Tennis authorities are looking at ways of improving the game Jon Henderson How’s this for a scoreline: Tim Henman beat Fernando Vicente 4-2 5-3 5-4? It may look a little cock-eyed, but it is the score by which Henman would have defeated the Spaniard in the first round of the United States Open – rather than his actual winning margin of 6-3 6-3 6-4 – under a new, shorter sets format. The more attentive will have noticed that the format is already in use. Buried deep in the results columns of sports pages, where only anoraks with the sharpest eyesight roam, these scorelines have started to appear with too great a regu- larity for them to be misprints. In last month’s Futures tournament, for example, Britain’s Lee Childs went down in the semifinals to Australian Paul Baccanello 4- 1 4-5 4-1 1-4 5-3. Support for experimenting with changes to the scoring system at a limited number of minor tournaments, as part of a broader initiative to improve the game’s appeal, comes from the top. Francesco Ricci Bitti, the Italian president of the International Tennis Federation (ITF), says that although “our game is very attractive, something has to be done. Many other sports have made changes and we should do something. “On the one hand, we have to be conservative, because we have to serve the integrity of the game,” Ricci Bitti believes, “but we also have to be very open-minded if we are to push forward the game’s evolution.” Ricci Bitti says the thinking behind the specific measure of all matches being decided by the best of five, abbreviated sets – that is, a set being won by the first player to win four games (or lead 5-3 or win a tiebreak at 4-4) – is that “the attention of the audience is dramatically going down during the set. Having shorter sets means that there are more frequent exciting moments.” The ITF president reckons an even bigger problem for tennis as a fan-friendly sport is the new technology, which has transformed tennis without the accompanying negative aspects being addressed. “The racquet has changed the game more than anything else and there has been no compensation,” he says. “At Wimbledon, for example, the men’s game has become faster and faster. And at the French Open the rallies have become longer because of the new racquets’ greater control.” Two possible solutions for reducing the speed of the professional game that Ricci Bitti thinks are worth considering are a bigger ball and the abolition of the second serve to make it more difficult for the speed merchants to impose themselves on more skilful opponents. The prospect of any of these changes finally being enshrined in the game’s rulebook has been made more likely by the new spirit of cooperation existing between its various governing bodies. The ITF long ago lost its position as the sole international authority with the men’s tour being run by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and the women’s by the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), and the atmosphere among the three often being colder than a tundra blast. Now, though, the three bodies are working more closely together than ever before with the ITF recognised by the other two as the lead organisation with regard to rules of the game. “It doesn’t mean we can touch the rules without consulting,” says Ricci Bitti, “but we are the reference for the ATP and WTA.” There are those who reckon that if the shorter sets experiment, in which all three organisations are taking part, is the best this collaboration can manage then the game may be served better by the old discord.
@Hewitt faces Sampras Stephen Bierley The eagerness with which the ATP Tour, to say nothing of the sponsors and marketing men, is waiting for one of the new guns to break into the big time borders on the frantic. To its delight Australia’s 19- year-old Lleyton Hewitt, the winner of four tournaments this year, reached his first grand slam semi- final yesterday with a pulverising straight-sets victory over Arnaud Cl’ment, the man who knocked out Andre Agassi, the top seed, in the second round.
Before this US Open Hewitt had never progressed beyond the last 16 of a slam tournament but after an impressive fourth- round victory over Thomas Enqvist he ripped into Cl’ment with typical zest and energy, and the highly gifted but frequently nervous Cl’ment could not cope with the unbending intensity. Hewitt won 6-2 6-4 6-3 but then had to wait late into the evening to find out he would be playing Pete Sampras, who beat Richard Krajicek, in Saturday’s semifinals. The Australian teenager defeated Sampras in this year’s Stella Artois final at Queen’s but then lost to Jan-Michael Gambill in the first round at Wimbledon. Todd Martin, henceforth known as the comeback kid, staged another fightback from two sets down to defeat Carlos Moya 6-7 6-7 6-1 7-6 6-2 in more than four hours. Martin is not known for his animated approach to tennis, being the reserved, deep-thinking, dignified type, but there were high fives all round after this victory, which earned him a quarterfinal match with Thomas Johansson of Sweden. The match finished deep into the New York night and Martin had to go on an intravenous drip afterwards. In the women’s draw, defending champion Serena Williams lost to American Lindsay Davenport 4-6 2-6 in the quarterfinals, while Martina Hingis defeated Monica Seles 6-0 7-5 to set up a repeat of last year’s semifinal against Venus Williams, which Hingis won before losing to Serena Williams in the final. Elena Dementieva became the first woman to reach the last four with a 6-1 3-6 6-3 win over the number 10 seed, Anke Huber. l Agassi, the Olympic champion, has withdrawn from the games in Sydney. He was beaten in the second round at the US Open last week after revealing that his mother, Elizabeth, and his sister, Tammee, were both suffering from breast cancer.