Friday, September 7, 2007

More on Night Tennis

A few more notes on night tennis at the US Open, which was also featured in Greg Garber's ESPN column today:

1. Television dollars are clearly driving the scheduling, but that doesn't necessarily help the men's tour (ATP) rather than WTA (women's tour) or the US Open/USTA itself.

2. In addition to being the only Grand Slam tournament on US soil, the US Open was the first tournament to move to night tennis, according to Garber (Australia has subsequently followed suit, altough Wimbledon and Paris remain day-only events).

3. If the women are the main draw, why are the women's semis being played during the afternoon? (The mens' SF are also being played in the afternoon, but on a weekend, rather than a Friday.)

4. In response to a comment, if Meghann Shaughnessy had defeated Sybille Bammer in the second round, and Jamea Jackson had defeated Nicole Pratt in the first, bringing the Yanks closer to .500 (31-33, ex. additional results), then...what exactly?

1 comment:

Matt Eastwick said...

A few points:

There is no Friday night session, probably because 1) there aren't enough marquee matchups this late in the tourney to justify two sessions and 2) they probably don't want to be playing the women's final on less than 24 hours reat

Also, 50% profit margin on the Open is insane. I would assume that means there will be some inflationary pressure on players' winnings. Total attendance will exceed 700,000 this year, which means that 2 weeks of tennis draws about the same number of people as an NBA regular season, with similar ticket pricing as well.

Finally, the reason why golf pros earn more than tennis pros all the way down the money leaderboard in the disparity of prize money between the "majors" and ordinary tourneys. The prize money is TEN TIMES more at the US Tennis Open vs last week's event (Pilot Pen in New Haven). Compare that to less than double for golf. You can make a great living just "grinding" in golf--not so in tennis.