Forget the Calls. Players Challenge the People Who Make Them.
Shortly after the nine-time champion Rafael Nadal played and won his second-round French Open match against Nicolas Almagro, Brazilian chair umpire Carlos Bernardes officiated a women's second-round match on Court 7 between Sloane Stephens and Heather Watson. The rapprochement between Nadal, the tennis star, and Bernardes, a leading tennis umpire, might have taken place here in Paris, but that is no longer a possibility now that the issues dividing them have become public.
- Christopher Clarey, The New York Times
- Updated: May 29, 2015 07:27 PM IST
The cooling-off period continued Thursday at the French Open.
Shortly after the nine-time champion Rafael Nadal played and won his second-round match against Nicolas Almagro, Brazilian chair umpire Carlos Bernardes officiated a women's second-round match on Court 7 between Sloane Stephens and Heather Watson.
The rapprochement between Nadal, the tennis star, and Bernardes, a leading tennis umpire, might have taken place here in Paris, but that is no longer a possibility now that the issues dividing them have become public.
Before the French Open, The Daily Telegraph reported that Bernardes had not worked any of Nadal's matches since their latest on-court disagreement at the Rio Open in February.
Nadal, in a particularly frank mood in Paris this year, then acknowledged after his first-round victory here that he had indeed asked that Bernardes not be assigned to his matches.
The reaction has ranged from consternation to a Gallic shrug.
Two of Nadal's chief rivals, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, said they had never made such a request. "I don't think that's fair to them," Djokovic said. "They do their job as best they can."
Jim Courier, the U.S. Davis Cup captain and former world No. 1, said he had never heard of a player "making a request to be segregated from an umpire" and was "quite surprised that the request was acceded to."
Courier added: "This is not a good precedent to set. Having said that, if I knew that I had the option to request time away from an umpire or two in my time on tour I would have used it quite often."
But Cedric Pioline, the former French star who played in Courier's era in the 1990s and early 2000s, said that the situation "doesn't surprise me at all."
Pioline said he had requested not to be assigned to a specific chair umpire during his career. "What surprises me in the case of Nadal is that the word got out," Pioline said.
The rules do not prohibit requests like Nadal's and, despite Courier's surprise, such requests are not without precedent. Nor are they guaranteed to succeed.
"It is not chair umpire ~CHECK~ la carte, definitely not," Stefan Fransson, the French Open tournament referee, said in an interview Thursday. "There is the perception sometimes that if the player just says, 'I don't want an umpire,' then it happens. That is not true, because if they say they don't want this official then we find out why they don't think they should have him, and we look into why he thinks so. We might agree. We might disagree."
In this unusually high-profile case - which Fransson and other men's tennis officials were reluctant to discuss in detail - there was clearly agreement within the ATP Tour, which operates independently from the four Grand Slam tournaments, that it was best for Nadal and Bernardes to take a break after Rio.
But it was also evident that putting Bernardes in the chair for a Nadal match at the French Open would do nothing more than inflame the situation.
"I don't really want to get too specific about the case, but it would not be good for anybody," Fransson said. "It wouldn't be good for Bernardes. It wouldn't be good for the tournament. It's just too big right now. I don't see there is any advantage to trying to do it now. I'm sure Carlos will come back with Rafa, and I think he will do that quite soon."
As a working official, Bernardes was not allowed to comment, but Nadal said he viewed the situation as temporary.
The question is whether star players like Nadal have more clout than lower-level players.
Hard as it might be to believe, Fransson said they did not.
"I think we try to treat everybody the same," he said.
Managing relations between pro players and chair umpires is usually a subtle process. According to current and former officiating supervisors, it is much more common that umpires ask not to be assigned to a specific player than the other way around.
In either case, the decision rests with the tour supervisors or, in Grand Slam events, the tournament referee.
With the ATP Tour encompassing much of the year, chair umpires have week-to-week interaction with the players. When they arrive at a Grand Slam tournament, Fransson said, they were usually asked to provide a list of players who might be problematic for them to umpire, as well as a list of any recent issues.
With about 30 chair umpires available for assignment, Fransson said, it was rarely problematic to juggle the lineups.
Fransson said that he had never been asked by a player to have a specific chair umpire work a match but that he regularly fielded complaints from players and their coaches and agents.
Gayle David Bradshaw, a men's tennis official for 30 years who is the executive vice president for rules and competition at the ATP, refers to a chair umpire simply as a "chair." When a player and an umpire take a break from each other, Bradshaw calls it "a vacation."
Bradshaw said reasons for chair umpires and players to "take a little vacation" range from overexposure to a series of altercations.
"I've only had a couple of incidents where it's almost a permanent vacation if something was really bad," Bradshaw said. "Others we just say, look, they need to have a week or two off, or if it's more serious, maybe it's all played by ear."
There are also more unusual situations.
"I had one chair umpire come to me years ago," Bradshaw said. "And he said, 'Listen, this player has lost the last seven matches that I have officiated. Can we stay away from each other for a while?'
"I don't think the player had any clue, and I don't think there was a problem between them. It was just the umpire. It was bothering him."
Bradshaw said that when a tour supervisor determined that it was time for a "vacation" to end, it was not uncommon to organize a meeting between the chair umpire and the player.
"The umpire gets to hear the player's side of it, and the player gets to hear the chair's side of it," Bradshaw said. "And things have cooled off, and then you move on."
But not always. At Wimbledon in 1995, the U.S. player Jeff Tarango walked off the court at the All England Club to protest the officiating of French chair umpire Bruno Rebeuh. Tarango's wife at the time, Benedicte, later slapped Rebeuh.
"When you have something like that," Bradshaw said. "It's probably best that it's a permanent vacation."
© 2015, The New York Times News Service