Keeping Tabs: Oct. 2

The big news of the day is that Rafael Nadal is tentatively scheduled to play the Abu Dhabi exhibition beginning on December 27th. It will be the first time we’ve seen the 11-time Slam winner since June, when he was having the door slammed on him at Wimbledon by Lukas Rosol. I was reminded of what we’ve been missing without Rafa when I read, in an interview he did recently with the Daily Mail, his opinion on building more hard courts.

“Hard courts are very negative for the body,” Nadal said. “I know the sport is a business and creating these courts is easier than clay or grass, but I am 100 percent sure it is wrong.”

“I am 100 percent sure it is wrong”: Welcome back, Rafa. No one else in tennis talks quite like that, do they?

Here’s what else we’ve found out in the tennis press recently. It’s a usual suspects list of issues.

You Don’t Say

Simon Cambers of the Tennis Spaceinterviews the tight-lipped head of the ITF’s anti-doping program, Dr. Stuart Miller. While Miller keeps up his tradition of not revealing much, he does say that, while there’s no penalty at the moment for associating with a person who has been banned—in this case, Lance Armstrong’s doctor, Luis Garcia del Moral—there is a proposal to make it a violation in the next WADA code.

Dr. Miller says of the Serena Williams “panic room” incident from last year, “There’s another aspect to that, which is the anti-doping programme’s side, which unfortunately I can’t talk about.”

On the question of the ITF’s published testing statistics, he says that the numbers listed don’t include tests that WADA, or a country’s own anti-doping agency, might have administered on a player. Why can’t we get all of them listed together? Miller says that’s WADA’s job. That sounds like another proposal for the next WADA code to me. Right now, despite the stats we have, we still don’t know exactly when or how often tennis players are being tested.

Blasts from the Beeb

We, or at least I, don’t often hear from Wimbledon’s main broadcaster, the BBC, about what it would like to see more of—and hear less of—in tennis. So Danielle Rossingh’s recent interview for Bloomberg with Barbara Slater, director of BBC Sport, was an interesting one.

Slater claimed that the channel would love to see more night matches on Centre Court. “We have conversations with the All England Club,” she said, “and they evolve their strategy going forward.”

So far the AELTC has no plans to evolve. “We stick to what we are,” said club spokesman Johnny Perkins, “an outdoor daytime event with the capacity to play late if we need to.”

We’ll see who holds the whip hand in that relationship in coming years.

Slater also lashed out, BBC-style, at the women for grunting. “It’s a shame,” she raged. “Some of our audience clearly don’t like that.”

Maria the...Anti-Grunter?

Maria Sharapova has told Reuters that she’s in favor of the WTA’s plans to stop grunting—once she’s retired.

“I started grunting since whenever I can remember,” Sharapova said. “When you start something from a young age, it’s a habit. The WTA created a plan. That’s the smart way to go about it, rather than like taking someone’s forehand grip in the middle of her career and telling them to change it.”

Sharapova seems to believe her grunt is as fundamental to game as her grip, though she can practice without shrieking. It’s a habit, as she says, but it’s one that I think she, as well as Victoria Azarenka and the tour’s other deci-belles, could break. One positive, I guess, about the WTA’s plan is that now we know Sharapova’s shriek isn’t going anywhere.

31 Million Reasons to Come to Australia

This week the Australian Open announced that, in response to player demands and the threat of a boycott, it will up its total prize money for the 2013 event to $31 million, making it the richest in the sport’s history. Tournament director Craig Tiley says he believes the boycott has been averted, and that he’ll meet with the Players’ Council next week in Shanghai to talk about where the money will go.

“[The rise] could be anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent in some of the rounds,” Tiley said. “We’d be looking to buoy up the first round, but particularly the second, third, and fourth rounds. That’s been the players’ beef, and we’ll address that.”

It’s hard to see a negative here, provided the players accept the increase. Hopefully Tiley is meeting with WTA representatives as well. Has the rising tide at the top of the men’s game lifted all—or at least a lot—of boats? After securing mid-level prize money increases at four straight Slams, it would seem that way. It would also seem to be the consequence of having not just a top tier with leverage, but one that has been directly involved with council matters and making changes to the sport.

Faster Faster Pussycats

So far today we’ve been through doping, shrieking, and revenue sharing. What’s left on the tennis agenda? That’s right, slow play. The ATP recently announced one rule change, and one rule experiment, designed to address this issue. From now on, chair umpires will call able to call a fault, rather having to dock the player a point, on his second time violation. And at the Challenger level, service lets will be eliminated in a test run.

The fault call sounds like a good idea, though I think instructing umpires to begin warning notorious plodders immediately, or even before a match begins, is still essential. As for playing service lets, this won’t do much for slow play, but it will increase the amount of luck involved in any match. One other reason for doing it is that many players don’t trust the machine that calls service lets; this would take that out of it. Still, I don’t think this is a rule worth changing. It is true that World Team Tennis has made the change, in part because Billie Jean King couldn't see why there should be different rules for serves and ground strokes. Fair enough, though if we're going to follow WTT's lead on rule changes, we've got a long way to go. No reason, to my mind, to start now.