Friday, November 9
Last updated at 12:05 am EDT
BRITISH PRESS
Integrity at risk as game’s dirty secrets start to rise to surface - Neil Harman, The Times
One recalls a German television investigation in 2005, when an unnamed professional player (they are always unnamed, it seems) was quoted as saying: “You go online, see your name [on a tournament website], you know that you’ll not be able to play at 100 per cent or you have an appointment during the next few days somewhere else. And then you start thinking if it is really worth it [trying to win]. And if it’s not worth it, you take the money [to throw a match]. If it is worth it, you try to play.” No anticorruption unit in the world can alter that kind of mentality. What tennis can do is limit the opportunities for cheats to prosper and then impose heavy, career-threatening sanctions against anyone caught in such an unprofessional act....Yet it is worth recalling that it is only four months ago that we were cherishing the finest Wimbledon men’s singles final for 20 years, between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, the best role models a sport could wish for.
Bear in mind, too, the fourth-round match between Nadal and Andy Murray at this year’s Australian Open, which raised British expectations that the Scot could soon win a major championship; the two finals in Miami, Florida, where Serena Williams recovered from losing the first set 6-0 to Justine Henin to take the women’s title the day before Novak Djokovic, of Serbia, announced his arrival as a big-time champion; James Blake and Fabrice Santoro playing sublime tennis long into the night in the second round of the US Open in New York; David Nalbandian slicing through back-to-back Masters Series tournaments in Madrid and Paris; the devotional to Tim Henman.
Sharapova, who said this week that on-court coaching can “screw up your mind” despite requesting frequent tête-à-tête with Michael Joyce, her coach, needed no outside input yesterday because she produced a nononsense performance to beat Ana Ivanovic, thereby avoiding a semi-final with Justine Henin.
Immenga, from the Frankfurt firm Bird & Bird, said he had written to Gayle Bradshaw, the ATP official in charge of rules, calling on him to punish the two umpires. "I was extremely shocked by what happened in St Petersburg and Paris. It was unbelievable what the umpires seemed to have said to my client. It seems they were saying stuff like, 'Serve like me' and 'You're trying to lose'."I have written to the ATP requesting that they fine the umpires for those comments. I also want the ATP to remove the umpires.["]
["]Nikolay is a modest, fun young guy, and one of the nicest guys I have ever met, but he is showing the classic signs of depression. He is mentally burnt out because of the investigation by the ATP. You can see that on the court - that he has been affected by this. This has been extremely hard for him mentally.
"I believe that he is being victimised by the ATP. The ATP are conducting a witch-hunt against him," said Immenga, who suggested that the controversy had caused a number of potential sponsors to pull out of negotiations with Davydenko, probably costing the player millions of pounds in lost earnings..."Their Wild West lawyers from America tried to enforce interviews with Nikolay without letting him have appropriate legal representation. Can you believe that? They have had the details of the people with betting accounts for several months, but haven't done, or come up with, anything," Immenga said.
"Then they asked for Nikolay's phone records, but giving the ATP his phone records would violate his rights and also the rights of those around him. I want the ATP to finish the investigation by Dec 31, and then I want them to put out a statement saying they investigated him and couldn't find anything, that he is innocent."
On the other hand, perhaps it's all true. This wouldn't be that much of a surprise. The notion of tennis as a beige kind of sport played by essentially mute people in baseball caps is a fairly recent confection. This is after all the country house pursuit of the British empire and the French royal court, a game steeped in bluff, power-play, institutionalised violence and jolly decent chaps in flannel bags with mean, twitchy moustaches, recently discharged from bashing up jolly old Bechuanaland and ready to deliver a vaguely homoerotic thrashing to anybody showing signs of delay in proposing marriage to their dear sister Millicent.For decades tennis was one of the hammers with which the British class system was ruthlessly maintained. What more visible statement of feudal power than a slightly squiffy afternoon foursome on a manicured camomile terrace maintained by an entire division of penniless estate tenants? In this context the current trio of allegations against the professional game reads like nothing more than letting the vicar win after a few sweet sherries, having feasted on rather too many of cook's devilled kidneys at luncheon.
Tennis has always had a shady side; as the poet John Betjeman wrote in its most famous ode: "Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn/I think I'm going to poison you/And then score some coke/from a Russian bloke".
AMERICAN PRESS
Patrick McEnroe says he won't be poisoning the Russians this month when they arrive in Portland to face the U.S. in the Davis Cup final."It's not in my playbook," McEnroe said Thursday.
