Wimbledon view: It’s time for the women to step it up

JOHN LEICESTER

WIMBLEDON, England — Right, Wimbledon ladies, time to earn your keep by playing best-of-five sets like the men.

Not only is it unfair that women, by playing at most three sets, get a better hourly pay rate than the men. More importantly, women are deprived of a format that has provided tennis drama. Given its current state, the women’s game could use more of that magic ingredient.

Exhibit A: the men’s singles final on Centre Court last year. Widely considered the greatest men’s final ever, it would have been a letdown in a shorter format — Rafael Nadal would have won 6-4, 6-4 in 94 minutes. Fans would have been home, a trifle disappointed, in time for tea.

Instead, Roger Federer staged an almost mythical comeback, taking sets three and four 6-7 (5) and 6-7 (8) to push Nadal into the decider. At 4 hours, 48 minutes, it was the longest men’s final in Wimbledon history. No one who saw it can forget Nadal lifting the golden trophy in the quickening gloom after his chewed-fingernail 9-7 final-set win.

We’ll never get such a drawn-out epic with women.

“Over five sets, you’d likely see a lot of changes in a player’s mental and physical state. I think it could be a bit more interesting,” said world No. 16 Zheng Jie after her 6-3, 7-5 second-round defeat to Daniela Hantuchova.

“We could try it for the finals and semifinals.”

Exhibit B: On Nov. 18, 1990, for the first time since Bessie Moore beat Myrtle McAteer 6-4, 3-6, 7-5, 2-6, 6-2 at the U.S. National Championships in 1901, a women’s match goes five sets.

“In a five-set match, I’m not mentally as tired as in a three-set match,” Monica Seles said after the 6-4, 5-7, 3-6, 6-4, 6-2 defeat of Gabriela Sabatini in the final of the season-ending Virginia Slims Championships. “The longer I keep going, I’m not as tired. It’s very strange.”

Under pressure from television broadcasters who found such 3-hour, 47-minute marathons too long, best-of-fives were abandoned for the season-ender — the only women’s tournament to have them — in 1999.

But Seles, Sabatini and others had by then shown that women could be as physically resilient as men. That valuable lesson could do with reinforcement — some seem to have forgotten.

“I don’t think a lot of them would last five sets,” men’s former world No. 1 Lleyton Hewitt said of women this week.

Exhibit C: There were already empty courts at Wimbledon on Thursday, just four days into the two-week championships. Those lush, unused spaces undermine the argument that five-setters for women are a nonstarter because they could not be packed into tournament schedules.

By Thursday morning, the 79 men’s matches at Wimbledon had on average lasted 40 minutes longer than the 80 women’s matches. Going off that, one could estimate that allowing women to play five-setters would add about 85 hours of play to the Wimbledon fortnight. That would be a squeeze, especially in bad weather, but impossible?

“It would present all kinds of scheduling issues,” said Larry Scott, outgoing head of the women’s tour. “But our position has been [that] players are willing to do that.”

After decades of lobbying by Billie Jean King and other pioneers of the women’s game, tennis’ top 10 events now all pay men and women the same.

But, in rates of pay, men get a bad bounce. Nadal earned $5,156 per minute last year in winning the final. For women’s champion Venus Williams, the rate was $13,376 per minute in her 7-5, 6-4 victory over sister Serena — one of several absorbing encounters over the years that we gladly would have watched more of.

Now for some downsides.

Longer matches could lead to more injuries and leave women too tired to play doubles, as many of them — including the Williams sisters — do now.

Nor does quantity guarantee quality. Last year’s Nadal-Federer final was the exception rather than the rule because it was brilliant from first ball to last.

“Men’s matches are too long,” said 2006 Wimbledon women’s champion Amelie Mauresmo. “Eight matches out of 10 aren’t worth being played out over five sets. Yes, you do get some fabulous five-setters, with an incredible finish and where everything comes together and is perfect. But for one or two like that, there are many, many, many that are not worth it.”

True. But the matches that are worth the extra time etch themselves deep in our memories. Shouldn’t women get that opportunity, too?

XJohn Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org.