ATP Adelaide Preview: Round Robin Ruckus

Ready?

Take a look at the "draw":
http://www.atptennis.com/posting/2007/339/MDS.pdf

Yes, this looks like tax time for the IRS. Look at all those boxes. There are roughly 400 info boxes on that draw, no joke. Who designed that, the ATP accounting dept.? This is what was e-mailed to the media as the official tournament draw, and the first thing that throws you is -- there are only 16 players on the draw, where are the other 16?

Luckily for confused media like us, the ATP on-site communications people do daily media notes. Unluckily for us, when we clicked on the notes link from the e-mail announcing the draw, we was taken to a webpage that announced: "Server Error in '/en' Application. The resource cannot be found."

This made us pause and look around the room. Were we on candid camera? Was this the start of the tennis season, or an early April Fools joke? This only toughened our resolve. "I will beat you ATP!" said one writer to no one in particular. "I will understand and report the tennis! You cannot stop us!"

More info, more info, need more info. Think dammit! Find the missing players. Need more info. Hmmm. Aha!

The media e-mail pointed to the 400-box draw, but the ATP website upon investigation also lists a "Main Draw Elimination Round" draw. Another draw. This one with a little less than 100 boxes on it:
http://www.atptennis.com/en/common/TrackIt.asp?file=http://www.atptennis.com/posting/2007/339/mde.pdf

Only problem with this draw is, as of Sunday in Australia, Day One of the event, the qualifying isn't updated even though it's in the second round, and the Main Draw Elimination section, which is supposed to contain the mystery players, is blank. Perhaps it's updated by the time you're reading this.

From the media e-mail Day One schedule, which contains no seeded players (sorry ticket holders, you got jobbed), you can see that the qualifying is still being completed, and you're shown who a couple of the mystery players competing in the Main Draw Elimination round are:

Centre Court start 11:00 AM
A Delic (USA) vs C Guccione (AUS) -- Main Draw Elimination
M Vassallo Arguello (ARG) vs P Luczak (AUS) -- Main Draw Elimination
L Dlouhy (CZE) vs J Johansson (SWE) -- Main Draw Elimination
 
Court 1 start 11:00 am
A Stoppini (ITA) vs P Baccanello (AUS) -- Qualifying Match
W Moodie (RSA) vs T Summerer (GER) -- Qualifying Match
Not Before 3:00 PM
G Muller (LUX) vs A Jones (AUS) -- Main Draw Elimination
 
Court 2 start 11:00 am
R de Voest (RSA) vs G Soeda (JPN) -- Qualifying Match
E Gulbis (LAT) vs N Healey (AUS) -- Qualifying Match

Delic, Chris "Penthouse" Guccione, Vassalo Arguello, Luczak, Dlouhy, Lleyton Hewitt's sister's former squeeze Joachim "The Jackhammer" Johansson, Muller, and Jones. There we go, now add the players dropped into the round robin with the seeds on the official draw, and we have the remaining players: Jan Hajek, Paul Goldstein, Vince Spadea, Florent Serra, Jan Hernych, Janko Tipsarevic, Benjamin Becker and Florian Mayer.

So after a little detective work, we're at the "tournament preview" part.

Serb teen Novak Djokovic is the top seed in Adelaide, an exciting young player who nonetheless brings about as much star quality as the defending champ Serra, who the majority of tennis fans would be hard pressed to name his country of origin -- or play the ever-popular game "Where in the World is Florent Serra?" Other than in round robin Group 4.

Answer: He's from France. As is the No. 2 seed, Richard Gasquet, followed by the man brave enough to undertake the usually career-ending task of dating Martina Hingis, No. 3 seed Radek Stepanek, then No. 4 Lleyton Hewitt, No. 5 Dominik "The Dominator" Hrbaty, and Frenchmen (Serra's win last year seems to have sent them flocking) rounding out of the final three seeds in No. 6 Arnaud Clement, No. 7 Gilles Simon, and No. 8 Paul-Henri Mathieu.

Hewitt, coming off disastrous injury-plagued season in 2006 where he didn't surpass the third round at a Masters Series event of the quarters at a Slam, nonetheless says he enters this year playing better than when he was ranked No. 1.

"I think I'm a better player now than I probably was when I was No. 1, No. 2 in the world a couple of years ago," Hewitt says. "But you have got to produce that week in, week out and obviously with a few niggling injuries that is pretty hard to do."

Our memory must be bad, because we remember Hewitt as an unstoppable groundstroking machine when he was No. 1, as opposed to the guy in 2006 losing to players like Paul Goldstein and Andreas Seppi -- last year when Hewitt was also making comments about playing his best tennis. Hopefully the Lleyton in his head and the Lleyton who takes the court can meet up sometime in 2007.

One bad thing about the round robin format, aside from the "Where's Waldo?"-way the ATP is presenting it, is that it's nigh impossible to pick who can meet in the latter rounds. You can take the eight seeds from their round robin groups and place them in their likely quarterfinal spots, but little else.

Example: On the draw in round robin Group 1 is the top-seeded Djokovic, unseeded Czech Jan Hajek, and one other player to be named later in the week (officially "ME8," though the drawsheet lacks a much-needed key to refer to, we'll assume that means the player to come out of the Main Elimination draw in the 8th position). After each of these three players face each other in round robin play, the player with the best record (which will be determined by matches won, or in case of a tie then percentage of sets won, then if that is tied, percentage of games won) moves on to the single-elimination quarterfinal round.

Whew.

Good luck with that ATP. If these experimental round-robin events result in getting the marquee players on TV more often, more satisfaction for ticket buyers and a higher profile for tennis in general, it's going to be hard to argue against it. As the ATP puts it, "changes that intend to help the sport achieve broader appeal." Who isn't for that, especially in the U.S. where tennis in popularity ranks around No. 14 behind televised poker and eating contests.

Who knows, round robin could turn out to be the greatest innovation since the headband. But communication is the key. It's a shaky start when it's presented to the media and fans with spreadsheets and hidden draws.