The new serve clock in tennis appears to be backfiring

By J.S.

TENNIS was born as a leisurely pastime for the upper class, meant to be played at whatever pace the participants favoured. As a modern spectator sport seeking to attract and hold the attention of impatient audiences, however, it needs to ensure that every minute is as packed with action as possible, and that matches finish within a relatively abbreviated timeframe. Much to the dismay of the keepers of the sport, in recent years match durations have been getting longer rather than shorter. Improvements in racquet technology have ushered out the once-popular aggressive, serve-and-volley style, tilting matches in favor of baseline-centered bludgeoning. Extended rallies take longer, not just during play, but also between points, as players require extra time to recover from their more extreme exertions.

As the sport’s executives took aim at ballooning match times, an early target was match format. A decade ago, the men’s and women’s tours shortened doubles matches by converting the deciding third set to a first-to-ten-point “match tiebreak,” a move that almost guarantees each contest finishes within two hours, though at the cost of some excitement. Around the same time, the men’s Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) converted its few remaining best-of-five-set matches to best-of-threes, leaving only the four majors and the Davis Cup, the international team competition, with the five-set format. More recently, the Davis Cup, one of the last bastions of the sport’s traditionalists, has shifted most lower-level matches to three sets, and is currently mulling a massive overhaul that would result in a more television-friendly, World Cup-style event.

Players, however, aren’t ready to abandon the traditional format wholesale. Enter the serve clock, the latest attempt to enforce the time limits designed to reduce between-point lulls and keep viewers engaged. This year’s U.S. Open, which begins on August 27th, will be the first major to display a countdown before each point, not unlike the shot clock in basketball. The innovative aspect of the screens, which are visible at both ends of the court, is not the time limit, but the transparency. For years, the rulebooks of the ATP and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) have specified that players take no longer than 25 seconds between points. The four grand slams, which operate independently of the tours, have demanded a quicker turnaround of 20 seconds after a point is completed, although this year’s U.S. Open will relax the rule to the tour-standard 25. An offending player is issued a warning on the first violation, followed by the loss of a first serve, the loss of a point, and the loss of a game if he or she continues to serve too slowly. But this was a policy with no teeth: when Wall Street Journal (WSJ) staffers armed with stopwatches clocked more than 1,000 serves at the 2010 U.S. Open, players took longer than the allotted 20 seconds more than half of the time. Yet over more than 40,000 points, a measly eight warnings were issued.

In addition to their unwillingness to enforce the rules, officials often appear to favour some players at the expense of others. Many rank-and-file competitors have complained that umpires fail to apply the rule to the sport’s biggest—and slowest—names. Rafael Nadal, the eleven-time French Open champion and now the world’s top-ranked male player, is known for the elaborate sequence of tics that precede each of his serves. And Novak Djokovic, this year’s Wimbledon champion, responds to increasing pressure by bouncing the ball again, and again…and again, before commencing his service motion. In 2017, Mr Nadal averaged 45.5 seconds per point played—a figure that includes time elapsed during play, as well as breaks between games and sets. That was the most of any top player, and 27% more than the 35.7 seconds per point of Roger Federer, his long-time rival. The lack of available data makes it impossible to precisely audit Mr Nadal’s (or any other player’s) compliance with the time limit, but using these general figures, combined with the WSJ’s stopwatch logs, indicates that time played and longer breaks account for about 15 seconds per point, leaving nearly 30 seconds that must be attributed to Mr Nadal’s serve preparation. Other leading men are nearly as slow; Mr Djokovic, third-ranked Juan Martín del Potro, and former U.S. Open finalist Kei Nishikori also averaged more than 42 seconds per point last season, indicating that their typical serve preparation time exceeded the permitted maximum.

In the run-up to this year’s U.S. Open, several tournaments are using the serve clock, to give players and officials an opportunity to get used to the new technology before the curtain goes up in New York. Earlier this month Canada’s Rogers Cup, with a men’s event in Toronto and a women’s event in Montreal, was the highest-profile test yet. It was also the first meeting between the clock and Mr Nadal. In five matches—the Spaniard won the tournament, defeating Greek prospect Stefanos Tsitsipas in the final on August 12th—Mr Nadal averaged 47.2 seconds per point, including 50.9 seconds per point in the title match against Mr Tsitsipas. The introduction of the serve clock somehow corresponded to Mr Nadal playing even slower than usual: In 24 hard-court matches last summer and fall, all played without a countdown display, he exceeded 47 seconds per point only four times.

The Toronto champion wasn’t the only player who slowed down once on the clock. At each of the completed tournaments where the serve clock has been used—Toronto, Montreal, San Jose, and Washington, D.C.—the average point took longer in 2018 than it did in 2017, without the clock. The differences varied from 0.3 seconds per point at the women’s event San Jose (an event that was held in nearby Stanford last year) to 2.0 seconds at the men’s competition in Washington.

This unintended consequence stems from two main sources. Faster players don’t always intend to rush, and a visible clock helps them set a more comfortable pace. Even Mr Djokovic, who can rarely be accusing of hurrying between points, has said that he feels like the clock gives him more time. At the other end of the spectrum, it is apparent that officials still remain reluctant to lock horns with the players they are charged with monitoring. The 25-second countdown begins when the umpire enters the score on a tablet. After extended rallies, umpires wait longer to start the clock. Canadian teen Denis Shapovalov, one of the few players so far to have griped about the system, pointed to this form of discretion as simply a new way for officials to favor the great and the slow, such as Mr Nishikori, the player who had just defeated him.

The serve clock has succeeded on one count, silencing doubters who feared that a countdown would draw too much attention and create a distraction. As for the stated goals, however, it has yet to speed up the game, and it still allows the umpire too much discretion to be completely transparent. Increasing the pace of play may require shortening the time limit to less than 25 seconds, or implementing a system independent of the chair umpire—or both. Tennis executives will continue looking for ways to turn matches into more saleable media-friendly packages, but they will need to find a solution elsewhere.