Williams kept apart from Ramos on orders of organisers
US Open officials said yesterday that Serena Williams had not made a formal request for chair umpire Carlos Ramos to be kept away from her matches over the coming fortnight. Yet they have still decided to separate the two for the benefit of the tournament.
Last year’s final turned into what a recent ESPN documentary described as “the ugliest finish in grand-slam history” after Ramos issued Williams with three code
violations, prompting the partisan New York crowd to boo the victorious Naomi Osaka when she stepped up to the presentation dais.
During the match, Williams wagged her finger at Ramos during one of the changeovers and said: “You will never ever be on another court of mine as long as you live.”
But Williams has not repeated this instruction since, according to Stacey Allaster, the United States Tennis Association’s chief executive for professional tennis. When the subject was raised yesterday, Allaster said: “The request has not come in. This is our decision. We want to focus on the competition.” Further clarification was offered by Soeren Friemel, the German who has taken over as tournament referee from Brian Earley. Asked whether it was a dubious decision for tennis to keep certain umpires away from players who have an issue with them, Friemel said: “We have the best officials at the 2019 US Open, so there is some flexibility.
“It is not the first time we have made the decision that’s good for the tournament,” Friemel added. “In the end, our goal is to assign the best chair umpire for the match.” Umpiring “holidays” – as they are known in the referee’s office – are a familiar part of tennis’s peculiar ecosystem, even if they are rarely mentioned. The argument is that no one benefits from starting a match with pre-existing tensions between an official and player, and that the two parties can perhaps be reintroduced to each other after a lengthy cooling-off period.
One unusually high-profile case emerged before the 2015 French Open, when The Telegraph reported that Rafael Nadal had asked not to be umpired by Carlos Bernardes after a row in Rio three months earlier. “Yes, it was my re
‘The request has not come in, it’s our decision. We focus on the tennis’
quest,” Nadal said. “I consider him [Bernardes] a great umpire, but when you have some troubles with the same umpire, sometimes it’s easy to stay for a while away, no?”
To return to this year’s US Open, Allaster has made a number of changes in an effort to avoid a repeat of last year’s unpleasant scenes. After a two-and-a-half-day summit in Lake Nona in March, the USTA decided that the crowd might have been less hostile if they had understood the escalating nature of code violations: a warning for the first, a point penalty for the second, a game penalty for the third and
disqualification for the fourth. Instead, the impression of the angry spectators was that Ramos was penalising Williams on an arbitrary basis. “It was clear fans didn’t understand the rules,” Allaster told The New York Times.
The scoreboards have thus been reprogrammed so they will flash up details of code violations as they are announced – a simple solution that, surprisingly, has never been used before in professional tennis. There will also be an official on hand for the live broadcasters, ready to explain any controversial decisions for the benefit of a wider audience.