Most people view professional athletics as a business where people earn their living fair and square—after all there are officials, hawk-eye now to see if the balls are in or out, rules written down that everybody follows, I mean, how much more clear-cut can you get? That’s the essence of fair competition which is what the WTA Tour sells as entertainment, really—two people (or 4 in doubles) duking it out under the same conditions and with the same conditions applied.
The appeal of sports psychologically as a profession, especially an individual one like tennis is the idea that YOU are in charge of your own destiny! The outcome depends only on you-not your team. Sidenote: some of the best tennis players are extreme narcissists. Well, but how do you get to that point of being on that court, just you and the other person? What happens behind the scenes leading up to that moment? People go, compete, whoever wins gets paid more and gets more points and keeps going and going, it’s simple right? And, as a player, if I accomplish more I will get more right? (More high pitched and loud) Right? (Now serious and threatening and deep voice) Right?
Once we begin to delve into the world of pro women’s tennis on a detailed level you will begin to see that, because of the nature of the professional sport in general, the politics OF COURSE (can’t EVER leave out those politics) and how the prize money and the ranking points are allocated, more accomplished and more success does not necessarily equal more reward. As a player you are not necessarily in charge of your own destiny, and the spectators are really the only ones who are experiencing pure, fair competition of the world’s finest all in one place at, say, a Grand Slam.
Well we will start simple and informative--last time I left some vocabulary un-explained-namely “local wildcard” and “qualifying.” In the United States each tournament draw for ITF events has 32 main draw spots (where the majority of the money and points are) and anywhere from 32-128 qualifying spots. The main draw and the qualifying draw could be viewed as two separate tournaments where the qualifying draw feeds into the main draw but when you sign in online the draws are grouped together. The person with the next lowest ranking from the last person in the main draw is the first person on the qualifying list. Players get accepted into each draw depending on ranking essentially and if they have signed in on time. There is an online service that we use to sign in, and each player has their own identification # called an IPIN-you do not have to have a ranking to have an IPIN.
The majority of the qualifying is three rounds—if you win three rounds you qualify and are placed into the main draw-with the bigger qualifying draws they simply have more qualifying spots held open in the main draw. Those are the basics---the rules vary for men and women on the points and money involved in qualifying but those are the general organizing principles. Usually if you are ranked top 300 you will be in the main draw of most ITF Circuit Events, except maybe very strong 75K and 100K events (anything above a 100K ITF Event is a WTA Event). There is a ton of moving in the qualifying draw—if you are ranked 300-370 you might not know until you arrive early for the qualifying that you have actually moved into the main draw-even though there are deadlines that fine people for withdrawing late. Injuries happen last minute and people forget to withdraw in time for the final online published list to be made. This can make it hard for your travel/life schedule. I remember I arrived early for 4 tournaments in a row and made it in the main draw last minute a couple of years ago-hence I skipped every weekend that I could have spent at home or going out with friends (very important to a 23 year old who spends the majority of her time working out and being boring ;) ). This is mainly the experience of the ITF Circuit Player. When you play WTA’s you can plan much more easily and ahead of time when to arrive at the tournament and when you will start playing. That is one of the many perks for making it past the grind of the Circuit, besides just the sheer difference in prize money and paychecks compared to losing money in travel expenses on the ITF Circuit. The Circuit can be a huge hustle for many players if they do not push past it onto the WTA Tour. There simply is not an economy for professional women tennis players past the ranking of top 80 in doubles (if you’re lucky) and top 150 in singles (if you manage your expenses well and remain there for consecutive years).
Next we will enter into a more juicy area that involves the USTA (United States Tennis Association), politics, occupation culture and maybe even a little hotter discussion if we are lucky. Each tournament has wildcards, which is where players who do not enter into the tournament either on time or with a high enough ranking are given spots by the people with the power to do so—the tennis federation of the country that hosts the tournament (e.g. the USTA) or the tournament director, or even directly or indirectly, a sponsor. IMG (a super power sports agency if there ever was such a thing) sponsors numerous tournaments and this allows them to give their youngest and brightest prospects a berth (and also first round prize money) in WTA Tour events. The people at IMG know how much a little luck can go in professional tennis. What do they understand about the organization of events that makes them appreciate this luck? It has to do with the qualifying events that I was just explaining. If you win 3 matches in the qualifying against people ranked from 100-200 in the world at, say, Indian Wells, you will maybe get 20 points and $2,000 (my numbers are not totally accurate, but the comparisons/ratios are enough to give you an accurate idea of the reality). If you win one round in Indian Wells in the main draw you get 40 points and you get about $4,000. Imagine getting to skip those first three matches? Or even just having that exposure to the big time without having to grind your way there? Yeah—it’s a good deal. Seeded players get a bye in the first round entirely—they get about $8,000 just to show up—not to mention the 12 bye spots in the main draw that qualifiers could have filled. You will see later also how top-heavy professional tennis is in terms of money and points- it caters to those who already have high rankings.
