Tuesday, December 12, 2006

DW: Appearance money devalues sport

By Dave Winship
OnTheLine.org

It's not long ago that tennis was an elitist amateur game of starched white flannels and white balls and wooden racket presses. The notion of making money out of playing the game was anathema to the sport's governing bodies.

Today, the game has made great technological advances and is both accessible and attractive to a much wider player base. But the amount of money washing around at the top level of the game threatens to corrupt the motivation of players and turn away the fans.

No one would begrudge the world's best players the right to earn what their market value dictates, but there is an increasing perception that under-the-table appearance fees or guarantees are beginning to warp the integrity of sporting commitment. One of the main problems with such payments is that they are shrouded in secrecy. Lack of transparency invariably breeds distrust. People naturally become suspicious when rumours of six-figure appearance fees abound and a star player unexpectedly loses in the early rounds of a lesser event. When one of these stars pockets a huge fee at one of the minor tournaments and then pulls out of a Masters Series event the following week, citing exhaustion or injury, suspicion turns to outright cynicism.

The impenetrable wall that separated amateur and professional tennis players in the early part of the 20th century crumbled during the era of "shamateurism" in the 1950s and 60s when the top so-called amateurs received under-the-table payments of hundreds of dollars a week. Having belatedly got something so right with the advent of open tennis in 1968, tennis then contrived to get it all wrong again, ushering in a new era of deceit and hypocrisy in 1990 when the ATP Tour started encouraging tournament directors to wave the carrot of guaranteed fees on top of prize money. These guarantees often dwarf the amounts of prize money on offer and distort the economic realities of life on the men's tour. Although the WTA has steadfastly refused to sanction the practice, marquee attractions like Maria Sharapova get around it by signing up for extra promotional appearances.

Shortly after securing the appearance of Rafael Nadal at the Stella Artois Championships in 2007 and 2008, tournament director Ian Wight recently conceded:

We are killing our game. It is the economics of the madhouse that a player can receive more than three times the prize money not for winning a tournament but just for turning up.

ATP Chairman Etienne de Villiers is unmoved by such protestations. "It is impossible to stop the practice in the same way you can't stop people opening the fridge to see what's inside," he said. "We are introducing measures we hope will allow us to understand the practice better. Yes, we have to manage our tournaments better to improve the incentives and player commitment. Doing that, you will bring the situation involving guarantees back into some kind of equilibrium. What I must emphasise, though, is that this is not a huge crisis."

Personally, I think it would only take one episode of high-profile "tanking" to make this issue a crisis. The fridge should have a transparent door.

Tournament directors should come out in the open concerning appearance fees, so everyone is clear just what is guaranteed and what is actually at stake in any given competition. Better still, the practice of offering such payments should be outlawed altogether. After all, if tournament directors can afford to offer players vast guarantees, they can afford to increase the prize money instead.

Copyright 2006, Dave Winship -- all rights reserved worldwide

Dave Winship is an L.T.A. coach at the Caversham Park Tennis Club in Berkshire, England, and the author of OnTheLine.org magazine at www.tennisontheline.org.


Technorati Tags:

Labels:

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home