The Price of Greatness

Whenever I tell people a story of how this player stopped playing, or this other player quit they always say something like, “Oh that’s such a shame.”  People assume that if an athlete can keep playing professional tennis, an athlete should do so.  Also, an FAQ I get is, “How much do you train?”  Obviously not everybody is privy to the information about how much players train, and what kind of a physical toll professional competition takes on the body, so in this blog post I will try to explain. 

Let’s start with the whole purpose and reasoning behind training in the first place.  A competitive tennis match can range anywhere from 1 ½ hours to 3 hours.  Doubles matches, with the no-ad scoring put in place a couple of years ago, range from 1 to 1 ½ hours long.  Now, in a tournament if a player wins each day they can be playing a singles match and a doubles match in one day for 4 days in a row potentially, or any combination of spreading out four doubles matches and five singles matches in a 6-day stretch.  Grand Slams are great because they give rest days in between, but doubles are full matches in Grand Slams.  To be competitive, you have to run faster than the other player, have better aerobic capacity, be strong enough not to get injured, and be able to recover and play again the next day, against the highest ranked players in the world.    

What kind of training can prepare an athlete for these kinds of physical demands?  To give you a better sense of the sheer amount of physical activity necessary for competition I will describe a good warm up.

 I would bet that anybody reading this has gone out on any particular day to exercise, hopped on a treadmill, jogged for 15 minutes, gotten off and thought to their self, “Alright that was good exercise for the day.”  A good warm-up for pro tennis, either in practice or for a match, and before you even start hitting balls, is about 15 minutes long.  First you have to run around for five minutes just to get your heart rate up.  Then you stretch for about two minutes and then the remaining time is doing short little exercises like butt-kicks, arm circles or knee-ups to really get you sweating before you even pick up a racquet to practice. 

A good hitting warm-up then takes at least 20-30 minutes.  The reason is this; an athlete HAS to warm up to the point where they can start swinging with maximum effort on court, they can’t just step out and run around as fast as they can-the body doesn’t work that way.  There are exceptions to this, and how much you need to warm up depends on how much an athlete has been exercising in the previous days, but it takes a lot in the previous days to decrease the need for a good warm up. 

In terms of off-season (December) non-tournament training, every athlete is different in what they like to do and how much, but I will say that most every athlete must get out and train EVERY DAY with maybe one day of rest per week, regardless of how much they do each day.  When you are a pro athlete training you are forced to exercise hard every day, and workouts are much longer.  The hard workouts can vary in type-one day it is a hard sprinting workout, core workout, or weight lifting, and then the tennis workout must land on top of the training.  Tennis is not easy on your lungs; it ALWAYS lifts my heart rate up and gives me a super hard workout.  If I don’t try as hard as I can then I don’t practice good habits and my game doesn’t improve, so I HAVE to give it my all on the practice court every time I step on a court.  If my other training has not been grueling enough I know I can always count on the tennis practice part of training to work me hard.

How many hours are we talking about?  Well, at least 2-4 hours every day (other training and actual tennis practice combined) for 5-6 days a week, depending on how I feel. There are definitely players out there who train more than me, and it’s probably one factor that has held me back, because I actually get fatigued easily even though I take vitamins and eat extra protein.  Every player’s physiology is different- I like to sleep a lot, and I get tired quicker than normal when I am really training hard.  Training also affects my mood, and I get a bit snappy past a certain fatigue point.  It’s all in the details and everybody has their own cocktail that is their self that they have to manage.  

The training regimen for a pro tennis player is not an option, it is a must.  The biology of the human body is not something that would allow an untrained person to go out and play strong tennis for 4 hours at a competitive level.  If you want to be able to play strong for 4 hours a couple of days in a row you must gradually accustom your body to that amount of physical activity—which is the point of the whole training process, besides game, stroke, speed and strength improvement.    

Many tennis players are quite strong, big girls when they compete and then when they stop they lose weight and actually become skinnier.  In my opinion this is because the kind of exercise required by tennis builds muscle because it’s a bit over the top in terms of training.  When the player stops training, they lose the muscle weight that the tennis regimen forced on them.  Other players gain weight from the lack of activity when they stop playing—again, everybody’s physiology is different.

Truthfully, the younger a player is, the better they recover-and that’s a huge factor in tournament competition.  I think that women reach their recovery peak from ages 17-20 and it’s kind of downhill from there.  I felt at my physical peak when I was 16 years old, and when I reached age 22 I felt much older.  

