Eagle-eyed Twitterer @juki_tennis noticed the following tweaks to the rules for the 2020 grand slams:
Let’s start with the first underlined section. I’ll get to the doubles tweak in a bit.
The ITF is learning that incentives are tricky. In the olden days, back when Adrian Mannarino still had hair, prize money was simple. If you played, you got some. If you didn’t, you got none. Players who get hurt right before one of the four biggest events of the season suffered in silence.
Except it’s never been quite that simple. The slams have spent the last decade taking turns breaking prize-money records, raising in particular the take for first-round losers. A spot in the main draw of the Australian Open is now worth $63,000 USD ($90,000 AUD). Some players in the qualifying draw barely make that much in an entire season. Whatever one’s hangups about honesty or fair play, if you have a chance to grab that check, you take it.
The same logic applies whether you’re healthy or injured. The last decade or so of grand slam tennis has been littered with first-round losers who weren’t really fit to compete. That’s bad for the tournaments, bad for the fans, and probably not that great for the players themselves, even if $63k does buy a lot of physiotherapy.
Paid withdrawals
Two years ago, the ITF took aim at the problem. Players with a place in the main draw could choose to withdraw and still collect 50% of first-round loser prize money. The ATP does something similar, giving on-site withdrawals full first-round loser prize money for up to two consecutive tournaments. The ATP’s initiative has been particularly successful, cutting first-round retirements at tour-level events from a 2015 high of 48 to only 20 in 2019. In percentage terms, that’s a decline from 4.4% of first-round matches to only 1.6%.
The results at slams are cloudier. On the men’s side, there were nine first-round retirements in 2010, and nine in 2019. The ITF’s incentives might not be sufficient: 50% of first-round prize money is still a substantial sum to forego. In fairness to the slams, retirements may not tell the whole story. A hobbled player can still complete a match, and perhaps the prize money adjustment has convinced a few more competitors to give up their places in the main draw.
None of this, however, keeps out players who consciously game the system. Both the ATP and WTA allow injured players to use their pre-injury rankings to enter a limited number of events upon their return. Savvy pros maximize those entries (“protected” in ATP parlance, and “special” in WTA lingo) by using them where the prize pots are richest and, if possible, bridging the gap with wild cards into smaller events.
Emblematic of such tactics is Dmitry Tursunov, who played (and lost) his last six matches at majors, all using protected rankings. Two of those, including his final grand slam match at the 2017 US Open against Cameron Norrie, ended in retirement. Three of the others were straight-set losses. In one sense, Tursunov “earned” those paydays. He was ranked 31st going into Wimbledon in 2014, then missed most of the following 18 months. Upon return, he followed ATP tour rules. But with the increasingly disproportionate rewards available at slams, protected rankings seem sporting only when used as part of a concerted comeback effort.
While the ITF’s late-withdrawal policy wasn’t in place for Tursunov, it’s easy to imagine a player in a similar situation taking advantage. And that’s the gap that the latest tweak aims to plug. The new rule is not limited to players on protected or special rankings, which typically require absences of six months, not just one. Yet the idea is similar. You can no longer enter, turn up on site, plead injury, and take home tens of thousands of dollars … unless you’ve competed recently. It’s a low bar, but it raises the standard a bit for players who want to take home a $30,000 check.
One of two prongs
The rule adjustment wouldn’t have affected Tursunov’s lucrative protected-ranking tour of 2016-17. However, had the Russian come back from injury a couple of years later, his income might not have gone uncontested.
In 2019, both Roland Garros and Wimbledon invoked another rarely-used clause in the rulebook. It requires that players “perform to a professional standard,” and a failure to do so can result in fines up to the amount of first-round prize money. Anna Tatishvili–using a special ranking–was docked her full paycheck at the French Open, and Bernard Tomic–a convenient whipping boy whenever this sort of thing comes up–lost his take-home from the All England Club. Both fines were appealed, and Tatishvili’s was overturned. (Tomic’s should have been, too.)
What matters for the purposes of today’s discussion isn’t the size of Tatishvili’s bank account, but the fact that the majors have dug the “professional standard” clause out of cold storage. It’s worth quoting the various factors that the rulebook spells out as possibly contributing to a violation of the standard:
- the player did not complete the match
- the player did not compete in the 2-3 week period preceding the Grand Slam
- the player retired from the last tournament he/she played before the Grand Slam
- the player was using a Protected or Special Ranking for entry
- the player received a Code Violation for failure to use Best Efforts
Every major has a few players who are skirting the line, perhaps returning to action a bit sooner than they would have if the grand slam schedule were different. With the fines in 2019, the ITF has made clear that they expect to see credible performances from all 256 main draw players. And with the prize money adjustment for 2020, the governing body has closed the door on five-figure paydays for players who shouldn’t have been on the entry list, even if they never take the court.
