Women’s Tennis Should be Best-of-Five
How long should tennis matches be? At the Grand Slam level, five sets. That’s the traditional answer, and all of the best matches I’ve seen have been five sets long. That’s long enough to be challenging, but not so long as to be ridiculous.
The “lesser” tournaments, e.g. not the Grand Slams or Davis Cup, are all best-of-three sets. Until recently the men’s year-end championships was best-of-five in its final match, but they changed that in 2008 (a bad move, in my opinion). A number of other tournaments also used to be best-of-three except for the final. It’s clear from this history that the longer format was and is considered appropriate for more important matches.
For Grand Slams, male tennis players switch over to best-of-five. But the female players do not, sticking with the best-of-three format. There’s really no reason for this apart from sexism.
Sexism, and the inconvenience of overturning the structures put in place by a history of sexism.
The tournaments don’t want to make such a shift because it would make scheduling much harder for them, since best-of-five matches take up more time. The female players don’t seem to be clamoring for it, which makes sense since it would be personally difficult for all of them.
It seems that basic fairness dictates that men and women should play the same format. I’m trying to think of other sports with similar gender splits. Women’s soccer doesn’t feature shorter halves—and if it did, I would be questioning that too.
There are some people who think that men’s matches should be best-of-three as well, but I think that would really be a terrible mistake, and suspect it of being driven by television advertising concerns—not by a desire to improve the sport.
Common arguments for sticking with best-of-three for women include:
- Women don’t have the endurance for long matches. How could this be true? Women run marathons and compete in plenty of sports that demand endurance.
- Longer women’s matches would be boring because most of them would just add an extra set of one-sidedness. Again, there’s no reason why this would be more true of women than men.
- Longer women’s matches would reward the “wrong” players. Sort of the inverse of the previous argument, this is the claim that poor playes who worked on their endurance would prosper under a best-of-five system. Even if true, it’s something that would quickly change, as more female players would focus on fitness—just as the men do now.
- Longer women’s matches would mean more injuries. This might be true, but again I think players would adjust. In any case, followed to its logical conclusion “injury reduction” would lead to one-set matches for both genders…
- Longer women’s matches would mean more bad tennis because most women’s tennis is low quality. This is a surprisingly common argument. Its inherent sexism should be apparent—regardless of what you think of the current state of women’s tennis.
- Longer women’s matches would wreak havoc with scheduling. This might be true, but so what? Lengthen the playing day, increase the number of courts, that’s just not an insurmountable problem.
All of the arguments against moving women’s Grand Slam matches to five sets are based on the idea that women are too “frail” to play that long, or that women‘s matches are somehow less worthy than men’s matches. Naked self-interest plays a part too (the tournaments don’t want to have to spend more money, and the female players currently against the idea don’t want to increase their workload.)
Making women’s matches best-of-five would promote the idea that their matches are on an equal footing as athletic endeavors with the men’s—an idea clearly in need of reinforcement. It would help puncture the idea that either gender requires “special treatment”—right now the men get more of the limelight, but on the other hand the women earn the same prize money for shorter matches, and I consider both imbalances to be unhealthy.
The signs aren’t too hopeful right now, but I’m hoping that at some point women’s tennis being best-of-three at Grand Slams becomes just one more bygone relic of a sexist past.
15 Mar 2010 at 08:27
Not only do I think women’s tennis should be moved to five-setters, I also think they should compete in the same tournaments, male against female. But I have been influenced in this by Judit Polgar’s behaviour in chess.
16 Mar 2010 at 14:30
I don’t think I can quite go that far… the strength gap between men and women is too great, and I really don’t think that the top female pros would be able to compete with even low-level male pros. I certainly think that they should be allowed to do so if they wished, but to merge the competitions in tennis would effectively kill women’s tennis.
That’s not true for all sports, of course, but I think it is for tennis.
05 Jul 2010 at 00:35
I completely agree that women’s grand slam matches should be best of five sets like the men’s. Otherwise women are really not playing grand slam tournaments while men are. What surprises me that none of the women seem to be arguing for this. I would think that feminists like Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova should be leading the campaign for this. As pointed out all the arguments for why women’s matches should not be best of five sets are sexist arguments that should be opposed by all feminists. And even feminists would not agree that women should get the same amount of money for doing less work than the men. The endurance argument is totally unsound. After women’s marathon was introduced in the Olympics, research showed that women actually have greater endurance than men. This should hardly be surprising as no man could undergo 15 or 20 or 25 hours of labor in childbirth, which women have done for centuries. What the research showed was that even though the best women runners could not run as fast as the best male runners, at the end of a marathon, the bodies of women were in much better shape than the bodies of men. Also the argument for lesser player winning if it went to five sets is also fallacious. Borg would not have won as many wimbledons as he did if it had not been best out of five sets. One year he was down two sets to zero and down 4 to 1 in an earlier round to Vijay Amritraj and he came back to win the match and the tournament. Even though as an Indian I may get some kick out of thinking that Borg was a lesser player than Amritraj, I am sure Vijay would say I am crazy and that Borg was infinitely better than him. Actually, I think that it would have been best out of five sets all along, then Chris Evert, Martina navratilova, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Sarina Williams and Venus Williams would have won even more grandslams than they did since they were all much more fit than their competitors. This then would actually be a good argument against going to five sets, as the best of three sets is an equalizer, letting lesser players pull an upset. In this year’s Wimbledon for example, I think that Venus would have been able to come back and win in a five setter. But I think this would be a poor argument because the quality of tennis would be much better if it went to best of five sets. I think that Venus and Sarina should push for making it best of five sets for the benefit of women’s tennis. The argument that men are better players than women is also not a sound argument. Perhaps men ranked from 200 to 300 can consistently beat the top ten women, but this is like men running the marathon faster than women. Due to faster serve and more powerful strokes men may be able to beat women but it surely does not mean that they have greater skill than men. Enough for now.
Priyedarshi Jetli