Shadow over Sinner at Wimbledon

 WIMBLEDON-The three-week interval between the French Open final and the start of Wimbledon has provided ample opportunity to ponder Jannik Sinner’s loss to Carlos Alcaraz. The three consecutive match points that Sinner squandered to the Spaniard remain only slightly less explicable than the paltry three-month suspension Sinner served for using a performance-enhancing drug.

 The rule as written calls for a much harsher penalty. So how did the carrot-topped Italian manage to cop a plea to a less serious charge? Everyone in tennis has an opinion. But what’s the real story?

 It occurred to me during the 2025 French Open as John McEnroe nattered on about an old scandal at the Italian Open that it’ll take at least a decade before the facts of l’affaire Sinner fully emerge. In 1987 during the first round at the Foro Italico, McEnroe ran into a lowly Argentinean qualifier, Franco Davin, who shocked the crowd by winning the first set of a night match.

 When Davin went on to go up a break in the second set, tournament officials had to pray for a miracle. And God, or Satan, or some clever soul, soon provided one. The lights on Campo Centrale went off and play was suspended. Once power was restored, McEnroe made short work of the second set only to have the lights give out again during the deciding third set.

 In the end, McEnroe prevailed, provoking an outpouring of suspicions and accusations. I was there that evening when conspiratorial theories boiled over in the Press Room. But no one was bold enough to accuse the tournament director, Sergio Palmieri, who also happened to be McEnroe’s agent, of fiddling the match. Nearly forty years would pass before McEnroe casually revealed what sounded like nothing more than an amusing anecdote. The point of the story – it certainly had no moral – was simply to entertain the TV audience. It turned out that Palmieri had paid off a maintenance worker to kill the lights and change the course of the match.

 Tennis history is heavy with such vignettes about the game’s less than edifying events. Take the 1983 men’s final at the US Open. Both Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl were represented by Donald Dell, tennis’ uncrowned King of Conflict of Interest. Normally Dell would have been satisfied to sit back and cash in his percentage of the prize money. But unknown to the public, Connors had sustained a massive blood blister on his foot in the semifinal. Given the gravity of the injury, he looked likely to default, costing Dell a sizeable chunk of money.

 Anxious to arrange a solution, Dell contacted a doctor who worked weekly miracles for the New York Jets by keeping banged-up football players on the field. The doctor advised that Jimbo’s blister could be drained and his condition stabilized with a shot of painkiller. The problem was that the painkiller wore off every hour and had to be supplemented with more shots.

 According to the Code of Conduct then in force, players were forbidden to receive medical treatment during matches. It wasn’t uncommon for a competitor to pull up lame or even collapse on court and lay there unattended by a physician. Always cool under pressure and willing to improvise, Dell persuaded the US Open that Connors was suffering from diarrhea and would have to occasionally answer a call of nature.

 Tournament director Bill Talbot argued that this too was against a strict interpretation of the rules. But this didn’t dissuade Dell from spontaneously inventing “the bathroom break.” From the start, spectators were encouraged to believe that players received no coaching and, God forbid, no medical attention, during these trips to the toilet. Instead, Connors, with the help of booster shots, managed to win a Grand Slam title that by rights belonged to Lendl. This squalid deception would have remained a secret if Donald Dell hadn’t revealed it in his 2007 memoir, Never Make the First Offer.

 As a public figure who has reinvented himself more often than Madonna, Andre Agassi surprised nobody by assuming the role of bestselling author with a book actually penned by a ghostwriter.  Agassi shocked his fans that he actually hated tennis. In an even more startling admission, he confessed that he had dosed himself with crystal meth. In 1997, during a psychic and physical low point in his career, he tested positive for meth and faced a potentially career changing suspension and a stiff fine.

 Most pros caught in such a dilemma deny everything, lawyer up, and pursue a plea bargain. But just as he did during close matches, Agassi quickly changed a losing game and went on an imaginative offensive. He claimed that he had a close friend who was a meth addict and that by mistake he had drunk out of that junkie’s glass. According to Agassi, this accounted for the drug traces in his blood sample. Despite the Code of Conduct’s stipulation that a player is strictly responsible for everything in his system, Agassi was let off without a penalty.