We Love Round Robins

To:  Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP)

Dear Mr. de Villiers:

We love round robins. Tennis is exciting again!

Okay, you made a mistake by advancing James Blake and it didn't look good because Evgeny Korolev got shunted aside for the crowd favorite American and that’s regrettable. But it’s fixable and you should fix it.

The better approach is to award all six games in the remaining sets to the winner if a player retires. In that case, Blake would have won his match 6-1, 6-3, and advanced to the quarterfinals. It’s not perfect, if Del Potro had retired early in the first set, Blake wouldn’t have deserved the victory, but no one complains in single elimination tournaments when a player advances to the next round due to a retirement.

Matches now have an added layer of complexity and excitement. In single elimination a player can take a few games off or lose a set and still win the match but every game matters now and each game could be the difference between advancing and going home. That makes it more exciting.

Keep in mind that there is always resistance to change and you’ll get plenty of complaints, but tennis needs change, other sports are changing and tennis isn’t keeping up. Fix the problems, of course, but move forward and keep tennis moving forward too!

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The We Love Round Robins Petition to Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) was created by and written by N. Rota (nrota@pobox.com).  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.

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