Poles Apart? Thoughts Sparked by the Australian Open
For a moment there, in the first round of the Australian Open, it looked like Venus Williams, at the age of 45, was about to win yet another thrilling tennis match. It was swell, even seen from the other side of the world, not, as is obviously preferable, from a bleacher seat. I am not one to denigrate progress in communication technology, or any other kind, but you know what I mean. There was a time when most people followed distant events on the radio.
The real question is what the avalanche of headlines does to our appreciation of what matters. How do we maintain a sense of the relative importance of events?
Miss Williams (happily newlywed to Andrea Preti) took the first set in a tiebreak, letting go a winner to put an end to a long baseline rally. She lost the second 3-6, found reserves — as she is wont to — to storm ahead to 4-0 in the decider, blew it: 6-4 for Olga Danilović, who is less than half her age. Wish I’d been there, there’s nothing like Venus Williams’s controlled power. Ironically, it was a fairly routine forehand sailing wide that clinched the other young lady’s match point, but to give her credit, she hung in there against a legend still in excellent form. She met Coco Gauff in the next round and lost. (RELATED: Gutsy Gals)
Which got me thinking, what are the chances of an Arctic Open? The Australian Open, followed by the Arctic Open, would be an answer to the quite justified complaints about a schedule that has become an endurance test even for the best players, in fact, especially for them, since they make the longest runs at every stop. An Arctic Open would be an alternative to the Sunshine Double, the Indian Wells–Miami Open circuit that highlights the northern hemisphere winter season while celebrating the sea to shining sea beauty of our country. It would be an option for those wishing to take it a mite slower prior to the clay and grass seasons.
The problem is not too many tournaments, the problem is the mandatories and the lack of choice. There was something resembling a free market in professional tennis prior to and in the early years of the Open era, but it broke down in a blaze of lawsuits between competing tours and gave way to a highly regulated, monopolistic system.
Why should players not choose where they play, and how often? The ranking system requires playing as much as possible, but it can be reformed so that it represents who’s playing well, better, and best. Players would still have fair opportunities to get into the cut at the biggest tournaments, the masters and the majors, and get seeded in those tournaments. Seeds give you some breathing and warming-up time, at least normatively (upsets are always possible), which facilitates a deep run and, therefore, more prize money.
Or you could simply do without a formal ranking system. As it stands, you have a closed shop, self-serving, corporatist. A more open system, favoring more competition in every sense of the word, might well be better for tennis and the people who make it a career. It would be more interesting, might even draw in the amateurs who are indispensable to keeping the sport honorable.
Actually, that is the point: make it truly open to keep it true. To keep things true, in sports and much else, is the real challenge.
Novak Djokovic played nine sets through three rounds, forced into a tiebreak only in the last of these, and then he got a fourth-round walkover into the quarters when Jakub Menšík pulled out with an injury. Injuries may be due to over-scheduling or to the new racquet technologies or other factors; in any case, they certainly seem to occur more than in the past. Naomi Osaka, a former champion here, had to pull out after a nice early run with an injury.
Stan Wawrinka, also former champion here, got through a classy first round match against Serbia’s rising Laslo Djere, then a thrilling fiver setter against France’s rising Arthur Géa; it would have been honorable for Stan to go down fighting in either round, but he held on until meeting California’s rising Taylor Fritz got him on two big first serves in the first set tiebreak. Wawrinka outplayed him in the second set with his one-twos — the famous big one-handed backhand to the ad court, followed by a return deep into the opposite corner. In the last two sets, both 6-4, Fritz was steady with his dominating serve and forehand. Time flies: the mighty Swiss is playing his last season and said how much Australia meant to him.
Now, if President Trump gets over his conquest of Greenland, it would facilitate holding the Arctic Open on the island. Nuuk is a possible venue, since it already has some nice unostentatious hotels, and a stadium that was already under renovation (including a roof) before the current who-gets-Greenland drama began. If the Greenlanders feel rather like the Sioux when they were told all deals were off when gold was discovered in their sacred Black Hills, it’s because from their perspective, it’s deja vu all over again.
I do not want to make another detour, but there remains some historical controversy over George Armstrong Custer’s role in the Black Hills land grab. He was aware of the gold and the rush publicizing it would likely bring about, but there are those who argue he tried to mediate between the Grant administration and the Sioux Nation. Overconfidence and a poor command decision — but you know the story.
My position is that they do not need a big extravagant stadium, and we certainly do not want to see a situation where a battalion of mountain troops Pituffik gets surrounded and slaughtered by Inuits — bad optics, apart from being awful since the basic idea is to maintain friendships and influence people, while protecting the region from Sino-Soviet, excuse me Russian, infiltration and depredation. We kept it low-key during World War II against the Nazis and during the Cold War; maybe that, rather than gimme-gimme, is the way.
I am reminded of a film about Alaska and hockey, premised on the values that small towns cherish and the loyalties they nurture (along with discords and resentments). If you don’t get what you think you deserve, you know, a prize, a certain kind of respect, or even its imitation, you may well act rashly, and then you’ll regret it.
Consider, after all, if the Qataris and the Saudis staged the soccer World Cup and the latest thing in tennis, a triumph of greed and vanity, do you really think it was out of the same spirit that moved Coubertin to organize the modern Olympics? Sportsmanship, virtue, character, habits of fitness, and camaraderie? They came up with something called the “six kings” tournament, a kind of round robin between the six top players in the world. If you are one of the select six, you have a shot at pocketing six million bucks for an exhibition in the desert. The next thing you know, the Saudi sheiks will want to take their thing into the regular tour, and after that, they’ll want to join the Slam circuit, and there will be no shortage of interested insiders wanting to cash in.
Meanwhile, I would say a five or 10-thousand-seater in the new Nuuk Stadium might be enough, but of course, it is up to them. It could be a single event, or you might want to combine it with some other sports. There is room for a golf course on the vast island. The existing venue has a football pitch, and Greenlanders are experts on skis and in handball, as well as ping-pong. The reason this is little known is that Greenlanders are happy with their traditional way of life and quite possibly not interested in being rich and famous in the manner some Americans understand these qualities. The monetization of sports has gone pretty far, with even tennis getting into the big money. Maybe societies that are not on that program should get a hearing, too.
Clearly, further study is required, and if the reported calming down of tensions at the recent billionaires’ convention in Davos, Switzerland, is not a delusion before another storm among competing elites, a sensible way forward may be found.
READ MORE from Roger Kaplan:
The Berber War Cry for Freedom
Give (Eternal?) Peace a Chance?
Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.