Australian Open champion Stan Wawrinka and the highest-ranked American man, John Isner, have "been elected to the ATP Player Council" and will "serve two-year terms," according to the AP. Others "elected in the player vote" include Kevin Anderson, Gilles Simon, Jurgen Melzer, Sergiy Stakhovsky, Raven Klaasen, Bruno Soares, Eric Butorac and Andre Sa. The new council's first meeting will be in N.Y. before the U.S. Open in August, when it "will elect a president and vice president." Roger Federer is "stepping down after serving as council president since" '08 (AP, 6/22).
IDEAS FOR IMPROVEMENT: The GUARDIAN's Kevin Mitchell noted ESPN tennis analyst John McEnroe said that he "wants to ban umpires and line officials." McEnroe said, "Do away with the umpires and linesmen completely. You want a little edge so, if you had no umpires. … But you’d have a challenge system, obviously, and it would have to be on every court, that goes without saying. You’d have a system where the players would call their own lines. All of a sudden things would get a whole lot edgier. But you could challenge it." He added, "The problem is, there’s no way in hell they’ll do it. But I guarantee you that tennis would be like 30% more interesting." Mitchell wrote although it is "hard to tell, he sounds serious when he hit out at the 25-second rule on slow serving." McEnroe: "No one enforces it. I’m not sure that that’s a good rule, to be honest. I think you should go with the flow of the match. ... Some people do abuse it, but I just don’t think that’s a winning thing for tennis." McEnroe also said that tennis "needs livening up." He added, "You can’t just stand on your heels and do nothing. We’ve got to keep trying to do things, in my opinion, to grab fans. The idea if you’re going out and you’re boxing and almost literally -- hopefully not kill each other, but, like, they want to put them where they’re unconscious on the ground -- they don’t warm up before they go out there. What the hell do we have to go hit a couple of balls with each other for? They haven’t gone out and practised already?" (GUARDIAN, 6/21).
