As 2013 begins, we thought it could be a good time for some tennis resolutions. Do you have any of your own? Feel free to share them in the comments section below.
Amy: My tennis resolution is to make sure to watch players I haven’t seen a lot on a more consistent basis. Sometimes it’s easy to get locked into watching the same players over and over again. I’ll try my best to change that in 2013.
Juan José: Here are my tennis resolutions for 2013:
1. Watch more women’s tennis, starting with the four Premier Mandatory events. Related: I just went to the WTA site to figure out which tournaments actually make up that group … and failed. Thank the heavens for Wikipedia.
2. Do a better job on focusing on up and coming young players so that when they break out (like Jerzy Janowicz in Paris) it doesn’t seem like a surprise. I used to pay more attention to this a few years ago, but the Big Four Era definitely took that focus away.
3. I’d like to know more about Stefan Edberg. I’d like to get a better grasp on his tennis, and what he meant for his era. This was triggered by how much fun I had going back in time for the Andrés Gómez piece, so I’m looking forward to YouTubing my way into the past more frequently in 2013.
4. I would love to see live tennis again this year. My last (and second ever) tournament was D.C back in 2011, and I only saw the quarterfinals. You always learn something when you watch pro tennis in person, so I’m looking forward to that this year. Houston, here I come!
Lindsay: My resolution is to watch more matches from beginning to end. It’s embarrassing to admit, but between my ADD, my sub-par viewing set-up, and my general business, I feel like it’s too rare that I sit down and watch an entire match from beginning to end. I’m especially bad about skipping straight to midway through the first set, overlooking the ever-important beginning of the match. I’m going to do whatever it takes to fix that this year.
I also resolve to travel to a WTA tournament. In my limited tennis travel I have only ever covered ATP events, and I am absolutely dying to get to a WTA tournament and do some one-on-one interviews with the ladies. There are always excuses why not to — primarily of the financial variety — but I resolve to make it happen in 2013.
JJ, I just wanted you to know that I’m so happy you want to learn more about Stefan Edberg. I’m aging myself here, but Stefan was my first tennis love, and if it weren’t for him, I probably wouldn’t be a diehard tennis fan today. I think you’ll love what you see and learn — even if there wasn’t a whole lot of “violence” to his game. 😉
Amy, your resolution is also my resolution — I know I don’t do a good enough job of watching players I don’t know well. And related is Lindsay’s resolution, because when there’s a match on that involves players I don’t know well, I may start watching but don’t finish. There are often legitimate reasons I stop watching a match, mostly related to my daughters, but when there’s no legitimate reason, I ought to finish what I start.
That’s awesome to hear about you and Edberg, Nicole. Like I was telling you on Twitter, I feel like I missed Edberg’s entire career. I didn’t get to watch much tennis in the 90s, and I’m pretty sure Wimbledon wasn’t shown in Ecuador during that decade (the last time I was in Ecuador for Wimbledon, back in 2007, it wasn’t even available on cable). It’s been kind of weird to hear and read so much about Edberg – particularly how many devoted fans he had – and not have an actual opinion about the guy. But that shall end this year!
I will try to hang in there and watch the big points in a match involving my favourite Players. Typically, I get nervous and change the channel and wait a sufficient amount of time before clicking the return button to see who won the big point and if the point is still going on, I quickly change the channel again and wait a few more seconds. Match points are the worse.
This may sound stupid and I am not encouraging gambling, but one of the benefits of gambling (if there is such a thing), I have found, is that you learn more about players outside the top 4, 10, 20 since there are more of those players and matches going on. More research is required on these players and watching of their matches before placing a wager.
That’s funny about changing the channel, Greekster. My wife is the same. I actually watch the whole way through, unless I’m wildly annoyed by the effort displayed by my favorite player. But if it’s close, I’ll watch.
You actually make a pretty great point about a positive aspect of gambling: you have to learn a lot about the subject matter in order to avoid losing money. There’s a positive in everything!
The WTA stuff used to be found on a convenient PDF called “How the Rankings Work” which was on the Rankings page – but I can’t find that on their new site (which I really dislike generally) any more. Googling it brought this up, though – http://www.wtatennis.com/SEWTATour-Archive/Rankings_Stats/howitworks.pdf
Personally I’d rather see a site that was informative with more interesting stats over stylish & glam, but it doesn’t seem like the WTA as an organisation agrees.
I wanted to go to Eastbourne last year but Stuff got in the way. Hopefully Stuff will have got out of the way again by this summer! I’d love to go – I don’t really think of it as a joint tournament even now. I can’t really make it a resolution as the Stuff isn’t something I have entire control over.
One resolution is to enjoy tennis, and reading comments/commenting about tennis again. It used to be pure fun, but lately, not so much. So this year I’m determined to get that sense of fun back, and to lose my grumpiness. Not sure how yet, but one way might be to avoid even glimpsing the idiotic fan wars that mar so much discussion…although I’m not sure if that’s possible, so maybe finding a better perspective on them would make more sense.
Did some more exploring and, JJ, if you go to Rankings on the WTA site, then click on Singles rankings, in the top right-hand corner there’s a link called “All About Rankings”. Click on that and it takes you here: http://www.wtatennis.com/all-about-rankings. That tells you the tournament classifications and the ranking points available for them all in each round.
Thank you so much for that, Jewell. I feel like I could easily produce a 2000-word rant on the deficiencies of the WTA site (and around 1950 words about the ATP site’s problems). But I find it absolutely mind-bending that you have to go to the rankings to learn about the different tiers of tournaments. It’s just crazy.
However, this madness is by design. The ATP has long fended off pressure from the smaller tournaments about the pretty explicit stratification among events. The smaller tournaments want a situation similar to what the WTA has: to a random fan’s eyes, all tournaments are the same (even though they really aren’t, for a long list of reasons). I’m just glad the ATP came up with the concept of having a few events be “bigger” than the rest, and make sure everybody plays them (and further kudos on the re-organizing of the 500s and 250s). The WTA has only managed to make 4 of their events mandatory, and god forbid you find out which four they are.
That page with all the points gave me a headache. It’s so freaking complicated, for no real reason. I particularly love how there are Premier Mandatories, Premier 5s, Premier 700s and Premier 600s. It’s like Franz Kafka came up with these denominations.
Also, may your 2013 be free of Stuff that keeps you out of tournaments!
Oh, that’s interesting. Thanks. I never would’ve thought of that re the smaller tourneys.