Road Rage Season
As the tennis season staggers through China, player behavior is fraying and the public's patience is wearing thin.
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Before we get into the ugliness around tennis in recent days in China, I want to start with a more fun moment.
This stretch of the tennis calendar always reminds me of a moment ten years ago, a day or two after Serena Williams won her sixth (and ultimately final) U.S. Open title, when she was holding court in the conference room of the JP Morgan Chase building in Manhattan.
Near the end of her media roundtable, Serena spoke about her outlook on the rest of the season. From my New York Times story that day in 2014:
Williams still has a fall schedule with high stakes. She is the defending champion in Beijing and at the WTA Championships, which begin a five-year stint in Singapore. She is also entered in an inaugural tournament in Wuhan, China, the hometown of third-ranked Li Na.
“I’m in Wuhan, Beijing, and the championships,” Williams recounted somewhat wearily. “I have a heavy end of the year to try to get to.”
An Italian reporter seemed distressed by her priorities, and asked her: “What about love?”
“There’s no time for love,” Williams replied. “I’ve got to go to Wuhan.”
Serena’s exasperatedly defeated reply drew the laughs from the room she’d intended: ever since it was added to the WTA schedule for that season, “Wuhan” had been a reliable punchline. Though populous, Wuhan had little profile as a world city in 2014; its arrival to the tennis calendar—as a prestigious WTA 1000-level event no less—struck many veterans of the circuit as a new height of absurdity in complaints about the bloated tennis season.
The Doldrums
The post-U.S. Open period has long since been the doldrums of the tennis circuit. (Thanks to Nate Silver for reupping that word in my mind yesterday and for sending many of you readers here!)
Major titles are increasingly considered the be-all, end-all tennis currency in this era of tennis, and so the U.S. Open feels like the natural end point for tennis each year. It’s certainly the year’s end of broader consciousness about tennis results beyond diehards: interest in tennis articles always dropped off dramatically among sports editors each year after the U.S. Open, especially with autumn being the most densely populated season of the American sports landscape.
Back to Serena in 2014: she indeed went to Wuhan a few weeks later1, but it would be the last time she deigned to participate in that part of the schedule as her focus narrowed. After losing a year later in the 2015 U.S. Open semifinals to Roberta Vinci, a stunning upset that ended her bid for the elusive calendar Grand Slam, Serena withdrew from the rest of the 2015 WTA season, abjuring the Asian swing entirely. That pattern stuck: Serena never played a post-U.S. Open WTA tournament again in the remaining seven years of her career.2
While I’m sure the WTA wishes Serena had played more of their autumn tournaments, particularly their showcase year-end championships event, those sorts of scheduling decisions also undoubtedly prolonged Serena’s overall career.
My Own Great Wall
Before going further into China’s place on the tour, I should probably disclose my own unique history with the Chinese swing of the tennis calendar: not for lack of trying, I’ve never been!
When I was tipped off that Li Na would be announcing her retirement during the 2014 Chinese swing, the same year that Wuhan was getting added to the calendar, I made plans to attend Wuhan, Beijing, and Shanghai. But because I was set to be covering the retirement and tournaments for The New York Times, which at the time was getting frozen out of visas by the Chinese government who did not want the NYT’s scrutiny of their country, I never got my visa.
Despite getting a letter of endorsement from Li Na herself, they didn’t budge; I actually went to the Chinese consulate in Washington DC the morning of my flight, wheeling in my fully packed suitcase, in a last ditch attempt, but no dice. My visa request was never officially denied, but nor was it never granted; weeks after my planned departure, I went to the consulate and withdrew my application so I could get my passport back.
Since there has been no noticeable thaw from Chinese government toward Western press in the years following—and because the time difference between Asia and America made life difficult filing to a New York-based newspaper—I haven’t tried again since. I would love to get to go to the Chinese tournaments some time in the future; maybe now that I haven’t worked for the NYT in a couple years, I’ll try again.
But honestly, it was also nice to adjust my own travel schedule, Serena-style, spending each autumn at home to rest and recharge for the next season.
Restless Road Warriors
Most of the folks on tour do keeping rolling onward through the end of the season, though. A large majority players crave additional prize money and ranking points more eagerly than Serena did at that late stage of her career—or than top-ranked Iga Swiatek, who skipped both Beijing and Wuhan, did this year—and there’s lots of money and ranking points available in the Asian swing (and the European indoor swing for the men). But the strain is often visible: motoring through the doldrums far from home drains more energy from players than when their sails are full of the motivating winds that power them through earlier months.
