Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Indian Wells

The Pacific Life Open at Indian Wells, California (near Palm Springs) is an ATP Masters Series and Sony Ericsson WTA Tier 1 tour event.


It is the 5th largest event in attendance next to the four Grand Slam tournaments.

Men's qualifying finishes today, and women's action begins. The tournament runs to March 18.

Draws (PDF):
Men's Singles
Women's Singles
Women's Doubles

This is a major event, one that takes a back seat only to the four "majors" - the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. But the women's tour doesn't require players to enter a "masters" series of such prestigious events. So all the top 30 men are playing at Indian Wells, but only two of the top five women are.

The WTA lets its players refuse to play in these major events, thus allowing other upstart tournaments to bribe top players away with huge purses, like Doha and Dubai have done.

My, how international, how good for tennis...which rides on the back of the American market.

Whether Americans are at the top of the game or not. (Compare the ATP profits from Germany when Boris Becker was playing to what they are now.)

You can see where this policy will lead - to chaos. Instead of a stable backbone of tournaments that perennially bring in money from an audience that is there even when the top players are not from the home country, we will have constantly undercutting competition for the top players by here-today/gone-tomorrow operations.

No it's not good for tennis. It's good for current players who want to cash in on a fast buck and for companies who couldn't care less about the future of tennis, companies who just want a foot in the door of foreign markets for their advertising campaigns.

Venus and Serena Williams boycott the tournament because of an ugly incident they were involved in there a few years ago. That, I understand, though what they did to precipitate it - defaulting a late-round match against your sister - was wrong and proves there is something wrong with their attitude toward their opponents. It's a game - SPORTING competetition - not a war, so you should be able to play it against your sister without any breech of faith.

But Belgium's Justine Henin has no excuse other than greed. God knows why France's Amelie Mauresmo isn't in the United States today. Or Belgium's Kim Clijsters.


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2 Comments:

At 10:54 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

god knows why? both amelie and kim have their own valid reasons. only henin doesnt, because she tired herself out in the appearance-fee laden middle east

 
At 11:25 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

amelie has played the event twice and had to retire with injury both times, so she has no points to defend.

clijsters is about to walk the long mile, so she could care less.

agreed with anon re henin's pocket lining. plus, she's only 33 points from taking over sharapova's #1 spot and if maria doesn't make the semis at IW, then henin gets it. she's probably banking on getting it back in Paris anyway.

-- god, who knows why :)

 

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