Anybody who says, “Oh it’s a shame that so-and-so quit,” is unknowingly condemning anybody who has the ability to play a high level of tennis to a life of above-normal physical activity, along with the emotional and physiological toll that goes with it.  Training affects your sleeping habits (you sleep more, or if you train too hard you can’t sleep at all), your social life (it’s really tough to make it out to salsa night with your friends on a Saturday-all you can think about is a good night of rest), and your everyday life schedule more than you could ever imagine.  You have to arrange all of your training activities around competing, and managing rest and activity for peak performance- taking a jog just for the joy of it is not really something that we get to do until we retire.  

Once such a high level of training is reached injuries occur, and it can be very frustrating to have to pound your body to the point where it breaks down.  I could write a whole book on tennis injuries but suffice it to say that planes and athletics don’t mix, PLEASE WEAR SUNSCREEN, HATS, AND SUNGLASSES, hard courts are much worse on the body than clay courts, and imagine how much stress a 120 mph serve puts on a person’s wrist, elbow and shoulder?

On one hand professional tennis is a passion, a consuming love, a joyful ride and it feels amazing to be one of the best in the world at something.  On the other hand, once the life the life you have to lead in order to be a successful competitor starts distancing you too much from other things you want from life (if you want children, marriage, stability, physical health, or whatever it is you desire) even the most beautiful, talented players will quit.

The money factor plays a role also.  To be working so hard and barely scraping even is not quite the envisioned life of a professional athlete right?  Well, sorry, but it’s the reality for most of us.  Only the very best of the best get to buy the houses, make $400,000 in a year and receive $100,000 just in appearance fees for one event. 

I hope that maybe now people won’t be so judgmental of athletes with great careers who decide to give it up for a family, or even simply leave competition for a different life.  The toll that the lifestyle of professional tennis takes on a person can be enormous, and the money and prestige earned through that lifestyle are sometimes not enough to justify that toll. 

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I Guess Grunting Doesn't Give a Player a Voice. . .

A couple of weeks ago after a tournament in Osprey, FL I realized something about professional tennis.  There is no way for players to protect their own financial investment in tournaments.  Tournament directors can say which day doubles and singles finals are played and their interests are covered by the ITF rules regarding defaults, tanking, and even withdrawing due to injury or severe illness.  All of these interests are covered in the form of negative incentives and punishments to the players, even if they have a legitimate injury.  For example, a player got very, very ill before the doubles final of the 100K event in Midland, Michigan in February and she had to default.  The ITF fined her for this, took away her doubles prize money and points and only gave her prize money and points for the previous round reached.  So not only does she lose the prize money from the final that she could have won, she gets less money than she actually earned in results. . .because she was sick?  I think the people at the ITF and WTA get about two weeks minimum sick leave each year at least, with pay. I’m just saying. . .

One might ask, ‘How does this happen?  That’s completely ridiculous.’  Well, the players have no way to fine the ITF when it is arbitrarily harsh or makes mistakes.  Nobody at the ITF loses their job if they wrongly affect a player.  The players, on the other hand, lose their means to make an honest living and don’t have anybody to stick up for them.  What can they do?  The ITF and the WTA single-handedly rule over the world of professional tennis, and there is no competing administration the players can leave and join (note to self- put ‘form competing administration to WTA’ on my bucket list). 

It’s not like the ITF and WTA are clamoring to ask the players how they can make the tour better either.  This is odd, because who would know better than the players, the ones with the first-hand experience, who are on the front-lines of the Tour night and day, where the Tour needs to improve?  Aren’t the players and the administration supposed to be working together to create a sustainable, growing professional tennis enterprise worldwide, and doesn’t this involve keeping the players happy so that they will help the administration when necessary?  Instead, what you have now is a player versus administration, in a juxtaposition that alienates the less-than-star-status players from the administration while that administration puts the star players with huge endorsement deals on a pedestal, and everybody fails to complete the marketing tasks necessary to grow the sport as a whole worldwide. 

