No-Ad Scoring One Way to Fix Tennis?

KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. —  Andre Agassi and television are on one side, Pete Sampras and tradition on the other.

Tennis has a score to settle as support builds for the first major rule change since the tiebreaker was adopted in 1970. The professional tours are considering no-ad scoring, which would make it possible for games to be decided by a single point.

Butch Buchholz, tournament chairman of the Lipton Championships, says the new rule could be in place by this time next year. Leaders of the ATP and WTA tours say they’re receptive to change.

“We have to protect the heritage of our game,” said Mark Miles, chief executive officer for the men’s tour. “But we also need to be prepared to be innovative.”

Such a revolutionary rule would affect the balance of power among top players. It would also alter the pace of the sport, creating more dramatic points and making the length of matches more predictable, which would please TV.

There’s considerable resistance from purists, however, and tennis has many.

“I’ve always felt like no-ad is a step in the right direction,” Agassi said.

“I don’t think that’s the answer to fixing this game,” Sampras said.

Like other games that involve hitting an object over a net, tennis uses a “win by two” scoring system. If each player wins three points in a game, the winner of the next point has the “ad” (or advantage), and the game continues until one player has a two-point margin. Theoretically a game could continue forever, and in reality games lasting a dozen points or more are common.

With no-ad, when the score reaches three points each, the next point determines the winner of the game.

“You’re going to have 12 to 16 points that seem to make the difference, as opposed to just two or three,” Agassi said. “There will be a lot more turning points in a match.”

No-ad scoring is common at the club level, and it was used by colleges in the United States from 1974 to 1987. Satellite tournaments in South America and France have experimented recently with the rule.

Surveys show no-ad shortens matches by about 10 percent and reduces the range in their length. TV networks find it difficult to plan coverage when a best-of-three-set match can last 45 minutes or three hours. Partly for that reason, night sessions at Lipton this week were relegated to early-morning tape-delayed telecasts by ESPN.

Players believe no-ad would reduce the importance of big serves and produce closer matches. Sampras dislikes the rule because it could mean more upsets.

“It just brings a little too much luck into the game,” he said. “It might be more exciting for the TV viewers and for the fans, but I’m not crazy about it. The longer a match goes, the better off I feel I’m going to be.”

Among top players, Agassi is one of the few to support no-ad, but the ATP’s Miles wants studies done to find out what fans think.

“Players don’t buy tickets,” Miles said.

Bart McGuire, CEO of the women’s tour, said no-ad should be considered as part of a more drastic overhaul in the scoring system. He offered two other proposals:

* Tiebreakers when the set score reaches 4-all, instead of 6-all;

* An extended tiebreaker as a fifth set, allowing women to join men in playing best-of-five-set matches at Grand Slam events.

“If you’re going to start playing with the rules of tennis, you should take a comprehensive look and maybe experiment,” McGuire said. “I believe it’s important men and women wind up with the same rules, and it might improve both games.”

Even discussing such change is radical in a sport so tied to tradition. McGuire counts just two new rules in the past 75 years: adding the tiebreaker and removing the requirement that the server keep both feet on the ground.

“The U.S. Constitution is a pretty enduring document,” McGuire said, “and it gets amended more often than that.”