Thursday March 25, 2021
Conflict escalates in the game
Tennis pro freaks out: “Get the asshole”
The mood in men’s tennis is obviously irritable. Germany’s best Alexander Zverev recently complained, now it is bursting out of Vasek Pospisil. The Canadian is ticking away on the pitch – the reason is a conflict between professionals and the ATP.
Referee Arnaud Gabas tried to calm the angry Vasek Pospisil, but he was lost. Since the beginning of the match, the Canadian tennis professional had been simmering a lot, he played the whole gamut of frustration – from the smashed racket to the listless serve from below, everything was there. And when he appropriately lost the first sentence with one penalty point for his grumbling, Pospisil exploded.
“The chairman of the ATP yelled at me for an hour and a half in a players’ meeting yesterday because I was trying to unite the players,” said the 30-year-old after Gabas asked him what was going on. And Pospisil, in anger at ATP boss Andrea Gaudenzi, stopped at all: “For an hour and a half. The chairman of the ATP. Get him out of here, this damned asshole. Why do I support that?”
The first round match at the Masters in Miami against the US qualifier Mackenzie McDonald was completely secondary – which also went against the grain of the referee. On his admonition to clarify the differences with the head of the players’ association outside the court, Pospisil only replied: “If you want to disqualify me, I would be happy to sue the entire organization.”
Zverev also agrees
The tirade of the number 67 in the world gives an idea of how irritable the mood is on a tennis political level. In addition to world number one Novak Djokovic, Pospisil was the key figure in the founding of the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) as a new players’ union apart from the ATP last year – it goes without saying that Gaudenzi does not speak too well of the Canadian. But the ATP gets its fat away from other sources as well.
For example, Alexander Zverev criticized the corona management of the professional organization this week, as it puts financial interests above the opinion of the players. And even with his anger about the change in the calculation of the world rankings due to the pandemic, the man from Hamburg did not hold back. Zverev recently described the system as a “disaster” because he sees himself at a disadvantage despite the strong results. The American John Isner also criticized the lack of transparency, for example in decisions about reduced prize money.
Pospisil, on the other hand, was remorseful after his freaking out. “I didn’t respect the game I love and I’m really sorry for that,” he wrote on Twitter. During the meeting between the players and the ATP executives, he “felt deeply unnerved and underestimated the toll these emotions took until I stepped on the pitch today.” By the way, Pospisil lost the match against McDonald 3: 6, 6: 4, 3: 6.
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