It’s amazing what a few people in the stands will do, isn’t it? Fill the seats up with civilized, attentive fans, and you’ve got yourself a tournament worthy of being called a season-ending championship, whatever may happen on the court. Or at least that’s the way it's felt for the first two days—has it really been only two days? we’ve seen a lot of tennis—of the WTA’s eight-woman year-ender in Istanbul.
Has a new tennis hotbed been born? It may have something to do with the ticket prices, which are about as much as you’d pay for a movie in the United States. But however those 21,000 people got there on Tuesday and Wednesday, the crowds in the arena alone have made this the most enjoyable WTA Championships to watch on TV that I can remember. The one slip-up has been the bright green court color, which makes it harder than it should be to see the ball on television. The reason for it—bright green is the corporate color of tournament sponsor Oriflame, a Swedish cosmetics company—only makes it worse.
With a squint here or there, I’ve been seeing the ball fine, and seeing most of the action so far—you can find four of my Racquet Reactions here and a piece on the tournament I did for ESPN.com here. Now for some other thoughts about it that haven’t made it to print, or screen.
I wrote earlier this year about the circular, never-get-anywhere nature of tennis news. In this sport, the news is rarely new; it just happens to get talked about again at each big event and then forgotten until the next one, when we realize that nothing was done about it the last time around. Istanbul has been no different. Two eternal issues in particular have made headlines—or, if not actual headlines, at least they've made it to the Ticker on Tennis.com.
The first and lesser of the two has been some chatter about the WTA wanting to hold a dual season-ending championship with the men. It’s certainly been chatted about before; the last WTA chief, Larry Scott, quit after trying and failing to bring the two tours under one roof. It's also an odd time to be talking about changes. The men’s World Tour Finals has been a major success in London the last two years, and it appears that the women, after wandering the earth for a decade, have found a home in Istanbul.
The more prominent, if no less tired, issue is grunting. It’s back again primarily because world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki has made her strongest statement against it yet, accusing some women of using their moans and shrieks to distract opponents. More important long-term, though, is the fact that WTA head Stacey Allaster has acknowledged the problem and begun talking about rooting it out at its source, in the juniors. I’ll reiterate my own opinion here: Typically a grunting player will bother me for a game or two, and then I won’t notice it anymore. The non-grunting women don’t seem to like it, but they do get on with playing the game anyway and don’t use it as an excuse for losing afterward. I also don’t believe that grunting players intentionally do it to distract; on the other hand, I also think they could, with a little practice, stop doing it and not hurt their games.
Nevertheless, something needs to be done, simply because so many fans are put off by it. Rooting it out in the juniors, while the right long-term solution, isn’t going to change anything in the next two or three years. Can decibels be measured during matches and fines assessed afterward? That would get the job done considerably faster.
There you go. I eagerly await having this discussion again in Melbourne in January. And in Paris in May. And in London in . . .
One perennial WTA issue hasn’t been raised this time around: coaching. Has the tour's long-running “experiment” with it been accepted as part of the sport? That’s fine with me if it has.
What’s interesting, if we are going to accept coaching, are the variety of effects it can have on a match. Petra Kvitova was broken in her first two service games by Vera Zvonareva on Tuesday. She called her coach out and didn’t lose serve again until late in the second set. At the opposite end of that spectrum was the case of Li Na yesterday. She called on her husband-coach after being broken, but, smart man, he refused. Looking, and playing, a little ticked off, Li smacked two disdainful return winners and broke back. There are many ways to coach tennis, it seems.
Sam Stosur’s coach doesn’t believe in coming on court, because he can’t do that at the Grand Slams. His approach seemed to have been vindicated when Stosur won the U.S. Open. Except that the Wimbledon winner this year was Kvitova. She has obviously benefited from on-court advice here, but had no trouble going without it on Centre Court.
The most famous or notorious on-court coacher is Wozniacki’s father, Piotr, who conducts a long and agitated soliloquy in front of his daughter in the middle of each set. Without understanding a word of what he’s saying, it seems to me that he’s there to make her feel his agitated competitive urgency when she walks back on court. In some ways, it works—Wozniacki is a gritty competitor, and she gutted out a three-set win in her first match. In other ways, though, it must help wear her down. That’s how she looked by the end of her second match, which she lost, and how she's looked for much of the second half of the season.
One final issue that's typically raised in women’s tennis is the inability of many of them to hold serve consistently. This was the case in the match between Maria Sharapova and Li Na, who essentially broke their way to a first-set tiebreaker yesterday. It’s a given in the sport that numerous breaks of serve in a row are an indication of “bad tennis.” And Sharapova and Li did play their share of that. But they also made it difficult on each other by playing so well in their return games. Sharapova drilled her returns at Li’s feet, while Li roped hers into the corners. Those shots were as impressive and entertaining—and as “good”—and any service aces and service holds would have been.
With that, I see that the third day from Istanbul is about to begin. I’ll be back to Racquet React after the second and third matches.