INDIAN WELLS: "ISMS" AND "SCHISMS"

What exactly is sexism?  Is it like art, where you know it when you see it, or does it require a fixed definition?  I'm a firm believer in the idea that words matter and definitions matter; the one without the other creates a murky waterway of innuendo and obligations, driving people to their battle stations, without any sense at all of what it is they're fighting for.  Political polarization has never been greater in this country:  whether your red, blue, purple or green, the telltale sign of your political orientation is the camp to which you report any time an issue comes up that brings it into relief.  The same could be said of the blogosphere when it comes to tennis.  The minute somebody says the word, "women", one is required to declare their position on their place in the game, as if that is something to be determined thereby.

But what happens when definitions are ill-defined?

Indian Wells CEO Ray Moore made the following comments, universally derided as sexist, prior to the final between Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka:

"I think the WTA - you know, in my next life when I come back I want to be someone in the WTA, because they ride on the coattails of the men.  "They don't make any decisions and they are lucky.  They are very, very lucky.  If I was a lady player, I'd go down every night on my knees and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal were born, because they have carried this sport.  They really have."

Cue dramatic gasp, and clutching of the chest.  The words themselves could be interpreted offensively on a number of fronts:  from the reference to women getting down on their knees, to thanking God that two men were born that have been carrying the sport, to the very idea that the sport suffers from a disproportionate emphasis on the men even at joint events.  Of course, Serena was asked about his remarks and had this to say, right on cue:

"I don't think any woman should be down on their knees thanking anybody like that...I think Venus, myself, a number of players - if I could tell you every day how many people say they don't watch tennis unless they're watching myself or my sister - I couldn't even bring up that number...So I don't think that is a very accurate statement.  I think there are a lot of women out there who are very exciting to watch.  I think there are a lot of men out there who are exciting to watch.  I think it definitely goes both ways."

Curiously absent from this response, given almost entirely by rote, is the central complaint of Ray Moore:  it's not the women he's complaining about, it's the WTA, which at the moment is run by a man.  And the question of whether they are doing everything they can to add to the interest in the women's game, is an entirely separate question of whether the women are playing the wretched supplicants to the men.  That's because it is only viewed through the prism of an ill-defined notion of sexism, and incredibly gives a pass to an organization which must continually evaluate itself and the role it plays in promoting the game.  

Let us suppose for a minute that, in fact, the women's game were not entirely healthy, and the men's game did in fact bear some responsibility to uphold their sisters on the other side of the schedule?  What then would you make of Moore's comments?  Would he still simply be a sexist trying to denigrate the women's game, or someone concerned with the health of the WTA, because of the important role they play at the tournament of which he is CEO, and the paucity of promotion and proper management under which their great athletes toil?  You see, if your first and only reaction is to go to your battle stations and decry the messenger as a sexist, you won't even get to the more salient question of which you should truly be concerned if your concern is for the health of women's tennis.

When people decry the lack of racial diversity in tennis, does anyone interpret that as, in and of itself, the ravings of an out of touch racist, or someone who wants to deepen the pool of athletes and fans of the game?  When one decries the paucity of American stars in the game, the current crop of young yankees notwithstanding, is this seen as an anti-American bigot, looking to dismiss Americans from the game, or the very real concern that the traditionally most lucrative market for sports in general, and tennis in particular, may be lost to an entire generation?

Why then do we fall to our knees and pray to the Gods of political correctness that we might be delivered from the sexism of the grey old men of tennis, looking down on the world's center courts like the faces of the Kryptonian judges in "Superman"?  Is there an expectation that the WTA can and must raise the profile of the game with equal effectiveness as the ATP, or isn't there?  And if not, why not?  

That's the real sexism:  the assumption that by merely criticizing women, or more accurately those charged with the stewardship of their game, they are being denigrated as a whole.  In fact the opposite is true, the low expectations of sexism compels us to attack any genuine commentary on the direction of the game, with the WTA at the helm, rather than hold their feet to the fire and demand that they produce a product that is the equal of the men.  There are cases where the women's game outshines the men's, and to her credit Serena did point out the fact that the women's final of the US Open in 2015 was sold out before she lost her semi-final to Roberta Vinci, and more significantly, before the men's.  That's saying a lot given that the two finalists are two of the greatest players ever to whack fuzz off the ball in the history of fuzz whacking.  

But it was so obviously an anomaly that it has to be pointed out as a point of refutation.  How many times has that happened in the history of the US Open, or any of the majors, or any of the joint WTA/ATP events?  Serena has played her part, and for this she is duly compensated:  aside from her PR challenged blonde nemesis from Siberia, she is the highest paid female athlete in the world.  Most of the credit for this belongs to the two headed beast that forms her imaginary rivalry with Yuri Sharapov's daughter, and more importantly, not the WTA.