...Figure skating thrived off Harding's naughty exploits for years. "I don't know if it's good or bad," McEnroe said. "Is this what it takes to get tennis covered?"
AUSTRALIAN PRESS
However — and, again, regardless of whether Hingis took cocaine or not — such arrogant disdain towards those employed to keep her sport clean is intolerable. Not just because it betrays a selfish, infantile mind. But because there will be many fans of the once brilliant Hingis who find it more convenient to believe she is the victim of a scurrilous witch hunt than to accept that the drug testers whose positive A- and B-samples have "reduced" Hingis to coming up with a reasonable defence simply are doing their job.Until recently, I was one of those who wondered if testing for recreational drugs — as opposed to performance-enhancing drugs — was part of a populist moral crusade. Who thought that, as one columnist argued in the case of Ben Cousins, athletes were merely "convenient targets for displays of public righteousness"...But no matter how sympathetic you are towards Cousins the man, his troubles have been illuminating to we fogeys who equate recreational drug use to the occasional tug on the joint passed around at a backyard barbecue... It has given us a greater appreciation of the need for recreational drug testing, even if the sanctimony of the anti-drug lobby can make you cringe. And also a measure of disdain for those such as Hingis who, by saying she will not be "reduced" to clearing her name, vilifies the testers who have a tough enough job as it is.
INTERNATIONAL PRESS
Sharapova's victory ended up being just as decisive, but it was far from a foregone conclusion when Kuznetsova emerged as the winner of a tightly fought first set. Lack of timing on her service return meant that Sharapova could not put much pressure on Kuznetsova's delivery and she paid the price.But Sharapova, who knows how to use her height and reach, took a step back on the return to give herself just a bit more time, and she suddenly started making inroads into Kuznetsova's defenses. Once she got the return back in court, confidence flooded back through her game, resulting in some blistering forehand winners that recalled the type of tennis she produced while winning the U.S. Open last year.
"During the first set my return was terrible," Sharapova acknowledged afterwards. "But I arrived here with very little expectation after playing just one match since the U.S. Open, so I knew it was all in my hands. I just decided to go for it, and I was able to turn the match around."
...Earlier in the day, Ion Tiriac, the Romanian entrepreneur and former Davis Cup player who has masterminded the top-class tennis tournament that now comes annually to the Spanish capital, showed off the vast complex that is being built in a residential area of the city. It will boast a main stadium with 15,000 seats as well as two subsidiary arenas. All three feature sliding roofs that can close in 15 minutes. "We will be able to have three matches in progress watched by 20,000 people in bad weather," Tiriac said. "Fifteen thousand is about right," he added of the maximum seating for the main stadium. "Otherwise people at the top cannot see the ball."
Federer soldiered on and eventually lost in the final to one of the replacements, David Nalbandian, but the Chinese hierarchy was not amused.Luckily, the frequently divided tennis world was able to provide a united front for once, because the Tennis Masters Cup is jointly owned by the ATP and the International Tennis Federation. Mark Miles of the ATP and Francesco Ricci Bitti, president of the ITF, joined Drewett in trying to placate their hosts and somehow succeeded.
The new mayor of Shanghai and his team were persuaded that this was a very unusual happening.
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Tatiana Golovin"I believe that she's never going to be like Sharapova," said Wilander, who guided Golovin during the U.S. Open Series. "She doesn't have that winning attitude. It's just not a natural attitude for her to win, to beat the other person, or I'm going to die. She's enjoying hitting the ball a little more than most people do. She just needs to learn all the shots, then she'll enjoy it even more. Once she enjoys it even more, she'll win even more."Victoria Azarenka... An aggressive baseliner, Azarenka cut her season short so she could prepare early for 2008. This week, she was due to begin working with noted fitness trainer Pat Etcheberry -- who has shaped the likes of Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi and Henin -- in Florida, with emphasis placed on her lower body. Azarenka's first serve could be as big as Vaidisova's "in a year or so," Van Grichen said.
Whether the parenting skills in the McEnroe household were exemplary is open to question. John Jnr has said he was never drawn into adult conversation, and that when his parents had friends to dinner, he was sent to his room with a hamburger. That may explain his shyness with adults, and perhaps even some of his uncontrolled rages on court. Kay admitted many years later: “We were rookies at the parenting business, but I think we got better at it.”The beneficiary of that improvement was Patrick.
Wires
Martina Hingis made a surprise appearance at the Sony Ericsson Championships on Friday, eight days after retiring because she is accused of failing a doping test.
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