Simple as 1-2-3: Medvedev wins
Russian tennis star takes down Top 3 players in world on path to ATP Finals victory
LONDON – Daniil Medvedev did not travel an easy path to the biggest title of his career at the ATP Finals: He beat No. 3 Dominic Thiem for the championship after earlier getting past No. 1 Novak Djokovic and No. 2 Rafael Nadal.
By switching tactics and coming back for a 4-6, 7-6 (2), 6-4 victory over U.S. Open champion Thiem in Sunday’s final, No. 4 Medvedev became the first player to defeat each of the men ranked 1-3 in the season-ending championship – and only the fourth to do so at any tour event since 1990.
“Means a lot,” said Medvedev, a 24-year-old Russian. “Shows what I’m capable of when I’m playing good, when I’m feeling good mentally, physically. So I know what I’m capable of. Just need to produce it more and more.”
The win against Thiem on an indoor hard court in an arena without spectators, who were barred because of the coronavirus pandemic, followed those against Djokovic in the round-robin portion of the tournament and Nadal in Saturday’s semifinals
Medvedev went 5-0 in all, quite a turnaround from a year ago, when he was 0-3 at the ATP Finals. The tournament now ends its 12-edition stay in London and heads to Turin, Italy, next year.
Medvedev closed 2020 by going 10-0 in November, including seven wins against members of the Top 10. He
and oft-interrupted college and pro football schedules.
But the reality is, the people college basketball really needs at the arenas are the TV crews.
CBS and various cable affiliates are scheduled to pay around $800 million this season to televise America’s most frenetic sports celebration for three weeks each March and April. That’s on top of the millions the biggest conferences generate in media revenue during the regular season.
Most of it is money earmarked for distribution by the NCAA and the conferences to the schools, which combine hoops and football revenue to fund smaller sports in their programs. A staggering 116 of those programs have been cut from 34 schools at the Division I level since the pandemic hit, according to the USOPC, whose very ability to field an Olympic team is largely dependent on the college system.
Another year like that would have the potential to mark the beginning of the end of the college sports system as we know it.
“When you look around the country, this has potential to force some schools to recalibrate what they’re capable of supporting,” said John Tauer, the coach at St. Thomas, the Minnesota school that is moving from Division III to Division I. “It’s a complicated question that every school is going to answer differently.”
So, how to get from November to March?
The Ivy League has already bagged it, canceling all winter sports, which means there will be no Harvard or Yale come tournament time, and none of those eminently enter
taining stories about how smart guys can play hoops, too.
Most everyone else is planning a season. Many teams are planning shorter road trips and a smaller footprint. No trip’s success – not even that of a quick bus ride – will be taken for granted. Testing protocols are in place and, as the college football season has shown us with the cancellation of a handful of games every weekend, all participants will need to be able to adjust on the fly.
“Those thoughts creep in every day,” Florida coach Mike White said. “I wonder
how many games I’ll miss this year. I wonder how many games we’ll have our five starters out there, 12 guys available.”
When teams do start playing, some of the top players to watch will be Jared Butler (Baylor), Cade Cunningham (Oklahoma State), Ayo Dosunmu (Illinois) and Luka Garza (Iowa).
Garza averaged nearly 24 points and 10 rebounds as a junior last season. The pandemic complicated his decision about whether to stay in school or go pro. He will now enter the season as one of the rarest birds in
the college basketball ecosystem – a senior who also has NBA lottery potential.
A mere eight months ago, those kind of issues – namely, the mass migration of players to the NBA after a single year of college, or no college at all – fueled that perennial cauldron of debate about the overall health of the sport and the need for reforms.
COVID-19 makes that seem less important now.
Though there’s always a lot of hand-wringing about the outsized role of money – passed both legitimately and under the table – in college basketball, there is no debate about this: Without any games, the money will dry up and college sports as we know it will be reshaped, too.
And so, even with positive cases of the virus surging and the health risks as dire as they’ve ever been, teams scurry to fill in blank spots on their schedules and get ready to put on a show. There was no Midnight Madness to mark the first practices of the season, but that was never the goal.
The goal is March Madness – even if it’s a TV-only event.
“We don’t know a lot of things,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “But we know we’re going to have March Madness. We know we’re going to have a regular season. We just don’t know much about both – and it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.”