March 1, 2012, 4:00 pm

A Wild-Card Snub and the Expectation of Local Preference

By BEN ROTHENBERG

 

 Malek Jaziri of Tunisia at the United States Open last year. While the nomadic nature of the professional tennis tours does not allow for any player to establish a firm home-court advantage, preference to native players in terms of wild cards and scheduling has become an accepted and expected part of the sport.
But with each tournament largely functioning as an independent governing body, the rules and settings change week to week.
Malek Jaziri of Tunisia, who at No. 104 is the highest-ranked Arab player in men’s or women’s tennis, said he had been told he would receive a wild card to the recent Dubai Tennis Championships, the biggest men’s tennis tournament in the region. Instead, a wild card went to 867th-ranked Marko Djokovic, the younger brother of the tournament’s top seed, Novak Djokovic.
Jaziri, who missed direct entry into the Dubai tournament on the strength of his ranking by two spots, said he was told that he would have to compete in the qualifying draw only 14 hours before his first qualifying match. Jaziri won that match, but lost in the second, and final, round of qualifying in three sets to Andrey Golubev of Kazakhstan, who, as it turned out, went on to beat Marko Djokovic in the first round of the main draw.
As the highest-ranked player to lose in the final round of qualifying in Dubai, Jaziri had a good chance of entering the main draw as a “lucky loser,” if one of the directly entered players had withdrawn from the first round of the tournament. But none did.
By not getting into the main draw, Jaziri missed out not only on the chance at the ranking points available, but also on the guaranteed $11,825 in prize money for playing in the first round, far more than the $1,330 he earned for winning one match in the qualifying draw.
“In Europe the countries’ federations help their own players,” Jaziri told the Emirati Web site Sport360°. “As the No. 1 Arab player, I expected a little bit more.”
Jaziri’s expectation of local preference may initially seem surprising, given that Tunis, his hometown, is over 2,700 miles west of Dubai, in another country but also on another continent. But such regionality has become commonplace and expected for tournaments in the Middle East, which often have to reach beyond their own borders to find Arab players deserving of wild-card opportunities.
Jaziri, who qualified and won a round at the 2011 United States Open, had proved worthy of the wild card he received in January at a smaller tournament in Doha, Qatar, winning a set from the eventual champion, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, ranked sixth at the time.
Jaziri’s 17-year-old Tunisian compatriot Ons Jabeur recently made a similarly strong showing after being given a wild-card opportunity in Doha. Jabeur, whose success at the junior level has her poised to become perhaps the most successful Arab player ever, pushed the former top-20 player Virginie Razzano of France to three sets last month at a WTA tournament in Doha. The other two wild cards in the main draw at Doha, who came from Morocco and Oman, both failed to win a set, and lost three of their combined four sets by 6-0.
The tradition of spreading wild cards across the region is largely unique to the ATP and WTA tournaments in Doha and Dubai, which, since adding WTA events in 2001, have given passes into the main draw of their singles competitions to men and women from Arab countries including Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates (as well as to Sania Mirza of India, who is Muslim).
This sort of cross-border inclusiveness is rarely seen outside the Middle East. The week of Jabeur’s battle in Doha, all three wild cards at the other WTA tournament being played, the Copa Sony Ericsson Colsanitas in Bogota, went to Colombians. Two of the three ATP tournaments this week followed the same approach, with the ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament in Rotterdam and the SAP Open in San Jose, Calif., giving all of their wild cards to Dutch and American players, respectively. The third, the Brasil Open in São Paulo, ignored its own completely, giving two of its three wild cards to Spaniards and the other to the retiring Chilean Fernando González. Nine of the 11 Brazilians entered in the tournament never made it out of qualifying.
Tournaments in Morocco (the only other Arabic-speaking country to host an ATP or WTA event) rarely reach beyond their borders to reward neighbors with wild cards. Since 2001, only six wild cards have gone to other players in the region, with four going to Algerians and two to the Tunisian Selima Sfar.
The Moroccans’ relative unwilligness to share the wild-card wealth is likely rooted in a tennis tradition that is vastly superior to any other in the Arab world. The 2000 Grand Prix Hassan II in Casablanca perhaps represented the pinnacle of what was the golden age of Moroccan tennis, as the top three seeds in the ATP tournament were all Moroccan; 16th-ranked Younes El Aynaoui was the top seed, 27th-ranked Karim Alami the second and 30th-ranked Hicham Arazi the third. None of the three reached the semifinals that year, but El Aynaoui would go on to win the tournament in 2002 (as Arazi had in 1997).
With no Qatari or Emirati players having ever achieved similar success, the need to be inclusive is far greater, even though there are not as many Arab contenders in 2012 as there have been in years past. Currently, the highest-ranked man from the region is 104th-ranked Jaziri, while the Moroccan Nadia Lalami is the highest-ranked woman at No. 334.
In 2007, the Asian Tennis Federation demanded that 25 percent of spots in the main draws of all tournaments in Asia be allocated to Asian players, a request quickly quashed by Brad Drewett of the ATP.
“We have rules in place based on merit, and we have no plans to change them,” Drewett said.
“We can give countries more wild cards for big events, but their players will just get beaten very easily,” he added. “That’s not good in terms of developing players’ ability.”
As would be expected of low-ranked players stepping up to high-caliber events, the “locals” from near and far have not found great success at the Arab tournaments. Since 2001, Arab players needing wild cards to enter the main draw of tournaments in Morocco, Doha and Dubai have a 21-85 record in their first-round matches, with four of the 85 losses being of the 6-0, 6-0 “double-bagel” variety. When they do win their first matches, the wild cards have a 5-16 record in the second round. None of the Arab wild cards have won three matches in a row at one of the tournaments during this span.
Though the Doha, Dubai and Morocco tournaments have been almost entirely loyal to their own, there have been exceptions. In 2008, all three wild cards in the WTA tournament in Doha were German women, a decision probably  related to the strong economic ties between Germany and Qatar in tennis; the WTA tournament in Berlin was called the Qatar Total German Open or the Qatar Telecom German Open from 2005 until its demise in 2008.