There have been past flare-ups in this week of the season. On the men’s side, one of the longest ATP suspensions in recent memory was earned by Nick Kyrgios in 2016 for his flagrant tanking in Shanghai, getting an eight-week ban from the tour. “My body finally just gave out in Shanghai both physically and mentally,” Kyrgios said.
Kyrgios is a usual suspect when it comes to boorish behavior, to be sure, but this time of year can catch up with lots of players. After his loss in Shanghai to Roman Safiullin earlier today, Frances Tiafoe went absolutely apoplectic about accurate time violation calls against him late in the match, unleashing a completely uncharacteristic tirade at Ecuadorian chair umpire Jimmy Pinoargote.
Tiafoe, who has no history of similar outbursts, profusely apologized on his Instagram after the match, to his credit:
Still, in any normal, functional sport, that sort of outburst against an official would guarantee a hefty fine and suspension for Tiafoe. But since the ATP set such an absurdly lenient precedent two years ago—when it failed to suspend Alexander Zverev for violently swinging his racquet at an umpire in Acapulco—it’s hard to imagine Tiafoe’s only-verbal tirade getting a harsher penalty.
Zverev, who has more of a reputation for anger on court, was himself also a tantrum-thrower today in Shanghai as it happened, melting down at Swedish chair umpire Mo Lahyani after Lahyani correctly called a pretty obvious double bounce against Zverev.
Zverev, unlike Tiafoe, explicitly cited his own overplaying as a reason for his anger during the outburst themselves.
In his first outburst, Zverev explicitly cited the Chinese section of the calendar for his lack of emotional control.
“I’m playing more than 80 matches this year,” Zverev complained. “With injuries, with illness, with everything. And I cannot be bothered, to go to China in October, for you to screw up this.”
Lahyani tried to be conciliatory to defuse the situation, hollowly suggesting that anger was out of character for Zverev, but Zverev continued on at the changeover.
“I’m absolutely done. I cannot be bothered to play 80 matches in a year…it’s not possible. Every Grand Slam final I play I lose it because of you guys’ mistake…you’re sitting on a comfortable chair while I’m running my ass off at 9 pm, and I’ve been doing it for nine months now this year.”
(Thank you to Twitter’s @sportyandhot for these fair-use video uploads!)
Instead of complaining about his own scheduling decisions, and counting up how many matches he’s played before electing to play even more, Zverev could easily take a page from Serena’s book and rest if he’s as beleaguered as he says he is.
China Is Tired, Too
There have also been a pair of major missteps by women’s players in China in recent days, too, albeit off the court.
First, 2023 Australian Open semifinalist Magda Linette crassly posted on social media as her train was pulling into Wuhan, a city that suffered enormous losses and hardships as Ground Zero of the Covid-19 pandemic, that “The virus database has been updated.”
The wildly insensitive remark upon arrival was not taken well by the locals who had survived the tragedy of years earlier, to say the least. As spectators shouted at her to “apologize,” Linette’s on-court interview following her win in Wuhan today was swiftly aborted when she tried to address the issue.
The WTA Tour hadn’t been back in Wuhan since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2019—because of a combination of the pandemic, the financial crisis in China, and the still-not-fully-resolved controversy over the disappearance of Peng Shuai—and Linette’s boneheaded remark made it a rocky landing.
Unfortunately for the WTA, Linette’s post wasn’t the only wild misfire by a women’s tennis player this week. Paula Badosa’s coach, Pol Toledo, posted a photo on Instagram of Badosa pulling her eyes wide with chopsticks, a gesture widely known to be offensive to Asians, and which drew outrage.
Badosa denied intending any offense—“I was just playing around with my face and wrinkles,” she wrote in a comment on Instagram—but the plausibility of that seems low given that this isn’t even the first time a Spanish athlete has been photographed in a similar pose, after the country’s entire women’s tennis and men’s basketball teams did in 2008, the year of the Beijing Summer Olympics.
Rather than face the wrath of the crowd, Badosa, who had made the semifinals in Beijing, withdrew from the Wuhan tournament altogether.
To stop more eyes from rolling, popping, or grimacing during the China swing next year, maybe more players should instead go home and shut their eyes for a good nap.
Surely delighting that Italian reporter, Serena also found her elusive love a few months later in Rome when she met her now-husband Alexis Ohanian during the 2015 Italian Open.
Serena actually only ever played one post-U.S. Open tournament the rest of her career, and it was under extraordinary circumstances: when the pandemic caused the 2020 French Open to be rescheduled for October, Serena was there. (She won her first round match and then withdrew before the second).
Tennis should probably imitate pga golf and go directly to playoffs after last major. Shanghai could go with Australian Open along with Tokyo/Beijing and Paris masters could honestly just get abolished. Paris already has a big tournament.