This is a *dreadful* idea. Some players will like it (players who are insecure, have coaches, and are tired of hearing after a loss, "If you'd just..."). Some players will hate it (players who have overbearing parents they can't get to shut up and whose only peace is on-court; players who don't have coaches at all).

Why it's so bad: the most appealing thing about tennis other than the grace of the game itself (often missing in today's biff-bang-bash-wallop) is the fact that players are out there on their own. *They* have to win it. Whatever preparation they've done off-court, with whatever advice, *on* court it's up to them to figure stuff out and make it happen. Coaches have a place on-court in team events such as Fed Cup. But not in tournaments.

A lot of people have said in recent years that the no-coaching rule can't be enforced, therefore it's silly to have it. But in other contexts we often have rules or laws that can't easily be enforced; there is a big difference between encouraging something by making it explicitly legal and discouraging something by making it against the rules. Still, this is the reasoning under which the ATP made appearance fees legal some years back (thereby making it financially extremely difficult for tournaments outside the Masters Series). AFAIAA, no serious attempt has been made to enforce the rule. It isn't, actually, that hard. Assign someone to keep an eye on the coaches -- ideally, part of the umpiring team.

Much has been written lately about on-court coaching, with Pennetta's coach during her match at Wimbledon and Sharapova's father in all her matches the most notable. Are we really just making rules for Sharapova now?

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So: the Zvereva Award to the player with the name the most commentators manage to mangle. Matevzic was probably last year's winner (or woulc have been): for some reason Eurosport kept calling her Mateyevich.

This year,even so early, it's clearly going to Anna Chakvetadze, whose name had three pronunciations yesterday on Eurosport alone. I've mercifully blanked all but Shock-ve-dot-see.

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That Wimbledon final and the semifinal before it were the only times I can really remember seeing Martinez emotional in her long career: the one time where she let her competitive desires really show, perhaps because it was the time she really felt she had a chance at a great prize. Neither of the players she typically lost to tamely in GS events -- Graf, Seles -- was there to get in her way, and she must have known she could beat McNeil and that Navratilova's age would make her vulnerable to being made to run hard.

In recent years, Martinez's game has looked more and more at odds with the prevailing trends: heavy spin in an age of power hitting; one-handed backhand, and the player often stationed far behind the baseline. Martinez never even looked particularly fit compared to the others (the Daily Telegraph a few years ago described the modern female tennis player as having "muscles on her muscles". Yet I never remember seeing Martinez run out of gas during a match or even look particularly winded or discomposed after very long points. She must have *been* very fit, even if she didn't look it.

She was, however, extraordinarily silent -- and/or ignored by the press. I think the only time I can ever remember seeing or hearing her speak was right after that Wimbledon win. In recent years, when she might have had a lot of interest to say about the sport, I can't remember seeing a single interview.

She had some great moments: helped win not only Spain's first Fed Cup but its first *five* Fed cups; three Olympic medals; two other GS finals; many clay court titles. The game will miss her and her variety.

Here (PDF) is the actual prize money breakdown from 2005 and 2004. Note that although more of the top female stars still play doubles, the men's doubles money is higher.

In her book about women's tennis of a few years ago (published only in French, I'm afraid), Nathalie Tauziat commented that more important than the gender difference, however, is the percentage of prize money awarded to the winners. Changing the percentage so that somewhat more was distributed for the earlier rounds would be fairer, and would also make it easier for those players to be able to afford the coaches and assistance to help them play their best tennis -- which , as fans, is what we should all want to see. She blamed the American habit of always quoting the winner's check, and noted that more emphasis on the size of the total purse would help. Unfortunately, I think tennis, too, has fallen victim to the increasing gap between what the stars get and what everyone else gets.

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Expect more of these cases: finasteride is commonly found in hair-restoration products. It's banned because it can be used to mask steroids, but it seems so much more likely (and funnier) that they really are taking it because they're worrying about hair loss. Plenty of players on the men's tour with hair loss problems over the years (Sampras, Agassi the first who spring to mind).

