Top women's stars make a season-ending move to Qatar

After Madrid, WTA now brings stars to the desert
 
Was it really only a year ago that Justine Henin and Maria Sharapova played one of the best finals in the 36-year history of the women's season-ending championships?
 
That show in Madrid - won by Henin - was a three-set tribute to controlled aggression, lunging defense and focused ambition by two champions in their primes. Or so it seemed.
 
With the Sony Ericsson Championships this year set to begin Tuesday in the radically different setting of Doha, Qatar, neither Henin nor Sharapova is part of the elite, eight-women field, which includes Venus and Serena Williams, the world No.1 Jelena Jankovic, the French Open champion Ana Ivanovic and the Olympic champion Elena Dementieva.
 
Henin gave the sports world a jolt by retiring in May when she was still ranked No.1 by a large margin. Sharapova, who looked ready for a dominant season of her own when she swept to the Australian Open title in January, has not played a competitive match since the first week of August because of rotator cuff problems in her right shoulder.
 
"Things have certainly changed a great deal since Madrid," said Karim Alami, the outgoing polyglot from Morocco who was a former men's player and is now the tournament director of the championships in Doha.
 
But change would have been the theme even if Henin and Sharapova were in the field.
 
Despite all the international sporting events now being staged and planned in the Gulf states, the move to Qatar represents a major shift for the women's tour from its traditional power bases in the United States and Europe.
 
The move was made, above all, for money. While the promoter Ion Tiriac put on a grand show in Madrid the last two years, packing the house and generating plenty of buzz in the Spanish capital, the Women's Tennis Association derived little financial benefit because it received no rights fees from the organizers.
 
Qatar, which was interested in bolstering its status as a big-event destination with the Olympics as the ultimate goal, paid $42 million for the right to stage these championships for three years (and probably did not count on being left off the short list this year of candidates for the 2016 Summer Olympics).
 
Istanbul is also paying $42 million to bring the tour championships to Turkey from 2011 to 2013. With that significant infusion of capital, the WTA has been able to increase its operating and promotional budgets and gain a measure of financial security, which has only made it easier to restructure the circuit next season.
 
Nonetheless, Doha is a long way in distance and spirit from Madison Square Garden, where these championships peaked in terms of exposure and importance during a 22-year-run in New York. From there, the event made a quick, one-year detour to Munich in 2001, which was ill-fated considering that the German superstar Steffi Graf had recently retired. The championships were then returned to the United States, for four years of lackluster reviews and ratings in Los Angeles, home city of the Williams sisters.
 
In short, Larry Scott, the chief executive officer of the WTA, did not have a particularly strong product to hawk. But Scott is the same man who finally helped talk the All England Club into providing equal prize money to women at Wimbledon and who talked Sony Ericsson into a surprisingly lucrative six-year, $88 million sponsorship deal of his tour.
 
"I think it's going to be a great success," Scott said of Doha, which, in a time zone three hours ahead of London and two hours ahead of Paris, he thinks is close enough to the main European market to maintain television ratings at a level comparable to those of Madrid.
 
"I'd be disappointed if we don't do as well on the basis that we've done much more advertising and promotion this year," Scott said. "Number two, we've got a very interesting player field, and I think we've also got an interesting story with Doha staging a world championships like this. There's a good buzz about it, like we had in Madrid. And the other thing is that we've invested resources with some of the revenue we got from this deal."
 
As a participatory sport, women's tennis remains a minor activity in Qatar. Alami said there are only about 80 girls in the national team compared with about 450 boys.
 
"Obviously you cannot compare the numbers to the boys," Alami said. "But it's already a big achievement for the region and slowly, slowly things will change, and we will obviously have more sportswomen in these countries."
 
But topflight professional tennis is hardly new to Qatar, which was the first of the Gulf states to stage a men's tour event, in 1993, and became the first country in the region to stage a women's event, in 2001. That tournament has grown from a low-level event into a Tier One, the highest category of tournament below the Grand Slams. Sharapova won the Doha title in February, which might help soothe the disappointment of Qatari fans who won't be seeing her this month.
 
