Commentary: Tennis Injury Cries Go Unheeded on WTA Tour

Posted on August 19, 2005

By Richard Vach, Tennis-X.com Senior Writer

Can you imagine more than half of the Top 10 women golfers being sidelined with injuries and the LPGA sitting idly by saying 'It's just a coincidence!'

Or how about half of Major League Baseball's marquee players sitting out, suffering arm, back and shoulder problems, and baseball commissioner Bud Selig shrugging his shoulders saying, 'Eh, looks like a fluke.'

You wouldn't see it, because in golf or baseball it would never get to this stage.

Number one, neither pro golf or baseball have let technology turn their sports into video games.

An example was golf banning square-groove clubs, which let players hit super-accurate shots with increased spin.

Baseball has never let players rise above the favorite tool of over-muscled brutes since the stone age -- the wooden bat.

No graphite. No titanium, no "wide-body" bats or "pro-braided power beam construction," whatever the hell that is. Just wood.

Number two, golf and baseball have strong leadership that quickly act without consulting or getting the approval of 20 other alphabet organizations.

Golf and baseball are two examples or sports that have limited technology advancements to maintain the integrity of their sports.

Tennis, on the other hand, is in the throes of a transformation that 10 years from now could see the sport totally resembling (as opposed to partially right now) something you see on a video game console. Make sure you hold down the "C" button on your racquet as your swing for maximum power, and even a blue flare will appear behind the ball.

Tennis' governing bodies, the ATP for the men, the WTA Tour for the women, and the International Tennis Federation for the Grand Slam events, have set very few limits on racquet manufacturers over the years, and now technology rather than skill has changed the game.

Racquet manufacturers such as Babolat, the racquet of choice for an ever-growing number of tour players and juniors, produce technological marvels that allow players to slap winners from anywhere on the court -- screaming winners that in years past were only within the grasp of students of the game who had perfected the proper shoulder-turn, stepping into the ball, meeting it out front, those myriad instructions you forgot immediately upon the end of the lesson.

No matter. Now the learning curve is simply grip it and rip it.

Unfortunately for the pros, the shock and stress on the arms and shoulders from returning these 21st century rockets, and the lower-body stress on the hips and leg muscle from chasing down these Babolat blasts, are sidelining more of the top players every day.

Last week seven of the Top 11 players were sidelined with injuries or illnesses.

WTA Tour CEO Larry Scott has held firm that the wave of injuries to the women over the last couple years are just happenstance.

"Injuries are a part of every sport," Scott told Reuters. "It is a bit of a flukish that so many players are injured at the same time and I don't expect this to happen next summer. Having said that, we want to do everything possible to keep the players as healthy and playing as much as possible."

The key phrase there is "playing as much as possible."

These days the WTA Tour's mantra is players playing all the time. Scott was instrumental in cutting two weeks off the end of the season to give players more rest, but the 10-month seasonal grind remains unchanged.

Some say 'If it's an epidemic, then why fewer problems on the men's side?'

To those I would say re-enroll in Human Anatomy 101 and check into the differences between men's and women's bodies. On the men's side Marat Safin just took some time off with a knee injury, Andre Agassi is touch-and-go, and Nikolay Davydenko came off a wrist injury, from players currently ranked in the Top 10. And Guillermo Coria spent much of late-2004 and early this year recovering from shoulder surgery.

Former player and current ESPN commentator Mary Joe Fernandez points out that as recently as her days on tour, players had more leeway to pick their spots during the year to rest and recuperate.

"We need to cut the season back and players need to know their bodies better, when to play and when not to," Fernandez said. "When Steffi Graf, Monica Seles and I used to play, we had a (ranking) divisor of 12 tournaments. Now you have to play (at least) 18 (tournaments) to stay ahead. That's too much."

This week Serena Williams withdrew mid-event from Toronto with a knee injury. This after an ankle injury kept her off tour in previous weeks, and knee surgery kept her off the tour for parts of 2003 and last year. Sister Venus missed much of 2003 with an abdominal injury, and last year added wrist, ankle and leg muscle injuries.

Marketing machine Maria Sharapova pulled out of Toronto this week with a chest muscle injury -- before that injuring her back playing World TeamTennis. Current world No. 1 Lindsay Davenport has been out weeks with a back injury. Former No. 1 Justine Henin-Hardenne just returned to the tour after sitting out with a hamstring injury.

Can someone chart this, make a PowerPoint graph or something? This would make a hell of a bar chart.

Kim Clijsters had to miss virtually all of last year with a wrist injury. Mary Pierce had to pull out of her last two events with a thigh injury. Elena Bovina has been out with a shoulder injury these past weeks, likewise her Russian counterpart Vera Zvonareva out with an ankle sprain. Jennifer Capriati is out indefinitely after shoulder surgery.