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But it's also true that the women are far more distant from me now, and the tours are now, from my pov, more comparable. The women are more heavily muscled, and of course the age gap between me and them has grown a lot. There are hardly any players over 30 now, and even if they are, they're 20 years younger than I am, not two. Karatancheva, at 16 and doping-or-pregnant-or-noneoftheabove, is younger even than my friends' kids.

In the January 9 New Yorker, which I read this morning, a Talk of the Town piece by Roger Angell talks about this very phenomenon in relation to baseball. For so long, he writes, you could sit in the stands and imagine that with a little luck you could have been one of them. Their bodies, their salaries, their lifestyles were like yours only a bit better. Now, of course, all gone: the huge, muscle-bound millionaires have taken the intimacy of the game with them as they bulked up their muscles and their contracts.

Tennis is always gazing at its navel trying to figure out why it isn't more loved, and I think this is at the heart of the problem. McEnroe and Connors were excoriated by the tennis establishment, but they packed in the fans curious to see what unpredictable thing they might do next; and they *did* come across as the hothead next door. Certainly people respond to the Williams sisters, the Belgians, the Russians...but the more they become celebrities (which the game promotes) the less they are like us, and the more the game loses its intimacy.

Writing all that makes me realize that Wimbledon, which has always tried to create the effect that you are watching tennis in "an English garden", may be making a mistake by putting in a roof. Yes, it will mean there's some live play for the TV audience and on-site ticketholders to watch. How professional. How 21st century. But at the cost of a little more of that intimacy.

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He could have meant they were both playing badly.

He could have meant they both served horribly and therefore failed to hold serve.

Or -- and this is the interpretation we favor -- he could have meant they were playing in spaghetti strap bathing suit dresses borrowed from Sharapova and Vaidisova.

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I suppose it's some kind of balance that we're getting Hingis back. Although why do John McEnroe and Pat Cash have to follow her?

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Also: 2004's model.

The discussion of this case is all over the place, trashing everyone from Puerta himself to the anti-doping authorities. The anti-doping tribunal itself opted for whatever leniency it was allowed, giving Puerta "only" an eight-year ban instead of lifetime. But Puerta is 27...and no one's ever successfully come back to the tennis tour after eight years away, at any age. Borg is the only one who's tried it on the men's side, and he quickly concluded he should give up and play the seniors tour.

So Puerta is finished unless he can win an appeal. But so is any pretence that dope-testing has anything to do with protecting athletes, fairness, or ensuring "fair" competition. If the drugs whose traces were found in Puerta's body gave him no performance benefit (as both tribunals said), why are we destroying his career and publicly shaming him? It is graceless and inappropriate for Dick Pound, head of the world anti-dophing authority, to gloat publicly, as he has over this case.

Starting Sunday, dope testing on the men's tour will be taken over by the ITF. It's hard to know if that will improve matters or not. It's always hard to tell what's going on inside tennis because it's such a small, closed world, but after the mess with all those players testing positive for traces of nandrolone and the ATP's decision to exonerate them on the basis that its own trainers had given them contaminated sports drink powderIs is, it seemed as though the pressure was on the ATP to hand testing over to the ITF. The fact is there are too many interested parties in tennis: to whose benefit is it if a Grand Slam winner tests positive? Sponsors, naional federations, the player associations...no one wants it to come out, not really. Even the other players might legitimately fear that their own sponsorshyips might vanish if *other* players test positive. On the other hand, the problem with a single-purpose anti-doping authority is that it must justify its continued existence and expansion by catching players, the higher-profile the better. The ITF owns the Grand Slams. Maybe it's got the right balance of interests, maybe not.

Is it credible to think that individual athletes with millions of dollars at stake don't use performance-enhancing drugs, ever? With the unscrupulous agents and obsessed parents running around the tour? No. I find it extremely difficult to believe that none of them has ever used drugs to speed recovery from injuries at the very least. But punishing people for things that confer no performance benefit just makes the whole thing look like a hypocritical morality play. If Puerta were American he'd be sobbing his redemption on a talk show right now. That's *not* what the purpose of the thing was supposed toi be.

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