Game, set and cash

Queen's Club in London has been awash with signs of the tennis good life over the past week. Sponsors' logos are everywhere, not least on the players' clothing, rackets, shoes and bags. Wimbledon, the world's most important tournament, is eight days away, dangling a total of £8,500,000 in prize money. Yet greed and cynicism are so rampant in the game that tennis professionals are cheating their sponsors or even, in the extreme case of Martina Hingis, suing them for shoes that didn't fit.

The attitude towards money has become mind-boggling when a top player can afford to reject the equivalent of a Wimbledon winner's cheque of $500,000 to appear in an exhibition event or a small tournament like Qatar. Yet that is precisely what is happening nowadays.

It is the decision of Hingis's advisers to pursue a £25m lawsuit against her former shoe sponsors for supplying footwear which allegedly damaged her feet which has highlighted the rampant avarice. If the reports are true that the shoes weren't suitable, it is ridiculous that a contract should be signed in the first place. With the amount of money being made today, rackets and shoes are the most important items for a player to get right. Never sign until you know the shoe ­ or the racket ­ is right.

Yet there are players on the men's and women's circuit using rackets they don't really like just because they are being paid big bucks to endorse them. Some of the heavy hitters in the men's game have been playing with special rackets from one company while painting them with the colours of the company who sponsor them. There was the famous instance some years back of Martina Navratilova trying to extract extra power by using Steffi Graf's racket which had been decorated with the logo of her own sponsor.

Why sign an endorsement if you know the item being sponsored is not right for you? That is simply greed at a time when the top men and women are making such exorbitant money. Why jeopardise in any way those earnings by endorsing something which means little in terms of overallincome? Anna Kournikova has reaped the benefit of incredible endorsements when she hasn't deserved it tennis-wise, but she has a market value which has been well promoted by the people who manage her. She makes $12 million plus a year, yet she hasn't won a tournament.

Good luck to her, though. If she was someone who potentially should have been a lot better and was just taking the money, she should be urged to calm it down and concentrate on actually hitting the ball over the net. But she is an extremely hard worker, although just not good enough a player at the top level. But if the companies are willing to pay this sort of money, why shouldn't she take it?

A serious problem exists, however, with players who feature in big-money exhibitions and then complain about tiredness when they are making up to £100,000 a night, money they don't really need, astonishing as that may seem. Some small tournaments which pay a total of, say, $300,000 in prize money have been known to dangle the same amount as an appearance fee to attract just one player.

One top American was offered a reported $350,000 to play a tournament in Singapore. He accepted, then demanded four first-class air tickets for his family to travel with him. When the tickets arrived he again complained they were the sort which did not allow him to claim air miles, so they had to be changed again. He lost in the first round.

There are many examples of players chasing the quick money when they should be concentrating on improving their game. You will not find the top pros involved in this practice if it is likely to jeopardise their chances at a Grand Slam. But a lot of players, especially from eastern Europe, find the money they can make beyond their wildest dreams so they cash in while they can.

All this has occurred far more on the men's circuit than the women's. In the old days those two great pals Bjorn Borg and Vitas Gerulaitis would sometimes play exhibitions 30 nights in a row, trooping from one city to another, while always making sure they had enough time to get ready for the next Grand Slam. Now those exhibitions are much less common but it has got to the ridiculous stage where the top players are turning down $500,000 to play in a small event because they can't be bothered or have something better to do. It's frightening.

I had personal experience of this when I was married to Chris Evert. On the rare occasions we were able to share a week together as a break from our touring commitments there would invariably be a call from somebody asking Chris to pop over to Tokyo or somewhere to play an exhibition on her week off and offering $100,000. Twenty years ago that was more than some people would earn in a lifetime. How can you turn that down? Is that greed?