INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Have we reached a new stage in the Rafael Nadal-Roger Federer rivalry in 2012? If we have, it’s an unexpected one. It seems that as their mutual respect has grown over the years, so has their willingness to take the occasional public shot at the other. In January, Nadal called out Federer for not doing enough in his role on the ATP council to address player concerns, letting everyone else “burn” while he came off as the spotless gentleman. This week Federer returned the favor by mentioning Nadal by name as one of the players guilty of taking too long between points.
“I don’t know how you can go through a four-hour match with Rafa,” Federer said, “and him never getting a time violation.”
So, the truth is coming out at last. This is a healthy new stage in their relationship, I’d say, even if they haven’t brought themselves to talk trash face to face—maybe (hopefully?) they’ll get into it on court one of these days. Why not? Federer, in his confrontational old age, also mused recently that Hawk-Eye has robbed the sport of some of its rage, and thus its entertainment value.
The bigger issue at the moment, though, is the delay-of-game question. Nadal answered Federer by essentially arguing for discretion from the chair umpires. “The rules are there,” Nadal said, referring to his supersized Australian Open final with Novak Djokovic, “but you cannot expect to play a six-hour match, play rallies of crazy points, and rest 20 seconds.”
All of the time talk has led, naturally, to talk of a shot clock. If the chair umpires can’t enforce the rules, let a machine do it. A shot clock was used at a tournament in Australia close to two decades ago. Even with the volatile, and often plodding, John McEnroe involved, it reportedly went off without a hitch.
Should it be tried again? Slow play bothers me more than shrieking; you don’t notice how much more enjoyable a match played at a brisk pace is until you see two guys move from one serve to the next with dispatch. And while Nadal has a point that 20 seconds can be a little unreasonable late in a “crazy” Grand Slam final, the time he takes is often strategic. If he loses a point, he inevitably goes to the towel and takes extra seconds, not to throw off his opponents so much as to gather himself. It’s a smart play, and controlling the pace of a match is obviously something he was taught to do from his earliest days on court. It’s up to the umpire to make sure he doesn’t take too much time while he’s doing it.
That’s how it should stay. A shot clock, which would be an effective final arbiter in theory, is too rigid for tennis. If it has the final say—and why would you bring it in if it doesn’t—it’s easy to imagine a situation where, say, a ball kid mishandles a ball or a player bobbles it, he sees the clock running down, and rushes himself into a missed serve. It’s also easy to imagine the buzzer sounding and a player pleading with the umpire to overrule the machine’s decision due to extenuating circumstances—what will constitute extenuating, and what won’t? At this point, the tour doesn’t see the problem as widespread enough to warrant such a major change in administering the rules, and in that sense the tour is right.
Where the tour and the game’s umpires are wrong is in allowing Nadal and Novak Djokovic to add approximately 70 minutes to their Grand Slam final due to slow play. If you don't rein them in, how do you justify reining players ranked below them if they start to go over the line? Nadal is correct; there needs to be umpire discretion after a long point, and deep in a fifth set the extra time taken can even add drama. If anything, though, chair umpire Pascal Maria exercised too much discretion that night in Melbourne. The pace was deliberate from the start, but Maria didn’t warn both players until late in the second set. These guys’ matches are now the marquee events in the game, the ones seen by the widest audiences. There’s no reason to make them harder for the casual fan to sit down and take in.
What to do? You could make a case that the Grand Slams should bow to the style of the times, join the rest of the tour, and make it 25 seconds, rather than 20, that are allowed between points. But that might just encourage the dilatory to take a little more time while they're at it. The rules, as Nadal says, are fine as they are, they just need intelligently assertive enforcement. That means not waiting, as is often the case, until a crucial point to give a warning. Obviously, a player will take more time in those situations—Djokovic typically adds half a dozen bounces to his routine—and he shouldn’t be rattled by the umpire as he’s about to serve. The answer is for the umpire to find a time earlier in the set to impose himself and set a tone for the rest of the day.
Or, if that fails in a Federer-Nadal match, we could just have have them duke it out once and for all.
We don’t want our Grand Slam finals to take an hour longer than they need to. But we also don't need them to be decided by a buzzer.