If you can find your way out of the camp, and if you care about women's tennis, there are a lot of questions about the decision making of the WTA over the last few years that can and should be asked.  Good questions that would inform the ill-formed, but no less pertinent comments of Mr. Moore, for which there are as yet few good answers:

• Why does the WTA continue to treat their Year End Championships (whatever the hell it's called these days) like a traveling circus?
• Where the hell was the WTA when Shahar Peer was being treated like a political tennis ball and denied entry to one of their premiere tournaments?
• Why do they distribute ranking points in a convoluted and irrational system, leading to majorless #1's that aren't worth the paper they're written on?
• Why do they persist with this obscene experiment with on-court coaching, when the coaching is clearly doing more damage than good?
• Why does the WTA continue to sell sex and get away with it, then decry sexism when they're called on it?
• Why is the blogosphere obsessed with men's tennis, if measured by its collective commentary, by comparison to the women's game?

You see, I care about women's tennis.  I grew up wanting to play like Martina Navratilova, I modeled my serve after Hana Mandlikova, and I still watch youtube clips of Justine Henin's matches where ever I can find them.  I'm not a sexist, and because I'm not a sexist, I don't falsely praise the quality of women's tennis out of a tacit and imminently sexist presumption that this is as good as it gets.  My expectation of women playing tennis is that they will be as athletic and skilled as the men, because that's what I grew up with, and that's what I've always enjoyed, and I know that's what they're capable of.

So please spare me the self-serving righteous indignation over sexist comments - the sexist comment that was implied, but unjustly ignored, is the assumption that the WTA has less of a responsibility to women's tennis, and by association tennis in general, than the ATP.  Nobody says boo when the same question is asked of the men, and the reason is more telling than the fact:  because everyone expects the men to carry their own weight.  When they don't, they get called out on it, and nobody runs to their battle stations to decry the sexism of criticizing men's tennis.  No, the only way to hold the WTA to the same standards as the ATP is to...well, hold them to the same standards.  

That isn't accomplished by hiding from an intellectual discourse on the state of women's tennis, and the role of the WTA, behind "isms" and "schisms" that are as facile as as they are useless.

BLAME IT ON STEFFI

There’s been a great deal of discussion at this year's US Open about the problems that top WTA players have had serving. Almost as curious is the paucity of good analysis as to the source of their problems.  If all of a sudden women on tour are having problems properly serving, and all at once, it makes sense to compare the serves of women say, 20 years ago, to modern players and analyze the difference.

I am a firm believer in the philosophy that all problems in tennis are essentially technical – even the ones that appear to be mental, and nothing has made that more apparent to me than the serving issue. In the past, wielding unforgiving 85 square inch 15 ounce wood racquets, a player couldn't get away with bad technique on the serve - today they have over sized composites to help them hide the fact that their technique is sorely lacking.

I had a soccer coach years ago who used to hammer us on technique – the way he did this was to get our fitness training in first. Running hills, sprints, push-ups, sit-ups, etc.; he really ran us through the wringer before we ever touched a ball. By the time we got around to ball work, our legs were like jelly and our lungs were on fire. The result: when you’re that tired, and wondering just what on your body is about to fail next, the only thing you have rely on, the only thing you have left, is your technique - it's the only thing that makes you kick straight.

I think it’s exactly the same with tennis.

Tennis is a game that demands constant adjustment to many factors to perform at a high level. There are a lot of factors that can affect your ability to hit the ball properly: your opponent's play, your level of fatigue, your movement – these are all physical factors. Ironically, of all the factors that can affect your play, pressure, whilst existing only in the mind of the player that allows it to, is the only one that is completely intangible. That doesn’t mean, however, that it doesn’t have a physical impact. In fact the variation created by all the physical factors are mimicked by pressure. You hesitate slightly and the ball isn’t where you’re accustomed to hitting it. You’re tentative and you don’t move into the position you should. You try to just keep the ball in bounds, and you lose racquet head speed, even though that’s the fastest way to lose control of your strokes.

So while pressure is an intangible factor, it has a physical consequence, and as such, the only thing that will allow a player to manage pressure, and all its consequences, is the same thing that will allow a player to manage all the other actual physical variables that affect her ability to hit a proper stroke: that thing is technique.

The best serves in the history of tennis have one and only one characteristic in common: the point of contact is at the optimal point of racquet head velocity. That’s it. Everything else is imagined and totally overrated. In short, if you can hit the ball when your racquet head is moving the fastest, the speed, accuracy and consistency of your serve will improve. If you can improve racquet head acceleration it will improve your power and accuracy, but at the end of the day everyone has their limit and generally the limit of women is lower than the limit of men. The key is to hit your optimal point of contact every time, so the question is how to do this and the answer is as simple as it is obvious.

The toss.

Take a look at the worst serves on the women’s tour and they all have one common characteristic – the toss is awful - it's all over the place - and as such, it’s anyone’s guess how often (if ever) they’re going to reach their optimal point of contact. If the toss isn’t out in front, you don’t transfer your weight forward, and you lose racquet head acceleration and speed. The ball on the toss travels slowest just before and after the apex, so if the apex of the toss is beyond the point of contact, when it finally returns to the point of contact, it travels through it too quickly to consistently make the optimal point of contact. If the sun is in your eyes, the point of contact on a high toss is obscured even more, and if it’s windy out?

