WTA's Road Map might need overhaul once again

ByPETER BODO
October 5, 2015, 12:57 PM

— -- The "Asian swing" has been the WTA's latter-day version of China's ancient wealth-laden Silk Road, but lately it's developed so many potholes that it may be abandoned in yet another restructuring of the WTA Tour.

That's the result of a sequence of events highlighted by Serena Williams' recent abrupt decision to quietly call it a year.

This week's China Open, the crown jewel of the Asian swing, lost two additional Grand Slam champions ( Maria Sharapova and Victoria Azarenka) to withdrawal because of injury late last week, shortly after Williams pulled the plug on 2015. Thus, the top seed in Beijing is the No. 2-ranked player, but someone who has yet to win a Grand Slam title, Simona Halep. And she retired in her first-round match with an ankle injury. 

And those withdrawals/retirements were in addition to the flurry of withdrawals and retirements that had already plagued last week's event in Wuhan, where Eugenie Bouchard, Caroline Wozniacki and Belinda Bencic were among those who threw in the towel.

"We know, the Chinese know, the Singaporeans [hosts of the upcoming WTA championships] know that this part of the year -- it's just too much," Micky Lawler, president of the WTA, told ESPN.

Lawler is the most senior WTA official since Stacey Allaster, an aggressive booster of the Asian swing, had the good fortune -- or was it shrewd judgment? -- to abruptly quit as WTA CEO just days before Williams declared she's done for the year.

"We need to look at spreading things out," Lawler added. "We don't need to call it a 'Road Map' [again] or anything like that, but we need to sit down and work out some significant changes, and we need to start on that soon."

The problem: The Road Map to which Lawler referred was implemented in 2009, in response to concerns that the tennis "season" was too long and insufficiently streamlined. The result was, among other things, a tour featuring the current, post-US Open Asian swing, followed by the WTA Finals and an eight-week, year-ending offseason. The longer offseason was intended to mitigate the toll taken by injuries and the demands placed on the top players by a more rigorous commitment structure.

While prize money has increased dramatically (by roughly 50 percent since the Road Map kicked in) and overall participation by top players has risen significantly, withdrawals and retirements have become a nagging issue. The WTA's Silk Road is lined with riches, but it may have been a harder, more demanding route than the architects of the Road Map imagined.

"The WTA sends the players to far-off Asia soon after the final major of the year is played, to chase points and money -- lots of money," Tennis Channel commentator Mary Carillo told ESPN. "A lot of the responsibility falls on the players and their agents, who design their schedules. But there's no denying it can be a soul-, mind- and body-deadening part of the season, especially on hard courts."

As if that weren't enough, the players aren't always using that longer offseason to rest; the exhibition circuit is just too lucrative to pass up.

"When the Road Map was first rolled out, the players had to commit in order to assure our partners that their investment in tournaments would pay off, the trade-off was a longer offseason," Lawler said. "Then the exhibitions popped up. So we need to ask the players, 'What do you want to do?' The prize money is going up, so there has to be a return on that investment for the tournaments. If the exos are so lucrative, let's narrow this [tournament] end. Fine. But this is where you make your reputations -- in the tournaments."

The situation also raises an interesting question: Why does this appear to be exclusively a WTA problem? Novak Djokovic actually played one more Grand Slam match than Serena Williams did this year. (Djokovic won three majors and played the final in the fourth; Williams also won three but lost in the semifinals at the US Open.) Djokovic is the top men's seed in the China Open this week.

Roger Federer, the 34-year old No. 2 player in the ATP rankings, played 18 tournaments over the past 12 months -- one more than his WTA counterpart Halep, two more than WTA No. 3 Sharapova and the same number as No. 4 Petra Kvitova. No. 4 Stan Wawrinka has played 22 events, a number that was surpassed by only Carla Suarez Navarro among the top 10 women.

The men play best-of-five sets at the Grand Slam events and in Davis Cup; the women play best-of-three. As of now, none of the notable ATP players have pulled out of the upcoming Asian events, and their own "offseason" doesn't even officially begin until the end of the ATP World Tour Finals on Nov. 22. (The WTA Finals ends Nov. 1.)

These facts raise an array of questions, practical ones as well as more complex speculations about the cultures created by the respective tours. The lack of female coaches overseeing female players may play a role in all this, as may a lack of female-specific training regimens.

"It makes me wonder," said Carillo," if the women are training properly, in accordance with the racket and string technology. There is far more power, speed and spin in the game now. Physiologically, men are surely built stronger to deal with it. Are they training better and smarter than the women as well? My guess is yes."

The WTA is hardly prepared to tackle such large issues right now -- not with an empty seat in the CEO's office, a group of angry Asian promoters bent on collecting the tariff the WTA will have to pay for failing to deliver the agreed-upon number of stars and a workforce that's in transition.

"It's been a perfect storm," Lawler said, "But in the bigger picture, our stars are also getting older, and there's a generational shift in progress."

There might have been a silver lining in all this for the Chinese as little as two years ago, while the boomlet in the women's game there was in progress. But Li Na, Asia's first domestic Grand Slam singles champion, was driven into an abrupt retirement by knee problems in 2014. And the inspiration she provided a number of women guttered out. Today, there's just one Chinese woman in the WTA Top 100, Zheng Saisai.

So much for silver linings; so much for silk roads.