Washington’s Citi Open long has served as a tuneup event for the U.S. Open, acclimating players to the heat and intense humidity they likely will find in New York for the year’s final Grand Slam. This past week, the Citi Open helped the pros grow accustomed to something else: the sport’s new serve clock, which will be used for the first time at a Grand Slam later this month.
The serve clock, which had previously been used only in qualifying tournaments at Grand Slams and on an experimental basis in the ATP’s Next Gen Finals in Milan in November, made its main-draw tournament debut in Washington.
Players and fans in Washington watched 25 seconds tick away on a small screen placed above the larger monitors that show serve speed on both ends of the court. The clear, white numbers on display aren’t the result of a rule change in tennis, but rather a tool introduced to help make more consistent the regulation of a time-limit rule that previously has been left to a chair umpire’s discretion.
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Now the chair umpire presses a button to start the countdown after he or she has announced the score, and the players are on the clock. If a point has not begun after 25 seconds — umpires have been instructed to end the clock at the beginning of the service motion — whichever player responsible for the delay will be issued a warning.
A second violation will result in either the loss of one serve (if the offender is serving) or the loss of one point (if he or she is receiving).
WTA and ATP players voiced their opinions on the addition throughout the week after both wins and losses. Many players appreciated the effort at more transparency; pros long have groused about being assessed time-code violations seemingly arbitrarily.
“I do think it’s a good thing. It’s one of those things in tennis that is so stupid that the players were sort of expected to be counting to 25 in their head, not having a clock on the court and getting warned,” Andy Murray said after his opening-round match early in the week. “I think it’s a positive change for tennis and I think that the umpires are smart about it as well. They start it after you’ve called the score, so sometimes, if there’s a really long rally and the crowd makes a lot of noise, you get a few extra seconds, but after an ace or a double fault it gets called immediately.”
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That human element remains the cause of some concern. That the chair umpire still decides when to start the clock allows wiggle room for enforcing the time-limit rule. The worry among some players is that umpires will defer to highly ranked, highly visible pros such as Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, both notorious for taking a long time to serve, and start the clock later than they should.
Canada’s Denis Shapovalov tweeted as much after a loss to Kei Nishikori at the Citi Open. No time violations were called during that match, though Nishikori appeared to take more than the allotted time.
“Not sure what the point of the ‘clock’ rule is if some players are not getting penalized for not following the rule,” Shapovalov wrote.
His complaint was one of few in Washington. Most players, including three-time Grand Slam champion Stan Wawrinka, liked that chair umpires waited a few seconds after long points to start the clock.
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The clock also clearly sped up some players. In an early-afternoon match played between Frances Tiafoe and Hubert Hurkacz under a glaring hot sun, Hurkacz served many times while still gulping for air after chasing down Tiafoe’s shots. It gave Tiafoe a clear advantage. Murray mentioned how his 2-hour 37-minute opening match could have stretched to three hours if not for the clock.
“Me, personally, I think it would be a good thing,” Citi Open semifinalist Andrea Petkovic said. “It just gives a little edge to it, I think, and just makes the game a little more physical. Especially once the rallies become really long, I think it favors the physically strong player, probably.”
On the flip side, both Petkovic and John Isner, the top-ranked American man, said that although it was odd at first to have the clock in their line of sight, knowing how quickly they serve allowed them to take an extra beat at the service line when necessary.
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“In the beginning I was looking at it all the time just to see how much it takes me to get from point to point, and once I realized, ‘You’re doing fine,’ it relaxed me, actually,” Petkovic said.
That Washington had few problems with the new serve clock does not mean the USTA won’t hear complaints when the U.S. Open begins Aug. 27. There the clock will be put to the test for the first time during best-of-five-set matches between more highly ranked, outspoken players than were present at the Citi Open.
Before its debut there was also the worry that fans would count down or clap along with the serve clock, as they do with the “Hawk-Eye” instant replay system. In Washington, fans were wholly uninterested, though that’s not to say the more raucous New York crowds will be the same.
Either way, the U.S. Open will be the final tournament to feature a serve clock this year before the U.S. Tennis Association determines whether to use it full time in 2019. Between now and then, players will see the clock at the Rogers Cup in Montreal and Toronto, the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati, the Connecticut Open and the Winston-Salem Open.
The USTA plans to collect formal feedback from players, fans, television broadcasters, umpires and tour managers along the way.
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