Longing for live tennis in COVID-19 times?
Photo: UTS Website
It’s very simple: tennis fans’ miss watching live matches. To fulfill that desire, Patrick Mouratoglou and Alex Popyrin have launched an international tennis showdown series called Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS). The series will start on May 16, 2020 and will go on for a five-week period through June 2020 at the Mouratoglou Academy in the South of France. Additional competitions sites in other parts of the world will be announced soon.
However, live tennis is not only what we will get from the UTS. Mouratoglou and Alex Popyrin are using this opportunity to create a tennis event that incorporates changes and reforms to certain rules of the game. In the UTS showdown series, on court and video coaching will be permitted, and players will share conversations between themselves and coaches and also be free to express their character on court.
As some of you may recall, after the controversial incident with Serena Williams at the 2018 US Open Final Mouratoglou has been very vocal about the “hypocrisy” of having a rule that prohibits on court coaching while the reality is that tennis players get on court coaching most of the time. As a matter of fact, on court coaching is permitted in the WTA in some tournaments and tv audience can even listen to the interaction between the player and her coach.
In April 7, 2020 he also released a statement on financial inequality in tennis advocating for the ATP, the WTA, the ITF and the Grand Slams to create a solution for lower ranked players in this crisis and in the long term. Mouratoglou is definitely using the UTS as the “Petri dish” to cultivate some of the tennis reforms that he’s been pushing.
As stated by Mouratoglou, the three main criteria for picking the players are: amazing game, charismatic, and unique. As of April 25, 2020, the UTS has confirmed the participation of David Goffin, Benoit Paire, Alexei Popyrin and Fabio Fognini – we’re sure that Fabio and Benoit will be very happy with a lighter code of conduct that allows them to express their emotions more freely on court! –. The UTS claims to be a player centric league, therefore distributing a sizeable income among the players participating.
Match format is still pending and the UTS website says that some innovative rules are to be included. Broadcasting and streaming partners haven’t been announced yet. All pending information will be released on the UTS page: www.utslive.tv. It’s good for the fans to have live tennis matches available in these stressful Covid19 times and we believe that it will also be good for the players to face competitive opponents in real matches to keep their form and game.