Round-Robins Designed To Forestall Upsets

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The New York Sun

As Roger Federer plowed through another tournament last week, eventually dismissing Fernando Gonzalez for the second time in as many Sundays, officials at the ATP Tour had their minds on next year’s season-long experiment.

For men’s tennis, 2007 will be the year of the round-robin tournament. Avid tennis fans have become acquainted with the format at the year-end Masters Cup, where eight players break off into two groups of four and play three matches each. The top two from each group move on to the semifinals and play single elimination from there.

At the U.S. Open this year, Etienne de Villiers, the former Disney executive who now runs the ATP, announced that the tour would sanction more roundrobin events next year, with a simple goal in mind: reduce upsets.

Under the format, a top-seeded player can lose a match and still move beyond the round-robin stage — and if not, a tournament director can console himself with the fact that he has sold tickets against the star for two matches at two guaranteed times. There are other goals, too. Round-robin tournaments require more matches, so most of them will begin on Sunday rather than Monday. The plan, according to the ATP and tournament directors, is to attract casual tennis fans on “family day” Sundays, and with any luck, turn them into diehards. Other possibilities, including a super tiebreaker in place of a third set, could come into play down the road.

The ATP has not finalized its schedule for 2007, and de Villiers is fond of saying he wants to test innovations and decide later whether to adopt them or consign them to the dustbin. Last week, the tour offered 13 likely candidates for round-robin events; a few of them certainly will participate: the Adelaide International prior to the Australian Open, the Delray Beach International Tennis Championships in February, and the Tennis Channel Open in Las Vegas. Others could include the Wimbledon warm-up at Queens Club in London and the Legg Mason Classic in Washington, D.C. (The tour’s largest events — the Grand Slams and the Masters Series tournaments — will not employ round-robin, though two Masters events, Monte Carlo and Montreal, will start on Sunday.)

Mark Baron, who runs the Delray Beach tournament, said round robin would have helped him in 2003, when Andy Roddick, his top seed, stubbed his toe in the first round and forfeited his match against Mardy Fish. Roddick felt better the next day, and even decided to hang around the grounds for a practice session. Jan-Michael Gambill won the title.

“Now Roddick could have a bad day and end up in the final,” Baron said. He said he would sell half-price tickets for the first Sunday of the tournament and devise other promotions.

At the U.S. Open, both Federer and Rafael Nadal expressed support for the changes. Federer has since broken ranks and adopted the more traditional view that the knockout tournament should be preserved. For lower ranked players, there is less to like, especially at 32-draw tournaments, where they will have to qualify for round-robin play.

It takes a little math to understand why. A traditional 48-draw tournament consists of 47 matches (the top 16 players receive a bye as the other 32 play for a spot in the second round).At a roundrobin event with 48 players, divided into 16 groups of three, tournament directors will need to field 63 matches (it takes 48 matches to complete the round-robin phase and another 15 matches after the tournament has been reduced to 16 players). Given an extra day, most 48-draw events have facilities large enough to host 16 more matches, just as most 24-draw events can host 31 matches, rather than the traditional 23.

It’s a different story at a 32-draw event. Traditionally, it would require 31 matches with no byes. But if players were divided into eight groups of four, and played each player in a group once, the tournament would need to host 48 matches to complete the round-robin stage, and then another 7 matches to finish the tournament. That’s 55 matches compared to 31, an increase too large for an event of that size. Perhaps more troubling, many of those matches would be “dead,” i.e., count for zilch. (Losing the first two matches guarantees that a player cannot survive the group, so what’s to gain by playing a third time?)

To solve this problem, the ATP sanctioned a hybrid format for 32-draw events like Delray Beach. On Sunday, the bottom 16 players will square off in single elimination (total matches played: eight). The eight winners will then join the top 16 seeds for a 24-man round-robin event (eight groups of three). In total, it takes 39 matches to finish the event, a much more palatable number for tournament directors.

Not for those bottom 16 players, however. They now could survive a singleelimination round, upset a top seed in a round-robin match, and conceivably go home without reaching the quarterfinals. On the positive side, the tour will increase prize money next year by 10%, so whatever rounds a lesser ranked player can win, he’ll buy a few more dinners with his take.

Though the round-robin idea has been cast as an act of scale-tipping in favor of Federer-Nadal finals, neither of those men will gain very much from it. The last time Federer lost in the second round (or earlier) in a round-robin eligible event was three years ago in his hometown of Basel, Switzerland — a tournament he won for the first time yesterday, 6–3, 6–2, 7–6(3) over Gonzalez. Nadal lost in the second round in Stockholm earlier this month, but hadn’t lost so early in a small tournament since Halle in June 2005 — on grass.

It’s the second-tier of top players — Andy Roddick, Ivan Ljubicic, David Nalbandian, Marcos Baghdatis, James Blake, Gonzalez, Andy Murray, and Richard Gasquet — who should benefit the most from these changes. And many of them might benefit from a fivefold increase in the ATP’s marketing budget, now at $5 million.

“The awareness of our leading players isn’t what we want it to be,” Phil Anderton, the tour’s chief marketing officer, said. “The round robin is very important because it gives our fans and broadcasters more certainty.”

***

With his run to the finals in Basel, Gonzalez has moved into striking distance for a spot in the year-end Masters Cup. He trails Tommy Robredo by eight points and James Blake by nine. The final Masters tournament of the year, the Paris Masters, begins today.

tperrotta@nysun.com


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