The Citi That Never Sleeps

Cannot believe how late matches are ending in Washington, D.C. this week. I know the Citi Open isn’t part of the U.S. Open Series (why, exactly, I have no idea), but these endless non-epics sure make it feel like a practice run for evenings in Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Since all of these insomniac specials straddled two days, it’s easier just to say the calendar date they ended on, rather than the day of the week: On August 7, John Isner wrapped up his two-set win over Vasek Pospisil at 1:30 A.M. On August 6, Richard Gasquet and Gilles Muller concluded their match at 1:43 in the morning. And then there was Marin Cilic and Hyeon Chung, who on August 5 finished at the comically late hour of 2:27 A.M.

For hardcore tennis fans, night sessions like these are found money. But for the good of tennis, the optics are terrible. At those single-digit hours, the sparsely inhabited stands recall a teeming crowd at a junior varsity match. And who can blame the fans, many of whom had been baking in the mid-Atlantic heat all day, for calling it a night when they did? The wire services and local reporters will cover these post-midnight matches, of course, but it’s more likely that you’ll see coverage for all the wrong reasons on a site like Deadspin—if you can find anything at all.

And that’s not even the worst part: All of these matches were scheduled on the Citi Open’s center court with the seeming intent of using the marquee names involved to sell tickets and generate interest. Cilic is the U.S. Open champion, and Isner vs. Pospisil would have been an interesting semifinal or final for an ATP 500.

Again, I commend everyone who worked through these graveyard shifts, alongside the players, in order to present these matches. In particular, I applaud Tennis Channel, which has set up shop in D.C. since Monday to broadcast both the men’s and women’s events, plus doubles. But these way-past-prime-time tussles can’t be helping them out. Television drives sports, not the other way around, but this is one of the few occasions in which I feel sorry for the network.

There are a number of reasons why matches run long in tennis, some controllable (scheduling; time enforcement on the court), others uncontrollable (weather; how many sets each match lasts). It’s hard to point the finger at any one reason as the driving problem, however, since solutions often come at a high cost. Not every event can have a roofed court, and tournament directors must strike a delicate balance that suits players, sponsors, fans, and stakeholders.

These past few nights at the Citi Open touch upon a larger issue in tennis: The sport takes a long time to play at the professional level. Between warm-ups, various stoppages and time-outs, commercials, and a lot of shots hit between two players who are often near the same skill level, three-set matches on both tours regularly finish around the two-hour mark. That may not seem like a lot for one match, but when you consider how many matches a tournament must complete per day to keep on schedule, it only takes one long exception, or something out of the event’s control—like a rain delay—to really throw things into chaos.

My friend Tom Perrotta’s recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, “Is It Finally Time to Tinker With Tennis?”, raises some of these points and reported concerns about the pace of play from tennis officials including Tennis Australia CEO Craig Tiley, USTA spokesman Chris Widmaier, and ATP president Chris Kermode. The story also highlighted a quicker variation of tennis, called Fast4, where sets are played to four games, games are played with No-Ad scoring, and points are played without service lets. No one is championing Fast4 as the solution tennis needs, but it seems that at some point, much like Jimmy Van Alen’s transformational tiebreaker, a change will be made to speed up the game.

Fast4 is a bit too fast for me—eliminating lets adds too much random luck to points, and first-to-four-game sets are too small a sample size to determine the better player. But I love one thing about the Fast4 concept: No-Ad scoring. It ends games one point after Deuce, and is already used in pro doubles. One of the greatest doubles players ever, Daniel Nestor, believes that it should be universal. “I would immediately change tennis to No-Ad scoring, all the way across, singles and doubles,” said Nestor, who at 42 is playing in his third decade on tour. “When you get the same rally over and over again, 200 times in a match, I think it can be a little bit boring.”

Even the most ardent Novak Djokovic fan would have a hard time disputing Nestor’s perspective on where the game is today. I would make one revision, though: The server should choose which half of the court to serve to on the deciding point, instead of the receiver. This alteration would give the server an advantage, but that makes up for the inherent advantage lost in eliminating long deuce games.

This gradual change would make a sizable difference overall: All of the incremental time saved by implementing No-Ad scoring—at minimum, one point from each game that reaches deuce—will make a day of tennis, a full meal as it is, much more palatable. And perhaps as important, this change doesn’t leave room for ambiguity. We’ve seen what has happened with the well-intentioned time violation rule: Every umpire has a different interpretation of it, and it’s not enforced consistently, from match to match or player to player. There’s no grey area with No-Ad scoring.

With over 100 tournaments between both tours, testing No-Ad scoring at a few of them couldn’t hurt, and it could lead to a revelation about how tennis should be played in the pros. I, for one, would be very curious to see the difference in total match time between this year’s Citi Open and next year’s event, should D.C.’s tennis fans want to catch the Metro before it closes at midnight.