And these are only injuries to Top 20 players.

"If they are not healthy, I think tennis should address that and figure out why there are so many injuries out there," said former great Chris Evert.

Or not.

What other sport would sit idly by with half their marquee stars on the sidelines with injuries?

And while women's tennis is enjoying an elevated level of popularity, how much more interest would there be if former No. 1-ranked Martina Hingis and former No. 1 internet queen Anna Kournikova were still in the mix, rather than being forced to retire at 22 with injuries?

Are the injuries due to overplaying? Is racquet technology playing a part? Are they just clumsy? Are they overtraining? Are evil hardcourt injury pixies on the loose? What the hell is going on? And why does everyone seem to care except the WTA?

The tour suits (men and women) don't want to investigate because the results will inevitably yield a need for corralling the racquet technology or making changes to the tour calendar, which is about as easy and quick as taking apart and reassembling your car.

"We should have had an off-season long ago, even before injuries became such a big part of the game. It's not acceptable to have so many top players not being able to get well and stay well," said Martina Navratilova, who says she saw fewer injuries in her day, even though the WTA says there has been no injury increase over the years. "I pulled out, I think, three times during a tournament and about three times before a tournament in my whole career...Now, it's four, five, six tournaments a year these top players are pulling out, or more. That's a shame...The last few years on the tour, I didn't play the Australian Open. That was my off-season. You shouldn't have to forego a Grand Slam to get enough of a break so you can recover and get healthy."

Yesterday third-round play at the WTA stop in Toronto was an injury version of the perfect storm, with four players succumbing to mishaps and muscle pulls.

Svetlana Kuznetsova, whose stocky build has rarely lent itself to injury during her career, suffered a back injury in the first set of her match. Although she was apparently in great pain, the Russian has little experience with injury and decided to play through the pain -- much to the delight of Tournament Director Stacey Allaster who has had a nightmare week of big-player drop-outs at the Roger Cup.

"She was a fighter," Allaster said. "When she came off the court she was screaming in pain. The tour asked her if she wanted to continue, but she said yes."

Hooray! Which must have been a delight for sports writers in Toronto who have been pondering why women tennis players can't be more like male football players and just play through pain. Nice grasp of sports and physiology.

The Russian's effort was good for Allaster, but bad for Kuznetsova may have put her US Open chances in further jeopardy.

"I just felt like I couldn't turn my body," said Kuznetsova, who didn't seem to feel that twisting might be an integral part of hitting a tennis ball for the remainder of the match. "Sometimes it just hurt. You wait for a couple minutes and it goes away. And I still kept trying. I played two more points and I said, 'It's hurting too much. I cannot turn my body to the side. I cannot push myself for the serve.'"

Hopefully the Russian will be able to defend her title in New York, but if reports are true will likely be forced to pull out of New Haven next week, another casualty of the "fluky injuries."

Hit the same day with mishaps were Anastasia Myskina (ankle), China's Li Na (ankle), and up-and-coming Serb Ana Ivanovic who strained a pectoral muscle strain, same as Maria Sharapova.

"Sometimes when you feel the pain, you try to be tougher, really become stronger," said Myskina, displaying the same Russian old-school attitude as Kuznetsova, leaving the court crying before coming back with a taped ankle to complete the win. "So I was kind of thinking to finish the match because I was up. I really felt that if I just can put everything to that set, I'm going to be able to win the match."

After the match Myskina could not judge the extent of the injury and whether she would pull out of her Friday quarterfinal.

"Maybe just today I have a pain and tomorrow it might go away, because I'm going to do a lot of treatment today and hopefully tomorrow I'm going to be good," Myskina said.

If only the pain could be treated and go away for the WTA Tour.

Probably the least-wanted job in sports right now belongs to the WTA's CEO Scott.

Your Top 20 players are dropping like flies. Marquee players Davenport, Sharapova and Serena are on the sidelines with back, chest and knee problems. Your few remaining healthy stars such as Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne are fresh off extended injuries (keep your fingers crossed) with wrist and leg problems.

You're being pulled apart in two directions, by tournament directors wanting you to supply more of the top players more of the time, and the players wanting you to represent their interests by appearing to show some concern for their welfare.

People feel you. They know the job is tough -- times are tough -- but ask anyone who plays the game, or has played the game and seen the level out there right now, and they'll tell you that ignoring the injury epidemic will not make it go away.

Things will come to a head during the next three weeks through the end of the US Open -- and you have to get the feeling that 'these injuries are flukes' isn't going to cut it much longer.

Richard Vach is an oft-injured senior writer for Tennis-X.com.