With $2.5 million in prize money available in February and a record $4.55 million available at this event, Doha has become an ATM in the desert for the WTA. The question is whether the atmosphere will be worthy of the occasion.
 
The legitimate rap on Doha has been the crowds. Even with free tickets the rule in the past, there have been plenty of empty seats in the early rounds at the regular tour event, and that was with a modest seating capacity of 4,000. But Alami and Scott have been encouraged by public interest this time, all the more so because tickets are no longer free and the stadium now has a capacity of 7,000.
 
It does not hurt that tickets for the entire week of play can be had for as little as $130 per person.
 
"Obviously, it's really cheap compared to Europe or anywhere in the world, but you cannot change things like this radically," said Alami, who indicated last week that approximately 80 percent of the tickets had been sold.
 
The spectators will get the chance to watch two American icons in the Williams sisters, two Serbian icons in Ivanovic and Jankovic and four leading Russian women: the resurgent Dementieva, Dinara Safina, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Vera Zvonareva.
 
It is no simple task to pick a clear favorite, and not just because the women are making a quick transition from the indoor circuit to Doha's often blustery outdoor conditions.
 
"I hear it's really, really windy, so hopefully I'll be able to play," Serena Williams said.
 
With Henin's abdication and Sharapova's absence, the women's game is in a deep egalitarian phase. Four different women won the Grand Slam titles in 2008. After Sharapova won in Australia, Ivanovic won in Paris, Venus Williams won Wimbledon, and Serena Williams won the U.S. Open. A fifth contender, Dementieva, won the Olympics.
 
What is more remarkable is that none of those five women is ranked in the top two coming into Doha. No.1 is Jankovic and No.2 is Safina, neither of whom has won a Grand Slam singles title in their career and both of whom have reached just one major final.
 
This is unprecedented in the 33-year history of the rankings. Although Lindsay Davenport and Amélie Mauresmo finished No.1 and No.2 in 2004 without winning a major title that season, Davenport had won three Grand Slam singles titles in previous years.
 
"It's a strange era," said Harold Solomon, a former top-10 men's player and a coach who has worked with Dementieva recently. "I don't think this has been what I would call the strongest time in women's tennis. I think we went through a phase there five or six years ago where it was amazingly strong."
 
Solomon has an intriguing theory for the perceived drop in quality that extends beyond the early retirements and injuries.
 
"I think the speed of the game has evolved faster than the women's tennis players' ability to be able to cope with it," he said. "Although I think they're starting to catch up with someone like Jankovic and how fast she is able to do some things. I think for a while there everyone was hitting the ball so hard, you'd see matches where players would have 50 or 60 unforced errors and 30 winners."
 
Solomon also puts the Williams sisters in a different category. When healthy and motivated, they clearly still have the capacity to soar to a higher plane. Venus did not drop a set on her way to her fifth Wimbledon, and Serena did not drop one at the U.S. Open. But Venus won just one other tournament, last month in Zurich. Although Serena won three other events, they all came in the first four months of the season. She has again played sparingly down the stretch because of nagging injuries and her longstanding need to keep recharging her batteries far from the workaday worries of the tour.
 
Jankovic, however, remained true to form and kept right on competing after losing to Serena in the U.S. Open final. She has clinched the year-end top ranking after winning three straight titles indoors this fall. But the reality is that four other women have been No.1 this year: Henin, Sharapova, Ivanovic and Serena Williams.
 
"When Justine retired, it opened the No.1 spot for many players," Ivanovic said. "For us it's very interesting because it's much more competitive, and everyone has actually a chance to get to the top."
 
Certainly not everyone, but there's no doubt that just about anyone could win this week in Doha as women's tennis continues to search (and search) for a true queen.
 
"I really hope next year we can have someone again in charge," Ivanovic said. "But at the end of the day, I think the way it is now is also very exciting."