Fegheddabouddit…

So without naming any names, you’ll note that the most inconsistent and/or least powerful serves in the game (men’s or women’s) are always the ones with the highest ball toss. It sounds simple, and in truth it is, but the problem is that once a player gets into a comfort zone with all the mechanics of their serve, it is very difficult to tinker with the toss with immediate success – if the movement of the feet and the shoulder rotation all depend on the timing of a toss that soars 3-4 feet above the point of contact, you basically have to re-engineer the entire serve in order to accommodate the new toss – the very toss that’s causing all of their problems in the first place.

That’s a daunting task for a player who will undoubtedly watch their ranking plummet in the process, and because so much money is riding on the ranking, it’s almost impossible for a coach who is largely judged by a player’s ranking to be willing to say something like:

“We need to re-engineer your serve – you’re going to lose a lot of matches while we go through this process, and your ranking will fall. But a year from now you’ll have a better serve and all the points you’ve lost you’ll gain back and then some.” In fact, how do you tell that to someone who’s already in the top 10?

So who is to blame for all of this? Typically in tennis the prominence of one player who appears and dominates the game causes millions of players to try to emulate their game in the hopes of re-creating their success. In the case of women and their serves, that player is one Stefanie Marie Graf.

For all her qualities as a tennis player, there’s probably never been a player with more aberrations from sound fundamental technique, that’s had more success in the game. Although this article concerns the serve, as an appetizer I give the Graf forehand – powerful and dominant as it was, it was singularly the most consistent cause for the few losses she incurred. Rarely did Graf lose a match because her backhand went off the boil, and in the worst case scenario her slice and movement would win her 8 out of 10 matches and the forehand was the difference in the ninth and/or tenth.

Why?

Because the point of contact on Graf’s forehand was at a point of contact with the racquet head parallel to the baseline – in other words it was very late. It was so late, that the only way for her to keep the ball in the court was to have massive racquet head acceleration and it was precisely that massive racquet head acceleration that gave her all that power. But if the timing on that stroke was slightly off, Graf suddenly became human - rarely, the timing was off because she wasn't feeling at her best, and certain players like Seles or Sabatini would find ways to disrupt that timing, hence their success against her. But generally speaking, if she got the timing right, the racquet head speed she had to generate on her forehand made it the most powerful stroke in women's tennis.

That condition was exactly the same for her serve.

Graf’s serve toss was, at the time, one of the highest in the game – with the apex of the toss consistently reaching 3-4 feet above the optimal point of contact. When the ball descended through her point of contact, she needed tremendous racquet head acceleration to meet the ball in the optimal point of contact range, and it was this racquet head speed that gave her all her power and direction on the serve.

Fast forward to 2009 – every idiot and her sister on the WTA mimics the toss on Graf’s serve, but none of the racquet head acceleration and speed, and as a result their point of contact is rarely in the optimal range and the result is the comedic tragedy of faults, double faults and just flat out terrible serves you see on the women’s tour.

So what was the difference with Graf? Why was she able to be so technically aberrant, but successful?

Well, let me tell you a couple things about Steffi Graf – if she hadn’t been a tennis player she could have been an Olympic decathalete, or volleyball player, or a champion in just about any other damn sport she wanted. Once clocked at a 23 second 200m dash, Graf was easily one of the most gifted natural athletes in the world, not just tennis, but she complemented her gifts with a tremendous focus and work ethic that allowed her to maximize her special abilities into her own brand of tennis technique. Her technique is so unique that some players may be able to emulate one or two things about it, but nobody can put together the whole package like she did.

Does anyone think Ana Ivanovic could run 200 meters in total, let alone 200 meters in 23 seconds? Not likely – and the paucity of physical gifts as compared to her idol doesn’t stop there – she also has terrible timing on the serve.  But rather than recognizing and accepting this limitation and adjusting her ball toss on the serve, she, and oh-so-many other tennis players on the WTA have inherited much of Graf’s technique and unfortunately almost none of her physical gifts, and not surprisingly, almost none of her success.

Even Venus Williams, who once was caught grinning at her own meaningless 130mph serve, has one of the worst 2nd serve’s in women’s tennis, and her toss is just as inconsistent as the serve itself. When she has a serve in reserve (i.e. she's hitting a first serve), she has the freedom to go after that ridiculous toss and every once in a while serves huge. But put the pressure of a second serve on her mind, and suddenly the racquet travels just that little bit slower and the bad technique on her toss is revealed when the physical effects of pressure put stress on her very poor technique.

For all the time, money, and commitment that women on the WTA show their coaches, they have been shamelessly rooked in quality of coaching – in my opinion it’s nothing short of highway robbery. When they’re juniors and nobody can serve anyway, a stupid toss on the serve doesn’t reveal itself as a weakness until the bright lights come on and someone stands on the other side of the net that will have a Thanksgiving feast on the results of bad technique.

Well, in the big leagues, there’s nowhere to hide. So maybe, instead of showing-off during changeovers or grimmacing on camera every chance they get, these coaches should earn their money and teach their pupils how to properly toss the ball on the serve, and by doing so, end their woes.