Does sporting merit matter? Prestige? Or perhaps the chance to involve younger players, to broaden the base of global tennis? When it comes to wild cards, the answer is all of it and none of it. Otherwise, how do you explain the extraordinary snub handed to Stan Wawrinka at the US Open: an ATP veteran, champion in 2016, now into the final season of a long career at 41. Usually, in cases like this, the résumé counts. Just look at the Williams sisters, who continue to receive wild cards into the main draw at major tournaments despite modest recent results. Sometimes it is the image, the commercial pull, that makes all the difference. According to the New York Times, Wawrinka is also paying the price for being Swiss: like Roger Federer, he is neither French, Australian, British nor American — the four countries that host the Grand Slam tournaments, and tend to have a certain fondness for their own tennis talent. Beyond the story of the past few days, though, the arguments over how wild cards are allocated show no sign of going away. If anything, they are getting harder to pin down.
Overall, wild cards account for roughly six per cent of the field at each major. Some are given to emerging talents who have missed out through the conventional qualifying route, or to players coming through college tennis: in the United States, regardless of the sport, anyone who reaches the top of the NCAA is taken seriously. Nothing controversial there. Young players are rewarded, given the golden ticket that could become the opportunity of a lifetime — and, in any case, a good sports story. Then there are the wild cards for veterans, or for professionals who, for all sorts of reasons, have slipped towards the margins of the circuit: a sort of career tribute that can sometimes amount to much more than simply getting into the draw. Ask Goran Ivanisevic, who won Wimbledon in 2001. Kim Clijsters, who won the US Open in 2009. Or Arthur Fery, who reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon this year. All of them started with a wild card.
There are other cases, though, that are much harder to justify, where favouritism seems to carry more weight than the growth of the game or sporting merit. Particularly in America — but in the other countries mentioned above too — the role played by the national tennis federation in deciding who gets them is well known and remarkably opaque. By now, it is almost taken for granted, a formality in the workings of modern tennis. And yet it continues to raise eyebrows among fans and observers, because the frequent result is that players higher up the rankings are left out in favour of the guest stars who receive the pass. Even so, organisers still insist that every decision is based on the following criteria, in order of importance (in this case for Wimbledon, though with some variations at the other Grand Slam venues): “Ranking, results and recent form; historical ability to perform at tournaments of this type; support for British players; other circumstances deserving consideration.” Clearly, in America, none of them applied to Wawrinka. Good tennis to all.