Now, we finally come to the juicy part—where the politics and the culture come into play. If you have a “local” wildcard it means that you were given a wildcard by the local tournament director in a tournament. They have a certain number and the local federation has a certain number. We will use the USA as an example, since I am an American player. So—in any given ITF or WTA event in the USA, the USTA has a certain number of wildcards and the local tournament directors do also. Who does the USTA give these wildcards too? Who do they choose?
Exhibit A Player X (won’t use real names)—the winningest circuit level competitor of all time on the USTA ITF Circuit with something crazy like 30 titles total in doubles and singles—graduate of Vanderbilt University in about 2002 or so. In around 2007 on her own 110 world ranking she was one out of the main draw of the US Open. She had never been in a Grand Slam main draw before, and had earned that ranking on ITF Circuit play which, as you will soon learn, is simply amazing when you look at the point disparities between ITF Circuit events and WTA events (a disparity which somehow gets bigger ever year. . .). American player, one out of the main draw, could have easily won a round and made more than $20,000 and 60 points which is more than winning an entire higher level Circuit event over the course of a week---and catapulted herself into the top 100, WTA level events, and a serious living and pro career. She is a seasoned veteran, educated at Vanderbilt one of the finest institutions in the country, also a top 100 doubles player and a very nice person on top of it.
Exhibit B: Player O, young American junior who could not crack the top 500 about 3 years ago when I was busy playing on the circuit. She was one of the wildcards that everybody wishes they would get because honestly it was an easy win. She has had at least 3 Grand Slam main draw wildcards. If I could do more than bold font, and bigger font to exaggerate the number 3 to emphasize that number without messing up the aesthetics of this page too much, I would do it. She is 16-18 years old during her 3 wildcards—French Open was her first, Australian Open was her second, and either Australian Open the following year also or the US Open was the third one. Now you’re saying, what? Australian Open, does the USTA give wildcards there too? Well, there is some trading that occurs. So yes actually, the USTA was behind that. They could say, ‘oh well we made a playoff for that wildcard so she earned the spot fair and square’—but the only people who played the playoff are those who they invited. Was Player X invited? No. Was Player X given that main draw wildcard? No.
Flash forward to these players current day. Player X got to the semi-finals of a WTA Event in Quebec City that fall after the Open, catapulting her ranking to top 100 and putting her in her first Grand Slam main draw in the Australian Open the following January-yay Player X! You did it without “The Man.” Unfortunately, without the experience of WTA level events, even though she was the master at ITF Events, she faltered and did not win her first round. She still stayed top 100 for about 2 years and then dropped out due to a wrist injury. Player O is currently ranked around 150 in the world after winning a round in a Grand Slam and having some mixed success at both the WTA and ITF Circuit levels.
If you play in WTA’s you can have mixed success and have the same ranking of somebody who wins every single match they play at the ITF level. Player O has nowhere near the accomplishments of Player X in the world of professional tennis, and yet she has a better chance of being a successful, money making pro.
Who do you think can deal with the pressures of success better, a teenager or a college graduate? Who do you think can promote the growth of the sport better—a college graduate or a teenager? Who do you think can represent the USA better in front of a room filled with the press, a college graduate or a teenager? Who do you think deserves a grand slam wildcard, a player with more accomplishments or less? These are real people, these are real events sans exaggeration, and these are only two examples of something that happens every day in the professional tennis world.
