When John Isner fired the winning backhand past Nicolas Mahut back in the first round of the 2010 Wimbledon tournament, he put an end to the longest match in the sport’s history. Over three days, the two men spent eleven hours and five minutes on court, with the last set alone outlasting the previous record for the longest ever match. In typical British fashion, the scene is now marked by a blue plaque – a testament to a match that pushed both fans and players beyond the limits of their endurance and patience.
But for most of that epic clash, nothing happened at all. According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, only 17.5 per cent of a tennis match actually involves players grunting and knocking balls back and forth. If this holds true for Isner and Mahut’s match, then the pair spent just under two hours actually playing tennis. A normal men’s single match can easily last longer than three hours, which works out at around half an hour of playing time. The rest is eaten up by breaks between points, switching ends during odd-numbered games and players challenging decisions.
Our patience for six-hour long matches is wearing thin, and people at the very highest levels of tennis are worried that if they don’t do something drastic, the sport could become a niche hobby for the few who have that kind of time to waste. So this week, in a tournament in Milan, the sport’s overlords tested a drastic re-writing of the rules aimed at reducing the downtime in matches and turning the sport into more of a spectacle.
This is the biggest shakeup of the rules in the sport’s history, says Chris Kermode, executive chairman at the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the organisation behind the entire men’s tennis tour. “In another ten years, is anybody coming to watch a six hour product? I doubt it. I really doubt it,” he says.
Kermode is keen to emphasise that, for now at least, tennis (or the “product”, as he calls it) is still going strong. For more than a decade the ‘big four’ – Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray – have dominated the game, winning 49 out of the last 56 men’s majors titles, including two four-year stretches where no other male player won a single majors title. Nadal and Federer still top the ATP rankings, but after fourteen years of near-total dominance, it’s clear that this era is coming to an end. Tennis, which has always struggled to inspire the kind of fervent tribalism that keeps sports such as football and rugby so popular, is waking up to the reality that it will soon lose its biggest characters and there is no one to fill the void.
With the average tennis fan aged over 50, and younger viewers turned off by the prospect of lengthy matches where not much happens, the sport is rapidly approaching a precipice. “We need to start looking now, when we've got plenty of time, to see what changes could be made,” Kermode says.
Shorter sets: The first player to win four games will win the set. If the score is tied at three gaames all it'll go to a tie-break.
No-advantage: When the score is at deuce (40-40), the next player to win a point will also win the game.
No-let: Umpires will no longer call let when the ball touches the net on a player's serve.
Shot clock: A countdown will ensure that players start points within 25 seconds, and only warm up for five minutes before the start of the match.
Player coaching: Players can communicate with their coaches via headset during breaks in the match. They can also view data about the match on iPads.
The rule changes are simple and sweeping. The scoring has been tweaked so that sets are shorter and players only need a single point clear to win when the score is tied at 40-40, instead of the usual two. Players are timed between points to ensure they serve within 25 seconds of the previous point ending, and are restricted to one medical timeout per game. Line judges are replaced by an instant version of Hawk-Eye, the camera-based system that instantly detects whether a ball is in or out, with a disembodied voice making the call less than a tenth of a second after the ball hits the court.
When he suggested the changes, Kermode says he faced a negative backlash from more conservative thinkers in the sport who didn’t want to tamper with the rules. “I've had real traditionalists in sport saying I'm messing with the tradition and heritage of the sport – I'm not, I'm not going to make rash changes,” he says. “Things do evolve and it's just a question of getting the balance, of keeping those core elements that work, that make tennis what it is – gladiatorial, one on one – and seeing whether we can enhance that.”
Kermode and his colleagues at the ATP frequently refer to tennis as a “product”. When coming up with these rule changes, their goal was to squeeze matches into a two-hour format that were faster-paced and would attract fans between 25 and 40. Matches that reliably last two hours or less are also much more attractive to TV stations that are wary about signing up to air matches that could last much longer than their allotted times. The Milan tournament was streamed live on Amazon Prime Video, a clear play for a much younger audience that aren’t keen on watching traditional broadcast television.
The ATP has taken its cue from other sports, particularly cricket, which introduced the then-controversial Twenty20 format back in 2003. Despite early struggles, T20 has gone on to be incredibly popular around the world. But the ATP is also looking to other sports, such as boxing, to inject more personal drama and spectacle into matches. In Milan, a camera follows the players from the gym as they make their way to the court in a slightly more refined version of the ring walk, while huge screens display the player’s head-to-head stats. Courtside, the darkness and dramatic blue lighting gives the whole event the feel of a nightclub, while a courtside DJ fills pauses in the action with snippets of electro. Wimbledon this isn’t.
To put these new rules to the test, the ATP opted for an entirely new competition. Called Next Gen ATP Finals, the end-of-year event brings together the eight highest-ranked male players aged 21-and-under to compete for the total prize money of $1.75 million.
