Events like WTA Championships Ruin the Rankings
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Make the Slams Truly Grand
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Warning - gripe incoming.
Here's why I don't like the year-end championships - because they aren't.
This isn't the end of the year, unless Santa Claus tore two pages off his calendar by accident, and no championship is on the line.
This is a money grab for players, advertisers, one selected city and the tour itself. The winner of this tournament isn't guaranteed to be the No. 1 player at year's end, so how can it be a championship?
If after the Super Bowl, all the teams got a ranking based on their wins that season, and the Super Bowl winner had won nine games while another team won 13, would it make sense to have the 13-win team declared NFL champion?
I've harped before on how much I hate the points ranking system, but this just really takes the cake for me. Caroline Wozniacki needed only win two matches in her group to claim the top spot for the year, a campaign in which she yet again failed to win a Grand Slam title.
With so many tournaments, so many 1,000 and 500 point opportunities to allow a very good player to stockpile points without taking out the best of the best, something needs to be done to prevent this from becoming the era of the paper champion.
When i check out the current WTA rankings, I have to get down to Samantha Stosur at No. 7 before I find a player that I'm convinced Wozniacki could beat in any given final.
Yet there she sits, No. 1 in the year-end rankings thanks to a 64-15 record on the year and five tournament titles.
Gaudy numbers to be sure, but delve deeper into them and tell me how Wozniacki is possibly the best player in the game right now.
Out in the third round at the French Open and the fourth round at Wimbledon, she did herself proud by reaching the semifinals at the Australian Open and the US Open, but losing in the final four makes her Andy Murray, not Novak Djokovic.
In her five tournament championships in 2011, she defeated a grand total of four Top 10 opponents. One of those five tournament victories was at Copenhagen, and while I laud her for playing to her home country fans, winning a tourney where your opponents have an average ranking of No. 84 in the world isn't exactly convincing the critics.
What really bothers me is the way Wozniacki loses. Much like fellow "why aren't you winning?" candidate Vera Zvonareva, when she loses, it's crash and burn, not fight tooth and nail.
Don't believe me? The proof is in the Danish pudding - Doha: 6-4, 6-4 loss to Zvonareva in the final; 7-6, 6-3 loss to Julia Goerges in the Stuttgart final; 7-5, 6-3 to Maria Sharapova in the Rome semifinals; 6-1, 6-3 to Daniela Hantuchova in the French Open third round and 6-4, 6-2 to Serena Williams in the semifinals at Flushing Meadows.
That is not the work of the top player of the game. A good player, maybe even a great player, but not the No. 1.
So what's the solution? Simple - overvalue the Slams and undervalue everything else. Nobody remembers who wins Indian Wells or Miami every year, but even casual fans of the game can tell you who won Wimbledon the last five years.
If the WTA insists on keeping the points system, then weight it accordingly. Drop the 1,000-point events to 500, and the 470s to 250. Bump the majors up to 2,500 points. Those are the tournaments that carry the sport. And winning even one of them in your career is an absolutely amazing thing, don't undersell the power of them.
Part of winning a big tournament is getting through the early rounds when there's a target on your back in every match and beating you will make a lower-ranked player's entire season.
And then there's the year-end championships. Keep having them, keep inviting the top eight players to compete, but take the points out of it. Make it all about prestige and money, athletes seem to like those things.
What's on your mind? Post a comment below.
Posted by Nick on 10/31/2011 8:07:40 AM
Filed under: australian, clijsters, french, kvitova, serena, stosur, us, wimbledon, wozniacki, wta, zvonareva
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