Stepanek planned to retire 11 years ago (!!!) as he was struggling to pay for his professional tennis. Radek won a historic Davis Cup few days ago.
Janowicz couldn’t pay his trip to the Australian Open and he had also to sleep in a car during a challenge to reach an epic final in Paris few weeks ago.
The Tennis World is full of stories of tennis players having to cope with a huge hardship to “finance” their tennis. We are not talking about players ranked 2000 in the world… but about top 150/200 ranked players.
The Goodall case
Josh Goodall is not a super champion, but a very respectable world no.232 (at the moment) and … incredibly enough the Great Britain no.2.
In the last 8 years his prize money was an average (and meagre) £30,000 per year. Not enough to make it.
LTA (the tennis association) gave to him last year an extra £10,000 that was decisive in order to make him play.
He said: “That was a really good decision by the LTA. If I didn’t have that I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford to carry on playing.”
Now… he can’t anymore as there are bills to pay.
From Goodall
“If I don’t see myself getting closer to the top 150 by next summer I will take a look at what I want to get out of this,” Goodall said.
“At Futures and Challenger level the prize money is not high enough. When you’re barely breaking even it’s difficult to accept, especially when you think tennis is a big sport.
“Playing in the Davis Cup felt like a massive achievement, that all my hard work had paid off, and I played Wimbledon as well.
“I’ve plateaued a bit at a Challenger ranking but I’ve been at this level before and I know what I need to do to get to the next level, which is why I’m working so hard.”
Considerations
Time to revise something if we want to see more young Federer, Nadal or Djokovic coming in the following years.
It’s more than ok that the top guys earn the big bucks, but the tennis system has to provide also for the lower ranked ones so as to have more and more new champions on board.
Food for thought.
