by Pete Bodo
It's as dismal here in New York as it appears to be in Madrid, and Paris seems no better off - thankfully, the French Open is still a few weeks out, so there's time for global warming to kick in and bathe the event in sunshine. The heat and humidity in Cincinnati, Toronto, and even New York (during the U.S. Open) can be close to intolerable during the North American hard-court season, but for pure buzz kill, I'll take a cold spring day in Europe any day. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like every time I've tuned into a match during the clay-court season so far, it's made me want to turn to a broadcast of beach volleyball, or a surfing competition. There sit our friends, in leather jackets right out of a Duran-Duran video, puffing on cigarettes and barely able to see through the lenses of their cool sunglasses.
To tell the truth, I haven't really been able to get into this edition of the European clay season, and I think it's for just that reason. At the end of the long, lingering winter in the northeastern U.S., I think of the upcoming spring clay tournaments as the first real strong blast of spring - or some Platonic notion of the season. Spring, of course, is not exclusively about sunny days, the twittering of recently arrived, nesting birds, the explosion of tulips and even the sublime (operative fragment: "lime") of that first of all blossoming plants in the river - bottom woods, the unfairly named skunk cabbage.
Spring is about chilly, damp, sometimes windy days, with alternating bouts of sunshine that trigger all the agreeable elements we associate with the season without providing comparable joys. So where's the sun? Maybe if you've been glued to the tube for the past few weeks, you can enlighten us. But so far for me, the tennis circuit this past month calls up adjectives like grim, chill, morose, glum. . . But at least we don't have somber Hamburg to have to watch anymore. If you ask me, they got out while the gettin' was good.
Meanwhile, I keep waiting for something/anything to happen in Madrid - at least on the men's side. The women's draw has already been decimated, and if you listen to our new podcast, you'll see why I describe the chaotic WTA situation in Madrid as, somehow, appropriate. Let's face it, Europeans, at least in the spring, seem really indifferent to women's tennis. The nominal women's "spring clay circuit" has been held together with spit and string, in an attempt to show the world a brave face. The disparity between the success and popularity of the ATP spring events the the WTA fixtures seems overwhelming. The reality is that Europeans like women's tennis at Grand Slam events, but their antipathy to all-women events is traditional, and it runs deep.
I'm open to having this interpretation challenged, or to rationalizations of the situation. But the bottom line seems to be that the WTA game is always on shaky ground in Europe, and that has repercussions. That's how I explain the rash of upsets we've seen on the clay. If you're, say, No. 20 in the world and bent on moving up, any tournament must be seen as a window of opportunity. But if you're, say, Serena Williams, do you really want to go all the way to Rome to go out on the court and have to play a match against said No. 20 with a few dozen spectators scattered through the empty stands (the photo with this post, btw, was snapped in Rome, during the quarterfinals)?
It's not a great situation, and what's worse, the high-water mark for promoting women's tennis and building the kinds of institutions/tournaments that fans will support for their own sake, or because of some sense of solidarity with what they appear to stand for, may be past. The women won the battle for equal prize money; in many ways, I think they won the battle for equality and respect in the U.S. and perhaps Canada. But in Europe, the women had fallen to sideshow status, which is what they had before Billie Jean King and company bolted to form the proto-WTA Tour. Now, they're propped up by the trend to combined events, or piggy-backed ones, but that's a far cry from providing equal or greater value.
Well, I took a break here to try to find the WTA match featuring Serena on television and struck out. It's just as well, she lost to Nadia Petrova. And that's another thing - does anyone else get the feeling that neither of the Williams sisters are nearly as big a draw in Europe as they are in the U.S.? But enough bad news. And what the heck, Venus Williams is still in the hunt in Madrid. I hope I get a chance to see her play.