The tournament itself could hardly have got off to a worse start. The ATP was roundly criticised after an opening ceremony where female models removed their clothing to reveal which group the players had been drawn into. One player was asked to remove the glove of a model with his teeth. Kermode subsequently apologised for the misogynistic and degrading show, but at an event intended to showcase tennis as a modern sport, the ATP inadvertently showed it is stuck in the past. With not a single seat on the organisation’s seven-member board occupied by a woman, it is unclear whether the ATP is as committed to modernising tennis behind the scenes as it is on the court.
Two days after they were asked to awkwardly pick a model and walk arm-in-arm down a catwalk with them to find out which group they would be in, Karen Khachanov and Daniil Medvedev, both aged 21 and from Russia, faced off in the first ever trial of the new rules. Any of these young men, Kermode reminds me, could one day replace Federer at the top of the world rankings. “I know that in the next couple of years that a new star will be born and they will start to dominate the game for the next ten years,” he says.
This time, there was no downtime. From the first rally, it became clear that every single point was crucial. “You cannot have one moment when you relax your concentration,” Medvedev says after the match. “I lost the first set so fast, in about twenty minutes.”
In a normal tennis match, the midway point through a set can feel somewhat aimless. If one player takes an early lead, then they still have to win a total of six games before they can clinch the set. The inevitable, it often seems, is needlessly dragged out. By shortening sets to four games, and having a tie-break at 3-3, these new rules get rid of the dead time. Every point becomes an opportunity to turn the flow of the game back on itself. After losing the first set 4-2, Medvedev won the next three, clinching two tiebreaks in the second and third. The whole match was over in one hour and 48 minutes – much quicker than a normal men’s singles match.
“I would say it was a good test, but the sets are too short,” says Khachanov after the match. If the sets lasted longer than four games, he says, then there would be more opportunities for the losing player to make their way back into to the game. In this new, more ruthless, form of tennis one break of serve can cost a player the entire set.
Getting the buy-in of players is crucial to the success of these rule changes, but the new scoring system might be a little too much for them to stomach, Kermode says. “I don’t see the dramatic scoring change happening in the next five years, personally, but I’m a big fan of it, I think it makes things much more dynamic and takes away the down time,” he says. “Once you start changing scoring systems, that’s when people go, ‘well actually a certain type of player could win that couldn’t win before’”. Smaller changes, like the tighter timings between shots, could be easily rolled out across tournaments with little fuss, he says.
One change that the players do seem to agree on is the use of live Hawk-Eye that automatically lets players know if a shot is in or out. In the Milan matches, the usual contingent of a half-dozen or more line judges were replaced by a digital voice shouting ‘FAULT’ or ‘OUT’. Hawk-Eye has been used in tennis matches since 2006, but only as part of a challenge system where players have a limited number of chances to refer to Hawk-Eye if they disagree with a decision made by a line judge.
“Initially people are going to be sceptical about something new which changes the game, but I think it’s a benefit for the players,” says Sam Green at Hawk-Eye. “The players know how to use it it as a challenge system and now it’s just the next step in calling every line rather than having to refer to the system.”
The ATP and Hawk-Eye have been testing the system for the last year, to make sure it was fast enough to bring to live tennis. In last years ATP World Tour Finals in London, the technology was trialled behind the scenes alongside normal line judges and after subsequent tests in Indian Wells and Cincinnati in 2017, they decided it was ready to be brought to the game for real. Green tested out different sounds, including beeps, before deciding that it was better to stick with the traditional ‘fault’ and ‘out’ calls for the new digital line judge.
“It should be quite fair, this system. It doesn’t do mistakes, I hope,” says Medvedev. Although disputes of line calls are one of the dramatic joys of tennis from an audience perspective, this is one innovation that should make things fairer for players. On the second day in Milan, the system switched over from a male voice to a female voice, but Khachanov says he’d prefer that it used the same voice as the umpire, to make things less confusing on court.
Other rule changes are proving much less popular with players. This tournament did away with the let rule, which usually means that if the player serving hits the top of the net with the ball, they replay that serve. Now all serves are valid, as long as they make it into the opposing player’s service box. Actually getting players and officials to internalise this change, however, may prove to be more of a challenge. “I know that to change that in a player's mind over a long time - that's going to be a battle,” Kermode says.
Halfway through the opening match, Medvedev’s serve caught the top of the net before dropping in the service box in front of Khachanov. In a normal game of tennis, this would be an invalid serve, but not in this tournament. Instinctively, however, umpire Carlos Bernardes called out ‘let’ top stop play, earning himself quizzical looks from the players and a smattering of applause from the audience members who had noticed the mistake.
If the ATP makes the decision to change the rules across the entire tour, which includes almost all major tennis competition except the four grand slams, Kermode says that it wouldn’t make sense to do it bit by bit. “If we do, I'm a believer that we would roll it out in the tour the whole way.”
As the tournament in Milan draws to a close, he’ll meet with players, sponsors and other officials to discuss how the rule changes impacted the game, and whether they’re likely to provide the kind of boost to viewership that they’re hoping for. People in tennis have talked for decades about shaking up the rules, but now is the time to stop speculating and start trying to save the sport before the decline really kicks in, Kermode says. But whether turning tennis into a product will benefit the sport in the long-run remains to be seen.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
