December Mailbag Part 1: Nike, Betting, and More

Ranking adjustments, plagiarism, Saudis, Jimmy Connors, Taylor Fritz, and the let rule all discussed!

I put out a call for questions and you wonderful Bounces readers delivered: Sixteen great questions (hopefully I didn’t miss any) came in across various channels and I answered them all at some length, so I’m dividing this December mailbag into two installments to have the space to provide in-depth replies to each topic.

Unsurprisingly from you sage folks, there’s a wide range of topics covered, so it was a lot of fun to dig in many different directions.

If you’d like to submit a question for a future month’s mailbag, you can click the button below or send an email to benrothenberg1+bounces@gmail.com

Let’s get started with a question, naturally, about the clothing contract of the current ATP No. 158…

From Tracey:

I was curious what Terence Atmane would be wearing after he made an announcement on his Instagram stories that Asics “fired” him…

He’s been wearing the Draper USO Nike kit, but I noticed he has a patch (not sewn on, but one of his sponsors logos on the sleeve). I know Nike is very strict about this….I’m assuming they haven’t sponsored him and he’s purchased this gear himself. In that case, are you free to add your sponsor logos on? And would this piss off Nike?

Ooh, the Nike no-patch rule is one of my favorite tennis tidbits, so this is an exciting starter for me.

For those of you who don’t know: Nike has clauses in its standard apparel contracts which forbid its sponsored players from affixing additional logos from other brands onto its clothes. This rule is the standard for Nike across all sports, so it was a big deal across the sports business landscape when Li Na’s agents were able to negotiate a bending of the rule in order to keep her on Nike’s roster while still adding logos of other brands. Naomi Osaka, similarly, was also able to keep her existing patch deals when she switched from Adidas to a big Nike contract after winning the 2019 Australian Open.

While Nike is the most famous for these restrictions, other apparel makers also sometimes pay premiums to players for not adding patches; Caroline Wozniacki was paid extra by Adidas, she told me when I reported on the patch landscape in 2017 for the New York Times Business section, for keeping her Adidas Stella McCartney outfits “clean” from other logos:

“I think it’s much better looking,” Wozniacki said of her patch-free outfits. “But at the same time, it also has to make financial sense, so it’s kind of a give and take. But if you can make it clean and make it work financially, I think that’s the best of both worlds.”

Now onto Terence Atmane, who was at the root of this question. Tracey is right: patches sewn or ironed onto a Nike outfit by someone who is not an Asian megastar like Li Na or Naomi Osaka is a telltale sign that the player is not actually sponsored by Nike directly to wear their clothes, as you can see on Atmane’s sleeve here.

atpchallengertour

A post shared by @atpchallengertour

Sara Errani, a long time Nike sponsoree in her heyday, has also had sponsor logos on her Nike tops this season, which is similarly a giveaway that she’s no longer under contract from Nike but is perhaps just receiving free clothes from them or from a third-party retailer.

wta

A post shared by @wta

I learned a lot about where players source their clothes from during Wimbledon in 2016 when I was working on a story about a dress Nike had given its players that proved too lightweight and revealing to be effective sportswear. I wound up going to as many first-round press availabilities as I could that week for every woman who was wearing a Nike outfit to get their thoughts on the outfit, or why they had chosen an alternate outfit. A couple of the players—Magda Linette is one I remember—told me they had gotten their Nike clothes not from Nike’s corporate tennis outfitters but via a local sports apparel retailer.

I’m guessing Atmane did something similar, or perhaps even just wandered into the apparel store on the grounds of the Shanghai tournament where he first donned the outfit.

Would this piss off Nike, you asked? Almost certainly not. Somebody wearing their clothes for free—especially a recent product line—is free exposure for the brand, if negligible on the scale of Nike’s larger business. Atmane (or another non-contract player) would have to do something pretty heinous to make Nike try to prohibit him from wearing their clothes for free.

From Andrew Ross:

I don't know if they just haven't considered it yet, but the WTA already has a history of dealing with two people who have some claim to the No. 1 ranking.

Remember back in 1995, when Monica Seles returned to the tour after recovering (ish) from her brutal stabbing, she came back as co-No.1 alongside Steffi Graf. It seems trivially simple for the WTA to pull this rabbit out of the hat again here, making Sabalenka and Swiatek co-No.1s for the week in question.

Any idea why this isn't happening?

That’s a great historical precedent to mention as an option in this quandary, which was faced by both the ATP and WTA this year in this unprecedented year of No. 1’s testing positive.

The tours’ parallel decisions seem settled, but I’m curious what both Sabalenka and Djokovic might have to say about this in Melbourne since they are the ones with a right to be aggrieved at the WTA and ATP respectively in their congruent situations, since both were shortchanged one week at No. 1 that I (and many others) think should be theirs.

The Aftermath of the Iga Swiatek Decision

Speaking of the ranking situation—which I wrote about here—you may have seen that last week (the rankings week of December 9) the WTA rankings were finally adjusted to remove Swiatek’s invalidated 390 points for reaching the semifinals in Cincinnati. But if you noticed the numerical change, Swiatek’s point total actually only went down by 75, from 8,370 to 8,295.

GIF of a blip.

This relatively miniscule rankings penalty, the WTA explained to me, was because the subtraction of 390 points was largely offset by the restoration of other points in Swiatek’s total in a series of adjustments that were made as a result of her antidoping saga. When Swiatek withdrew from Seoul, Beijing, and Wuhan due to her provisional suspension, she had been assigned a “0” in her ranking points tabulation for each of those events. But because the WTA rules (Section VIII.4.a.iii(b)) allow for “0”s that are accumulated at WTA 1000 or WTA 500 tournaments caused by a later-lifted provisional suspension to be erased, those were duly eradicated.

So with the 0s gone from her table, Swiatek is able to count the 195 points she earned in Stuttgart and the 120 points she earned in Miami.

In other words: -390 + 195 + 120 = -75

But if you backdate all that math, the result in the Weeks at No. 1 category we’ve been discussing stays the same: Sabalenka still would have gotten No. 1 one week earlier than she actually did, albeit only by SIX points.

The Weeks at No. 1 quandary, thus, remains.

It may seem like a trivial quibble to fixate over six points, but the way both ATP and WTA have been stubborn on this still feels symbolic of how unwilling tennis authorities are to reckon with the consequences of anti-doping offenses atop the sport.

From Gloria Pareyón:

I wonder whatever became of Neil Harman after your exposé of his plagiarism. Do you have any idea?

[If you’ve read this far I bet you’d like to keep reading! To read the answer to this question, and the answers to five more questions in this mailbag installment, please become a subscriber!]