right thing to do in an effort to support the fight against cancer and at the same time honor my father's legacy. My hope is that the money we raise will aid in the development of research that will in turn save lives. If we are able to help even one person overcome their battle with cancer and live a long and productive life, it will mean more to me than any other accomplishments in my life."
Sandra Harwitt is a freelance tennis writer for ESPN.com.
ATP suspends doubles titlists
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- Doubles specialists Frantisek Cermak and Michal Mertinak, both coming off tournament titles, were suspended Monday by the ATP for betting on tennis matches.Neither player wagered on his own matches, and an independent hearing officer found no evidence of any intent to affect the outcome of matches bet upon, the governing body of men's tennis said.
Cermak, a Czech ranked 34th in doubles, was suspended for 10 weeks beginning Monday and fined $15,000. He teamed with Rogier Wassen to win the doubles title Sunday at the Dutch Open.
Mertinak, a Slovak ranked 37th in doubles, was suspended for two weeks and fined $3,000. He teamed with Petr Pala to win the doubles Sunday at the Croatia Open.
Professional tennis has taken steps to combat gambling since a betting Web site voided all bets on a match involving top-5 player Nikolay Davydenko last year because of suspicious gambling patterns.
Five Italians have been suspended and fined for betting on tennis. Other players have come forward to say they were approached by people trying to influence matches.
The ATP said an investigation begun this past November found Cermak wagered on matches from September 2006 to February 2007. Mertinak bet on matches in October 2006, the ATP said.
"The ATP's tennis anti-corruption program is clear that gambling on any form of tennis match will not be tolerated," said Gayle David Bradshaw, ATP executive vice president. "The program was introduced to ensure the integrity of our sport, and all connected to the tour have a duty and responsibility to ensure that integrity is upheld."
--AP
Court in session
De Villiers
TORONTO -- A summer of promise and peril begins in men's tennis this week. The top players return to the courts in Toronto, still riding a wave of public enthusiasm over the Wimbledon final that could lift the game to renewed heights.
Meanwhile, a battle in a different kind of court will be taking place in Wilmington, Del. -- a messy, complex lawsuit that has the poential to knock down the existing structure of the ATP Tour.
Organizers of the Masters Series event in Hamburg, Germany, filed suit against the ATP in March 2007 to try to prevent the tournament from being downgraded under the ATP's planned calendar changes for 2009. Under the plan, a new two-week combined Masters event in Madrid will be established during the spring clay season, and the clay Masters events in Hamburg and Monte Carlo will be moved to a lower tier of tournaments.
Monte Carlo filed a similar suit against the ATP, but the two reached a settlement in July 2007, with the tournament keeping all its current features but not gaining the "mandatory" designation all Masters events will receive in 2009.
Twelve months on, no such resolution has been reached with the German tennis federation, Deutscheur Tennis Bund, which runs the Hamburg event. The cash-rich Qatar tennis federation, which holds an interest in Hamburg, also is a plaintiff in the antitrust lawsuit. The suit alleges that the ATP is running an "illegal cartel" and challenges its right to control the schedule of the men's pro circuit. The tournament also is seeking a potential $76.6 million in damages, a figure that, if awarded, certainly would bankrupt the ATP.
The ATP argues that tour structure and scheduling are among its foundational roles and that Hamburg has implicitly acknowledged this authority in the past.
According to Sportsbusiness Journal, each side has spent more than $7 million in legal fees so far. Last-ditch talks on both sides of the Atlantic over the past few months have failed to result in a settlement, and the case went to trial Monday. It's expected to last about two weeks.
"It's a very serious case for the men's pro circuit, and I think it's very troubling that a jury of 12 people is going to have a major impact on the direction of the ATP Tour one way or the other," said Donald Dell, a lawyer and longtime tennis promoter who himself has twice sued the governing body of men's tennis in similar fashion.
"Because it's a jury trial, it's going to be decided a lot by who has the best lawyers."
No equivalent case in tennis has gone through the full trial process and resulted in a final ruling.
In 2002, the ATP was sued by the Indianapolis and Washington tournaments when it changed their dates in the calendar. The parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, and the tournaments moved to their designated dates but reduced the amount of prize money they offered. Dell is the founder of the ATP event in Washington and its former tournament director.
In an interesting twist, the former tournament director of Indianapolis, lawyer Rob MacGill, is representing Hamburg in its current case.
A predecessor of the ATP Tour, the Men's International Pro Tennis Council, also was sued in the late 1980s by Dell, IMG founder Mark McCormack and Volvo Corp. The case initially was thrown out of court, then was reinstated on appeal, but partway through the process, the MIPTC ceased to be operational (the men's circuit was unified under a player-tournament partnership called the ATP Tour) and negotiated a settlement.
"So both sides can argue, 'Well, we didn't win the case' or 'We didn't lose the case.' All I know is that the people we were suing no longer existed," Dell said.
But, he added, many of the issues in that dispute are the ones cited by Hamburg organizers today -- the rights of tournament holders, the extent of the tour's control over when and where players play, and the fairness of pooling television rights.
Other antitrust cases in sports have had equally ambiguous outcomes. A lawsuit brought by the United States Football League against the National Football League at about the same time saw the jury rule in favor of the USFL but award it only $1 in damages (tripled to $3 under antitrust law).
"It was the most hollow victory in sports," Dell said.
While he doesn't expect a repeat of that infamous decision, he thinks it's possible that neither the ATP nor Hamburg will be an outright winner or loser in this case.
"The real issue is going to come down to … is it reasonable, for the order of the sport, to have a governing body that can schedule? If they can't schedule the tournaments, the ATP Tour board doesn't have much," Dell said.
"When jurors sit down and it's a complicated balancing of equities, they could very well come back and say, 'Well, the ATP does have the right to schedule -- that's the only way you have order and a good tour -- but Hamburg has been hurt, and therefore the ATP has to do X to alleviate the hurt.'"
The uncertainty of the outcome and the stakes involved mean a worrying waiting game for the sport. The ATP's restructuring efforts also have created friction among players and ATP officials, so the lawsuit is simply the largest conflict being waged, looming over past and upcoming skirmishes over the shape of the tour and the future of embattled ATP chief Etienne de Villiers.
In just more than two months, player representatives Perry Rogers and Jacco Eltingh have been voted off the ATP board by the Player Council and replaced with Justin Gimelstob (himself now embattled), David Egdes and past Player Council president Ivan Ljubicic (serving as an interim representative). The Player Council itself has been enormously strengthened by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic all taking spots, however. It marks the first time the top three players in the world have been on the council together and is a clear signal of the players' determination to have more say over the governance of the tour.
"We'll have to wait and see what happens," Federer said of the lawsuit. "We [the players] are concerned that things [should] be good for the players and for the tournaments at the end, whatever the outcome will be."
Said Djokovic: "The players' voices have to be heard, that's for sure. That's what we are trying to do.
"But first of all, we have to wait for the trial. … Obviously, it is going to decide a future of this sport. And hopefully it is going to be in our favor, because we don't want any scandals."
Did he mean in favor of the ATP?
Djokovic paused after the question. "I mean the players," he said.
The outcome of the court battle is expected before the summer is over, but the internal war might just be beginning.
-- Kamakshi Tandon, Tennis.com