I will give a realistic example demonstrating how the players have no voice, and their own investments are not honored.  A girl traveled all the way from Brazil to the string of ITF tournaments in the Southern part of the USA that are played on har-tru clay courts from April through May.  Her flight was expensive no doubt, she has brought a coach to help, and each visa costs at least $150.00 USD.  She has seven weeks of food and travel to pay for both of them on this trip, plus racquet stringing and other necessary expenses.  Her ranking is in the mid-300 level so she is consistently in the qualifying of each event that starts on a Sunday every week.  

In South America, Europe, and most other countries the doubles final is always placed a day before the singles final.  For the players, doubles does not earn a lot of money, but it gives valuable experience and points that could propel a player into a position to make a living as a doubles player, and any money is good money on the circuit.  When the doubles final is a day before the singles final, this at least partially ensures that the players in the doubles final who are in the qualifying of the next event will be able to play singles in the next event.  This is how tournament directors should be required to schedule their tournaments.

In singles, if you reach the finals and are signed into the qualifying of the next event you get an automatic bid into the main draw of the next event—this does not happen for doubles.  In doubles, the only way you can play singles in the next week is if you finish play (either win the tournament or lose) before the qualifying sign in.  WTA tournaments will move qualifying matches of the next tournament to Monday, but ITF Circuit tournaments will not.  If a player is scheduled for the doubles final on Sunday and has to sign in on Saturday and play on Sunday in singles for the next week, they cannot play and if they fake an injury (or have an injury) and pull out from the doubles they are automatically pulled out from the next week’s singles draw.  The player also faces fines for defaulting, plus only the prize money and points for the previous round reached which is a formal way of stating ‘robbery’ of the points and money she earned.  In the same way the girl who got sick in Midland had her points robbed, so can the girl from Brazil be robbed if she defaults to go and play singles the next week.  Also, if she is viewed as ‘tanking’ and losing on purpose she faces fines.    

Now, our Brazilian has paid to come all the way to the United States in order to play singles and doubles for seven weeks straight.  For her, she cannot risk skipping one of those weeks because the financial and time investment is simply too great.  She will play whether sick or injured, but what if she does very well, arrives to the doubles final and the tournament director mandates that the final be held on Sunday, with a day of no play on Saturday and she is signed in to play a tournament with double prize money the next week-in the qualifying? 

She has no say, no voice, and no place to appeal the tournament director’s decision even though she has paid an incredible amount to arrive and play the tournament.  Her investment is good for seven weeks, all of the money she has spent is worth less with every lost point and prize money opportunity, and double the prize money means double the points. 

The tournament director gets to boast to his club members and in his publicity that he has a player from Brazil in the tournament, and all the tournament director has to do is make a simple, easy adjustment.  So why wouldn’t a tournament director want to help out the players and put the final on Saturday if it involves players who are scheduled to play in the qualifying of the next event? 

I think it’s only fair that, since our livelihoods are on the line and we only get money if we play and win, our plight is much more valid than the plight of this tournament director.  It’s like the rules do not keep into account the fact that we can only earn money WHEN WE PLAY, and we have no voice and no power to make sure that tournament directors like this take our best interests into mind when making important decisions. I will also say that the spectator factor was zilch in this example because the tournament was in a retirement community where people do not work during the day, so the biggest spectator turnouts were during the weekdays.

In the past I didn’t play doubles in a week when the doubles final would most certainly have interfered with my next event-in the real life case this blog entry is based on, my partner was the player with the overlap and I was just happy to have a partner in the first place so I did not think to ask her about her plans for the next week.  She herself arrived to the tournament one hour before she was scheduled to play her singles match because she had just finished playing the previous week, so she was not thinking so far ahead to the next week either.

Whenever things like this happen, the tournament directors and ITF say, ‘Why did you even play if you knew that the final was going to be on a Sunday?’  Well, I’m sorry if I was too busy trying to first find a doubles partner, second actually get into the draw, third organize my travels to the event, and fourth play singles in 90 degree heat with 80% humidity.  And I’m sorry that I don’t have $50,000 to spend on a limitless number of tournaments in a year so my ranking is low and I have to take the opportunities and partners that I can get and make the most out of every event.  I’m sorry that neither I nor my partner saw the paper sign behind the tournament desk that said ‘Doubles final on Sunday.’  When was the last time a small, easy oversight cost you $500.00 because somebody else couldn’t be bothered to show some flexibility and understanding?  And lastly, I am so very sorry that I am good enough, despite it all, to make it to the doubles finals of your professional event.  I am truly very sorry Mr. Tournament Director.       

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