A group of ESPN tennis analysts during yesterday's coverage of Wimbledon discussed the state of the sport and examined some of the issues dogging the game in recent months. Referring to a recent series of scandals in tennis involving match-fixing, doping and sexist comments made by former BNP Paribas Open Tournament Dir & CEO Raymond Moore, Tom Rinaldi said the sport has "taken several difficult steps backward." But Cliff Drysdale disagreed, saying tennis is "trying to come to terms with the modern game in the modern era." Drysdale: "There is an issue with gambling at the lower levels in tennis and I think the sport is dealing with it." Mary Joe Fernandez disagreed and said tennis "took a big hit" when Maria Sharapova tested positive for drugs, as it "puts a black cloud over you." But Darren Cahill said, "I don’t see that Sharapova incident with getting the two-year ban as a real negative for the sport because this is what the players want. They don’t want players obviously to test positive, but if players are cheating, they want the drug testers to catch them, so I think this is a good warning, a good lesson for everybody. ... It’s a good thing that the drug system and the testing is working."
WHO'S IN CHARGE? Patrick McEnroe said the "problem is there is no one governing body in tennis." McEnroe: "Maybe what comes out of this, I hope, is that they get together more and instead of being reactive, be more proactive." Fernandez said, "If we had someone on top and being more proactive, maybe we would have more transparency, but I think we are headed in the right direction." Pam Shriver said the leaders in the game "have to stop enabling corruption to happen whether it is doping or whether it is match-fixing, and there’s going to have to be some organization and some leaderships that are really brave and give up some money in order to regain the integrity of the sport." Brad Gilbert said the sport needs a "commissioner -- we don’t have that -- but the entities must work together and prevent things like this from happening and have a plan for moving forward. In tennis, we’ve always felt like we are above things like this. We don’t have things like this happen, but a lot of times, things happen in threes and we’ve had them in threes this year and they need to be addressed." But L.Z. Granderson referenced FIFA and the Olympics, saying, "Assuming that once you put together one governing body that you are going to be able to eliminate all these troubles I think is a bit naïve. ... You are going to have players coming from situations that won’t be similar to us and other nations that may be playing by a different set of rules" ("Wimbledon," ESPN, 6/28).
