How can you develop the tennis game if low ranked players (especially youngsters) struggle to finance their game? Roger is going to fight for it!
The Problem
As we know there is a big difference between tennis and golf. The top 100 golf players earn good money, tennis players are not so lucky.
This creates a huge problem for the development of new tennis champions as the sport is already expensive and it’s really hard for low ranked players to gather the financial resources to play at competitive level.
A player ranked over 200 has often serious problems to make it for the next week.
Janowicz example
The Polish fairy tale is a bright example.
At the beginning of 2012, he was ranked slightly higher than 200 in the world and he could not play the Australian Open because he simply didn’t have money to. He had to endure big struggles such has sleeping in the car while play challengers etc. Then he blossomed (just because it happened).
Questions: How many Janowicz do we have in the world? And how many of them we lose?
Indian Wells affair
Apparently the Indian Wells organisation offered a $1.6 million increase (800K millions for each men’s and women’s competitions) to give more to those losing in the early rounds (a very important example for tennis development!).
But the ATP mysteriously refused…
Federer’s promise
Roger was very surprised about this. He definitely doesn’t need money, but he knows that this issue is really important for tennis.
“For me, I was a bit surprised to hear that,” Federer said
“Obviously, I wasn’t in the room when everything went down because it’s at the board level, at the CEO level.
“What I can tell you is I will investigate and make sure that the decision they’ve taken is, indeed, the right one.
“If it’s not, then obviously we need to talk about it and what we can do in the future. It’s an important issue.”
Hopefully…
They are going to solve the mystery why the prize increase has been refused, and “more hopefully” they are going to fix the financial struggle a lower ranked player has to endure. This might be one of the reasons why we struggle to see new and fresh champions coming to the Tour.
We want to see more Janowicz in the tour!