I promised to talk about doubles
The second section of the rulebook quoted above is a bit problematic, because I believe it is missing a key “not” in the opening sentence. Unless the ITF has some bizarre and unprecedented goals, the intention of the doubles regulations is to discourage singles players from retiring in doubles unless they are truly injured, and to prevent singles players from even entering doubles unless they plan to take it seriously.
Doubles prize money pales next to the singles pot, but even first-round losers in men’s and women’s doubles will take home $17,500 USD per team, or $8,750 per player. That’s enough to convince most singles players to enter if their ranking makes the cut, no matter how little they care about doubles during the 44 non-slam weeks of the year.
The majors determine which teams make the doubles cut the same way that ATP and WTA tour events do. Teams are ordered by their combined singles or doubles ranking. Each player can use whichever is better. The tours allow pros to use their singles rankings to encourage superstars to play doubles, and at events like Indian Wells, many big names do take part. At the slams, the bigger effect is on the next rung of singles players, giving us oddball doubles teams such as Mackenzie McDonald/Yoshihito Nishioka and Lukas Lacko/John Millman at the 2018 US Open.
As with other details of the entry process, most fans couldn’t care less. But they should. Whenever the rules let one team in, they leave another team out. By including more singles players in the doubles draw, the standard for full-time doubles players is made almost impossibly strict. An up-and-coming men’s singles player can crack the top 100–and gain admission to grand slam main draws–with a solid season on the challenger tour, but even the best challenger-level doubles teams are often left scrambling for partners whose singles rankings are sufficient to gain entry.
This year’s rulebook edit should help matters, at least a bit. (As long as someone inserts the missing “not,” anyway.) Grand slam doubles is not an exhibition, and it shouldn’t be contested by players who treat it that way. The ATP and WTA should follow suit, penalizing players who withdraw from doubles only to prove their health by continuing to play singles.
Incentives and intentions
These rule changes, while technical, are aimed at something rather simple: to ensure that the players who enter slam main draws–both singles are doubles–are healthy and motivated to play. The latest tweaks won’t close every loophole, and we can expect more disputes over issues like the Tatishvili and Tomic fines.
The bigger issue, complicated by the on-site withdrawal adjustment, is the underlying purpose of the rise in first-round loser prize money. The slams represent a huge proportion of the season-long prize pool, especially for players between approximately 50th and 110th in the ATP and WTA rankings. These competitors miss the cut for many of the most prestigious Masters and Premier tournaments. Even in later rounds, they are usually playing for four-figure stakes–if that. Four times a year, pros with double-digit rankings get a guaranteed cash infusion, and the potential for much more.
The presence of the four majors effectively funds the rest of the season for many players. The slams have upped first-round prize money–both nominally and relative to increases in later-round awards–partly in recognition of that fact. It is expensive to be a touring pro, and without paydays from the majors, it can easily be a money-losing endeavor.
Salary, not prize money
The majors rely on the less-lucrative tours for year-round publicity and a pool of highly-skilled players to drive fans and media attention to their mega-events. Much of the first-round loser prize money is in recognition of that fact. No one really thinks that the 87th-best player in the world deserves $63k just for showing up and giving Serena Williams a mild 59-minute workout. But does the 87th-best player in the world deserve to collect annual revenue of $250k–a figure that will largely go to cover travel, training, coaching, and equipment expenses? I think so, it appears that the slams think so, and I suspect you do, too.
So, when the ITF closes loopholes like these, keep in mind that they are operating within the silly $63k-per-hour framework, not the more reasonable $250k-per-season model. It is an important goal to ensure the integrity and quality of play at slams, but it ought to be paired with an effort to support tennis’s rank-and-file, even when those journeymen are injured.
A more sensible policy would be to separate much of the first-round loser prize pool from the literal act of playing a first round match. Perhaps the slams could each contribute $7.5 million each year–that’s $30k per singles player–to a general fund that would disburse annual grants to players ranked outside the top fifty, and lower every singles award by the same amount. (The details would be devilish, starting with these few parameters.) Such an approach would come out in the wash for most players, who would simply receive the extra $30k per slam in a different guise. But it would help injured players return to top form, and it would leave plenty of money for high-stakes combat at the sport’s biggest stages. Such a solution, of course, would require a lot more than a few minor edits to the rulebook.