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by Pete Bodo
Ahoy, mateys! By my calculations, we're only about eight months and a handful of days out from *Talk Like A Pirate*day. Just thought you needed to know that.
I just finished a new post for ESPN, taking my inspiration from last night's BCS championship game - or, to be more precise, from the controversy surrounding the outcome (a brouhaha that would have occurred no matter who won - if you don't know what I mean, check out this Rick Reilly column). My basic argument over at ESPN is that when you compare tennis to other sports, at both the institutional and individual (the players) level, it's a remarkably transparent and well-run enterprise with one perverse and interesting flaw, which I would describe broadly as a lack of self-confidence, or perhaps it's self-esteem.
That doesn't mean there aren't flaws in the system, or that it's the best possible system. But as we sometimes like to say here: the perfect is the enemy of the good. And the system by which the sprawling and de-centralized game of pro tennis, on either side of the gender fence, has been unified and organized is good.
Think about it for a moment. Half the nation (I'm talking about the U.S.) is in an uproar this morning (btw, this is not a one-off situation, but an annual event), or at least in the grip of conflicted feelings, about the credibility of the system by which the high-profile collegiate football establishment selects its national champion. The nakedly commercial motivations behind the BCS are not just detrimental to the game, their shortcomings are glaringly obvious. Hail, even President-elect Barack Obama has called for a playoff system to determine the national collegiate football champion (last time I checked, the system worked fine on the basketball side). But it hasn't happened, and doesn't seem about to happen.
What is tennis's equivalent to this controversy? I dunno. The legitimacy of Jelena Jankovic's no. 1 ranking? But on that issue, arguing against the legitimacy of Jankovic's status is less of a denial of the ranking's validity than a quasi-philosophical objection. After all, everyone had an equal opportunity to earn ranking points, and the only way to become no. 1 on Dec. 31st was to earn (let's repeat, earn) more points than the no. 2 player did. The useful comparison here would be to a college football team that, say, lost to one (or even two) of its traditional rivals, yet still survived a playoffs to emerge as national champion. It can happen. It has happened, and with some frequency, in the well-conceived and wildly popular NCAA national championship basketball tournament. Having a surprise winner might strike some as unsatisfying result, but the legitimacy of the achievement can't be challenged.
This, incidentally, touches on why the year-end championships are a minor disaster (and the operative word is "minor"). The year-end champion is nothing of the kind; he or she is the winner of his professional organizations biggest tournament. This is because the the ranking system itself takes precedence over the tournament, and that keeps the final ATP and WTA events from becoming anything like conclusive meetings that determine the world champion for the year.The players they feature earn X-number of points, the number carefully calibrated to realistically acknowledge the relative importance of the event. In this, the ATP and WTA have acted wisely, resisting (or being prevented from) doling out the number of points that would really make the YEC's the most important events in tennis.