For the USTA and from my perspective as a player what I have seen is that younger is better-younger equals more $ and sponsorship which is still more $-and which still doesn’t make much sense since the USTA is non-profit. Many girls from other countries will falsify birth certificates to say they were born years later in order to get the young age required of them to be viewed as successful money-makers in the tennis business for endorsements. On the sponsorship and agency side they go for young—I won’t get into that too much because then I’m battling the entire fashion industry and I can’t fit a small novel in here about the images and ideas that they portray and endorse about beauty. I mean, since when in the real world is no ass size 1 sexier than a woman with curves size 6? And for that matter, since when is a 15 year old considered the ideal image of beauty? I mean let’s just remember the reality that they are trying to create sex appeal with the image of a 15-20 year olds in bikinis. The only grown men I know (aged 28 and up) who like them that young are disturbed creepers and men below that age have the whole ‘sex with a minor’ thing to consider before they dive in. But we don’t call the fashion industry a creeper industry, we simply believe them when they say what ideal beauty is. . .It’s all a bunch of hocus-pocus.
But youth in selling endorsements for women professional tennis players is a fact of the business—Americans that I meet always say, ‘What? How can you possibly fake a birth certificate?’ and Europeans always say something like, ‘Yeah, you know here’s this other player who did that.’ Believe me, it’s possible. What we Americans have to understand is that in other countries in the world it is much easier to get around that one—maybe other rules are more strictly enforced but that one is easier to get around, sometimes with very little resistance to no resistance at all. One my biggest senses of relief when I come home to the USA sometimes is driving on the roadways and knowing that people will follow the general rules of driving. It is not so in certain other places in the world.
Going back to the Player X/Player O story, the lesson and moral to take home is this: wildcards and luck matter in professional tennis. Every bit of exposure to the big show, every penny saved, every ounce of stress not experienced, helps to maintain a career and create success. We are talking about professional athletics here—competition against the best in the world—matches are won by inches, people push themselves to the limit physically and mentally. Every boost counts. It’s supposed to be the best in the world, right? And that’s also why performance enhancing drugs are banned, yes? There are so many uncertainties, and a person’s biological window for competition and stress is never quite known until that wall is reached. If Player X could have gotten that little push—not even a push, a tap or a touch—into the US Open main draw, she would have been in a much better position to make money fast while she was healthy and things were good. Not to mention she deserved it. That little experience in the big time could have positioned her to make thousands more in prize money than she did. And she would likely have stayed at the top for years, which is good for American tennis and interest in the sport. Why do the French have so many top ranked players? Because they give their players free training, they have prize money tournaments for those ranked outside of the top 100, they have club competition which is yet another way to make $--they bolster their players outside of the top 100 until they can break in. It’s not really rocket science.
What does the USTA have? A group of young players from ages 17-21 ranked from 80-500 in the world who get wildcards into the all the big events (even past the USTA’s own prescribed limits on number of wildcards)—and a system that has yet to prove they can produce a player who can stay in the top 100 for multiple years aka make a good living as a professional player. The goal of this blog is not to bash the USTA—it is merely to give a players’ perspective of the things that go on in the world of professional tennis. Unfortunately for American tennis and for those of us with college degrees and more than 23 years already in the tank we are out of luck in terms of expecting help in professional tennis from the USTA.
The system is not fair and neither is it justified in my point of view. I have received a few wildcards from the USTA in my time, despite being a college graduate and past age 16. That being said, they were never positioned in ways that would have helped my career develop. They were completely random, all except for one that I got into the Bronx tournament before the US Open right when I finished college. Every other college graduate experiences the same thing, and you will hear most of them say “I don’t even want their help anymore,” or “It’s better just to get in with my own ranking,” when asked, “But couldn’t you get the wildcard for this or that tournament?” There’s some American tennis solidarity for you. I know a French girl who played in college for Clemson who got 2 French Open doubles wildcards before she was able to make it on her own. Viva la France! Is what I say. Canada has a good system too, but my French example is the best from what I have personally seen and experienced.
Since my last blog I have been to Dallas and Amelia Island, FL so I’ve put up some pictures of Florida-it’s really a beautiful place down here and I lived in Orlando for a bit so I feel good coming to this area of the country. Personally I have been struggling with injury, having gotten an MRI last week in Oklahoma City on my lower back. The news was mixed—I’m not perfect but neither am I with a herniated disk or a fracture. This morning the pain was very bad—just another reality of the daily grind over so many years. One thing that people don’t realize about Roger Federer and why he is so amazing is how flexible he is. A picture of him finishing his backhand stroke is more mobility than I will ever be able to have in my shoulders. I think his flexibility contributes to his ability to have as few injuries as he has had-although he’s had his fair share and plays through them incredibly well.
