Blown Calls, Big Fines: Tension grows between players and officials

WATCH: A doubles team is DQ'd at Roland Garros for inadvertently striking a ball girl with a ball

At the Madrid Masters in May, an ATP pro is fined more than he has earned all year after dropping a ball from his pocket during the point, allegedly to cause a point replay. At Roland Garros, a puzzling foot-fault call, an unusual application of the “hindrance” rule, a double-bounce controversy and calls for more relaxed rules regarding player behavior—including one from a top WTA star and model of good sportsmanship—spiced up the first week of play. The incidents also led to voluble calls for greater accountability for officials.

Some of the themes percolating in those examples came to a head in the headline-generating outcry triggered by the default of Miyu Kato’s doubles team. Kato and partner Aldila Sutjiadi were banished after a freak incident in which Kato inadvertently struck a ball girl with a ball. Kato thus forfeited the prize money (roughly $23,000) and the rankings points she had earned in doubles up to that point (she is appealing the forfeitures). Sutjiadi was allowed, in line with the rules, to keep her second-round prize money and rankings points.

The consensus public opinion was that Roland Garros tournament referee Remy Azemar and Grand Slam supervisor Wayne McEwen made a poor judgment call in defaulting Kato. Owning the mistake, the tournament allowed her to continue playing the tournament’s mixed doubles event. In a welcome outcome, Kato and mixed partner Tim Puetz ended up winning.

The incidents are all different, but each in its own way underscores the way players are caught between a rock and a hard place. They’re under pressure to follow the letter of the law, yet they have no recourse when an official makes a poor or just plain wrong decision. British player Dan Evans was the victim of a dodgy, momentum-altering foot-fault call during his first-round loss to Thanasi Kokkinakis at Roland Garros, after which he was hit with a code violation for taking a swipe at a water bottle.

“Yeah, it's frustrating,” Evans said later. “Breaking a water bottle is not that big of a deal—but I guess it is in this environment.”

Adding insult to injury, even as fines for code violations and other curbs on freedom of expression have increased, rules pertaining to behaviors that once were unheard of—injury timeouts, bathroom breaks, on-court massages, trainer visits and wardrobe replenishment time-outs—have been institutionalized and often are, unlike code violations and the fines that accompany them, applied with flexibility.

The whopping $155,000 fine levied against Hugo Gaston for unsportsmanlike conduct following the incident in Madrid raised a red flag with other players. (At Roland Garros, Gaston himself denied that he had intentionally dropped a ball, claiming it fell out by mistake.) Although the fine was later reduced by roughly half, his peers were stunned.

“I don’t understand the system,” Gaston’s compatriot Benoit Paire said in Paris. “It's a shame. I think that we need to find a system because even for Challenger (events), the fines are really high. He took [a fine of] 20,000 (Euros) at the beginning of the year as a Challenger, and now he has a 140,000 (Euro) fine. It makes me laugh, but it’s sad. It’s a lot of money. That’s an apartment—that’s what’s crazy.”

Lucas Pouille, another French player who rallied to Gaston’s defense, also saw the hefty fine, and the general power of officials, as galling overreach.

“The umpire can make a mistake. It’s human. It’s normal, but I’m not sure she’s going to take a $15,000 hit for that.”

The sense among some players is that they are paying non-negotiable, escalating prices (call it inflation) for expressing their emotions, while officials make mistakes, show questionable judgment, lack flexibility and sometimes insert themselves in the flow of play in a way that affects the outcome of a match. Lower-ranked players are hit especially hard by fines that a Novak Djokovic might scoff at.

“If he [the chair umpire] makes a decision wrong, there’s no consequences,” Cam Norrie said. “For me, if I do something wrong, there’s consequences. I can lose the match.”

Norrie spoke after his successful first-round battle with Paire, during which Norrie was slapped with a code violation (under the “hindrance” rule) for grunting in a way that displeased the official, if not Paire. The Frenchman was no less baffled than Norrie by the code violation, which immediately resulted in a service break for Paire—and a significant albeit temporary shift in momentum.

Norrie’s pal Evans wasn’t so lucky. He said he was “right into” an entertaining struggle with Kokkinakis when he became discombobulated by a dodgy foot-fault call that wrecked his focus. While he did not blame his loss on the call, he later complained that the call came out of the blue from an official poorly situated to make it.

“If they’re going to call that foot fault, it shouldn’t be from 35 meters away, from fence to fence through a net,” said Evans, who added, “[Sure it was] disruptive, wrong and a few other things. . . They (officials) are getting involved, and they’re good at it. They get involved (in the action) plenty.”

Smashing a water bottle, as Evans did soon thereafter, automatically triggered a code violation call. But did it really have to be issued?

“I don't know,” Pouille said. “If you miss a forehand at 30-all in the fifth, after four hours of play, and you don’t control (yourself) and break your racquet, is it worth, like 15,000 [Euros]? I’m not sure.”

Pouille fell back on a word heard frequently in conversations about player behavior when he said that tennis players should not be expected to behave like “robots.” He also suggested that officials have been getting in the habit of doling out violations and fines as if they were “Christmas presents.”

The umpire can make a mistake. It’s human. It’s normal, but I’m not sure she’s going to take a $15,000 hit for that. Lucas Pouille

That’s a painful one-two punch for many players who already feel squeezed by the code of conduct. One of the more unlikely critics of the code of conduct is the WTA’s popular—and well-behaved—star, Jessica Pegula. The daughter of Buffalo Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula, Jessica has spent a lot of time around NFL players. That sheds light on her desire to see the game made safe for “trash talking.”

“We always get punished for showing any kind of negative emotion, but I feel like that's such a big part of it [the game],” Pegula said, “If the code of conduct wasn’t as strict you would be free to do more of what I was saying, show your personality more, whether it’s positive or negative. I think it would be more fun.”

For now, though, the players will have to keep a stiff upper lip, pay their fines for code violations, and content themselves with having earned the right to bathroom breaks—a luxury that players of yore did not even contemplate. When Yannick Noah, who was celebrating the 40th anniversary of his sensational win at Roland Garros this year, was asked how he thinks the game has changed since his heyday in the mid-1980s, he replied:

“I think tennis players have smaller bladders now. I don't see any other reason. I’m talking about the juniors until the seniors. I never had that. You just actually peed before the match and that was it. I never saw anyone wanting to pee during the match.”

Tour officials made fairly heavy-handed but empathetic changes in the rules to accommodate players’ physical needs. Perhaps it’s time to look at the pros’ emotional needs and make some in the code of conduct as well.