Fort Worth’s turn at hosting a major tennis event has been graded a qualified success.
The market was dealt a nearly impossible hand to win, and both the city and Dickies Arena did everything possible to host a successful WTA Finals, which concluded on Monday night.
The overall reception from the players and the professionals who cover and follow the WTA is that both Dickies Arena and the city of Fort Worth did well given the circumstances.
The main criticism has been the attendance, which has received attention from the players and members of the international media. The optics on TV, and the still photographs, sometimes were not great.
“They had five weeks to promote this,” WTA CEO Steven Simon said in a phone interview with the Star-Telegram. “Normally for an event we have about 18 months. We came here with modest expectations. I am comfortable that over time we’d sell this out.
“It’s a beautiful venue, but it’s a big venue as well.”
Might be too big.
There are a lot of perfectly good reasons why some of those crowd shots looked bleak, “arena size” near the top of the list.
“We sold over 35,000 tickets for the week,” Dickies Arena president general manager Matt Homan said in a phone interview. “It was great that we had the week available and we could plug this in. Absolutely we’d like to host this again.”
Even if the arena size was perfectly suited for the event, the WTA Finals returning to Fort Worth in the future is a giant Maybe.
The WTA has a China problem it must resolve first.
The WTA Finals was originally scheduled to be played at the Shenzhen Bay Sports Center in China, but the one-week tournament had to find a different site for two reasons:
1. Because of COVID concerns, international events are still suspended from being held in China.
2. The Peng Shuai issue. The Chinese WTA player accused a high-ranking member of China’s communist party of sexual assault back in November of 2021.
She has basically disappeared since she made the allegation.
She was interviewed by L’Equipe, France’s top sports publication, in February; she said she was fine, that she never made any allegations, did not disappear, and she had to end her career.
The interview was conducted in China.
WTA officials aren’t buying the answers, and have called for an independent investigation.
Simon and the WTA have no intention of walking this one back, even if they do have 10-year contract with China for this event.
The organization will let this play out, and decide what to do with its 2023 WTA Finals sometime early next spring.
The WTA was well aware of both early in 2022, and was in discussions with venues to play its Finals in other locations.
The primary reason Fort Worth and Dickies won this bid was its willingness to agree to a one-year contract. Other locations wanted multi-year agreements.
How it played out was mostly positive, with the undercurrent of disappointment about those crowd shots.
Dickies dropped its black curtain over the top part of the arena, which reduced capacity to 8,000. A WTA event is ideally suited for a venue that holds between 5,000 to 6,000.
If Dickies hosts another tennis event, Homan said they would likely eliminate the seating in the corners, and sell seats behind the players and along the court.
“I’m confident if we had the time to promote this and we were able to do what we needed to do on a normal schedule we could double the attendance,” Homan said.
It didn’t help that the 2022 WTA Finals competed against basically everything with the exception of another Top Gun movie.
It had to compete against Halloween night, and multiple days where the NBA, NFL, NHL, college football and the World Series were all going on.
Then there is the issue that women’s tennis doesn’t quite have the star power it once had when Serena Williams was almost a Taylor Swift show.
The quality of the players in the tournament is not in question; the casual American sports fan, however, may not be as familiar with a Maria Sakkari, Iga Swiatek or the other top players.
The exception is Coco Gauff. When she played at Dickies, the crowd was noticeably bigger.
Homan estimated that when Gauff was part of the lineup for the matches played on Saturday, Nov. 6, the crowd was 4,500.
Not great. Not awful.
Could be better.
Dickies Arena would like another swing at this.
To steal a terrible tennis cliche, the ball is literally in the WTA’s court.
