Cav's Place

Even though the announcement was made back in February and last year’s winners spoke out against the change right away, I just now learned, thanks to happening to see something about Mladenovic also speaking out, that the US Open is once again spearheading the sport’s continued march in that same awful direction by pretty much removing mixed doubles from the actual competition and turning it into what’s basically a demonstrative tournament, but apparently still considering, and rewarding, it as if it’d actually be part of the tournament.
Sure, I keep saying that my interest in tennis is pretty much completely gone because of the direction the sport’s been heading in for the past several years, and the fact that it took me so long to notice the news about such a change in a Grand Slam tournament, even if we’re talking about the one that’s always been clearly the least deserving of the title, just proves that yet again, so maybe I shouldn’t even bother to comment, but what the fuck? Yes, mixed doubles was generally overshadowed by the other events, but it was, and should be, a part of the tournament and, very importantly, there are players specialized in this, they train for it, they prepare along with their partners, and all of a sudden one of the major events of the year, so one that they work particularly hard for, is pretty much yanked from under their feet, being placed at a different time, which is likely to throw a wrench in the schedules of a fair number of players and also potentially harm tournaments taking place just before the US Open, and with exhibition rules, making for short matches that are more of a lottery than real sports, something like the equivalent of a football or handball match consisting entirely of series of penalties. And, of course, there’s the fact that half of the pairs are made up of top singles players, at least some of whom really will treat it as more of a demonstrative tournament than a real competition. And, of course, even if we leave the lesser ones aside, this last part also means that even the WTA 500 tournament from Monterrey can kiss goodbye to any of those top players taking part.
Granted, this is just the sort of thing that’s to be expected from the US Open, but the even bigger problem is that, like plenty of other changes that started from there, it’s likely to spread to the other Grand Slam tournaments and eventually, and probably sooner rather than later, become the rule. And then I wonder what else it’ll end up being applied to… I mean, it’s probably only a matter of time before five-set matches will disappear, the same holds true for replacing even the third set with a match tie-break, first for everything except seniors’ singles matches and possibly eventually even for those, and I wouldn’t put it past them to look into implementing the other fast tennis rules that will be used here, like making the first point after 40-40 win the game and reducing the number of games needed to win a set to four.