Seven Thousand Five Hundred Dollars

For four days after the US Open women’s final, the number floating around was seventy thousand dollars. That was the theoretical ceiling — fifty thousand for racquet abuse, twenty more for the rest — and it was reported as though it were a sentence rather than a maximum, which is how tennis fines are always reported and why tennis fines are always a disappointment.

On Tuesday the USTA issued the actual figure. Aryna Sabalenka, for the entirety of her conduct on the afternoon of September 12, was fined $7,500.

That is one number for the whole afternoon. Here is what the afternoon contained, as we reported it at the time and as the tournament has now itemized it:

A ball struck into the Arthur Ashe crowd in frustration during the first set, after a break. Code violation, ball abuse.
A ball struck angrily toward the back of the court that narrowly missed a cameraman.
A racquet smashed on the court during the second set.
After the final point, a racquet smashed at the bench repeatedly, before the trophy ceremony, until there was no racquet.
Two words, directed at a courtside camera operator, that we did not print in full then and will not now.

Seven thousand five hundred dollars. Her runner-up prize money was $2.8 million. The fine is 0.27 percent of it — a figure a colleague at Last Word on Tennis worked out so nobody else would have to, in a piece headlined “Tennis Fines Are a Joke and Aryna Sabalenka’s US Open One Proves It.” Which is the argument, and it is a good one, and this is the best test case the sport has produced for it in years.

The Scale

To be fair to the USTA — and one should be, briefly — $7,500 is not a slap on the wrist by the rulebook’s own lights. It is the top of the standard range for racquet abuse at this year’s tournament, which ran from $2,500 to $7,500 with most offenders paying $5,000. An audible obscenity is $3,000 to $5,000. Sabalenka was, in other words, given roughly the maximum ordinary fine for the worst ordinary offense, and the rest — the second racquet, the ball past the cameraman, the words — appears to have been folded in. The $50,000 ceiling exists for a different tier of conduct: the tier where the tournament decides to make an example of you.

They did not decide that. And you can see why. She lost a Grand Slam final, a three-peat, and a ranking she’d held for two years in a single afternoon; she cried through her speech; she apologized in the press conference in the way she apologizes, which is by explaining; and by Tuesday she had posted, “Not the ending I dreamed of. Today hurts, but tomorrow we start again.” The tournament looked at the top seed, the two-time defending champion, the most-recorded woman of the fortnight, and issued the fine you issue to someone you expect back next year.

The Comparison

Last year, in the first round of this same tournament, Daniil Medvedev lost in five sets after a match interrupted by a photographer wandering onto the court, went to his chair, and destroyed a racquet against it. The USTA fined him $42,500 — $30,000 for unsportsmanlike conduct and $12,500 for the racquet. His prize money for a first-round loss was $110,000. The fine was about forty percent of it.

Sabalenka: a quarter of one percent. Medvedev: forty percent. Same tournament, same referee’s office, a year apart, for offenses that a neutral observer would struggle to rank. The difference is not the conduct. The difference is that one of them was the top seed in a final and one of them was a first-round loser who had made the tournament look bad on a Sunday night, and the fine schedule, whatever it says on paper, knows the difference.

The Actual Proposal

Last Word’s proposal is that fines be assessed as a percentage of tournament earnings — ten to fifteen percent — on the grounds that “a punishment is only meaningful if it represents a real cost to the person receiving it.” It is a sensible idea. It would mean a first-round loser and a finalist paid proportionally the same for the same racquet. It would mean $7,500 became something closer to $300,000, which is a number that would make a player think about the second racquet before picking it up. It will not happen, because the people who set the fine schedule are the tournaments, and the tournaments do not want their finalists thinking about anything on a Sunday afternoon except tennis.

So the schedule stays. The maximum stays theoretical. And the next player who has the worst afternoon of her year on the biggest court in the sport will pay, for all of it, roughly what a courtside seat to watch her do it cost.

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