ATP Deals With
Players' Raction to
Blake/de Villiers Incident

It looks like it’s time to say good-bye to the ATP’s round-robin experiment.

 

In an incredible and ferocious condemnation of the ATP’s trial with round robins in World Series tournaments, three of the tour’s top players — Roger Federer, Andy Roddick and ATP Players Council VP James Blake — all said that the experiment should be blown up, and it appears that the format danced its last waltz at the Tennis Channel Open in Las Vegas.

 

Roddick believes that when the tour’s board of directors holds its meetings in Miami at the end of March, they’ll vote to kill it.

 

“I think we’ve seen the last of it,” Roddick said  “I don’t see how you can get around pullouts, going to a match and having to win five games and hit three drop shots to advance to the quarters, a million other things. There’s too much left to the players, whether it’s a friend, maybe dodging a game to let another one through. I just think there’s too many holes in it. It’s a good example of why you can’t look at tennis and treat it as a business because there are players involved and matches are won and lost.  It’s not completely a show.”

 

The format took a big hit in Vegas when ATP CEO Etienne de Villiers stepped in, gave defending champ Blake a pass into the quarters.  The next day, he reversed his decision and rightly stuck by the current rule book, which meant that Russian Evgeny Korolev advanced. The tournament used a format of eight groups of three players.

 

De Villiers had been called in because Blake’s opponent, Juan del Potro, had retired down 6-1, 3-1, and no one on-site was sure whether or not the result should be thrown out because it was a retirement.  Had Blake won a few more games, he would have advanced to the quarters, but he never had the opportunity. The rule says that the result must be thrown out and the next decider is the head-to-head between the two players in question, and since Korolev beat Blake, he rightly got a pass.

 

Chaos rained, and Marat Safin told Reuters that it was Blake’s status as ATP Players Council VP that influenced the decision.

 

“This is exactly the saddest part...If it had been the other way around, nobody would care about it and it just would be no discussion at all,” he said. “Unfortunately, the CEO, he put James in the wrong situation. I don’t think James wants to be in this situation at all. Somebody got screwed. It’s nobody’s fault but the people upstairs... With all due respect, the situation has been handled in a not professional way at all. For a serious organization [like] the ATP, you can’t make these kinds of decisions in the middle of the week, by the phone, and the CEO disappointed me a lot.”

 

De Villiers did issue a sizable mea culpa: “I was contacted late at night my time and did not fully understand the issues being discussed, and I made a judgment call on what seemed fair,” he said. “However, I understand that judgment calls are not part of the rule book and I must abide by the rules, as must everybody else in the circumstance. I apologize to James for giving false hope and to Evgeny for the confusion. I said we would be prepared to make mistakes, but that we would reverse them if necessary and learn from them. I hope that it is recognized that I acted in good faith and my intentions were to do the right thing and see fairness prevail. Clearly, I was wrong to intervene. I have always maintained that we should experiment with new and different ideas and it was with this in mind that I made what I thought was a fair call.  I regret that I got involved, that I overruled a supervisor and I regret this storm in a teacup.”

 

Blake later said that a round-robin format should only be used for the year-end Masters Cup.

 

“Diplomatically, I’d say we’ll revisit it, we’ll talk, but I don’t want it anymore,” he said. “There are too many possibilities of matches that could turn into exhibitions.  I don’t want to see more round-robin tournaments that get decided on who goes through by a rule, as opposed to by who wins a match. To go out there with the scenario of going out to win by a certain score, it’s not natural.  You wouldn’t tell a basketball team to go out and cover a line, like a Vegas spread.  You’d tell them to go out and win the game.  Hopefully the best thing that might come of it is that round-robins might be going by the wayside.”

 

Federer has disagreed with the experiment from the start and said he was pleased that it has begun to fizzle.

 

“I’m not at all in favor of it.  I think it’s never going to happen...I just thought there were too many problems with the whole system, and so I’m happy a problem arose.  Unfortunately, it always takes a few players involved that everybody kind of wakes up.”

 

Speculation as to who called de Villiers was still rampant at press time. Blake was told when he came off court that he would get through, but then was told he wouldn’t, so he went to on-site ATP officials and asked for clarification. It appears that it was ATP Supervisor Mark Darby or some other ATP official who called de Villiers, not Blake or Tennis Channel Open TD David Edges.

 

“My initiative was just going in to talk to Darby about it, learn about the rule, to find out what was going on, how this happened, how come no one let us know of the rule,” Blake said. “And it just kind of spiraled into a long discussion.  And before we knew it, we were on the phone with Etienne.  I don’t know who initially called him, but we just decided maybe we need to get more people on the line as to figuring out this situation.”

 

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