Scorecard

Collecting data for an insurance form, a secretary in the Atlanta Hawks' front office recently had the following exchange with Forward John Drew:

"What's your birth date, John?"

"September 30."

"What year?"

"Every year."

BATTLE OF THE COMPUTERS

As though life weren't confusing enough already, soon there will "be two rival computer rankings of the world's best male tennis players. Until now, the Association of Tennis Professionals, the men's players' union, has had the rankings business to itself, feeding into its computer results from Grand Prix tournaments held throughout the year. But this summer, World Championship Tennis, which has broken away from the Grand Prix circuit, is coming out with its own rankings, prompting Jim McManus, ATP's director of player and tournament services, to say, "The competition doesn't bother me. It's the fans I worry about. With two lists, it'll be hard for the public to understand what's going on."

The WCT claims that it was forced to start its own rankings because of the ATP's refusal to include WCT events in its rankings. "When they elected not to use our tournaments, the computer was a matter of survival for us," says WCT Chief Operating Officer Rod Humphries. "We needed an incentive to keep players on our tour. They could have been losing their rankings if they played a lot of WCT tennis. Vijay Amritraj [currently number 34 on the ATP list] is going to play only WCT events this year, so he'll eventually drop off the ATP computer. In six months Vijay might not be able to get into a tournament. He certainly wouldn't be seeded if we had to rely on the ATP rankings."

Accounts differ as to why the ATP chose not to include WCT events. The ATP says it "left the door open"—whatever that means—for the WCT to meet the ATP's criteria, while the WCT darkly alludes, with equal vagueness, to a "political situation." In any case, the ATP has cause to worry about the WCT's new ranking system. It will use a more all-encompassing approach, one that takes into account Grand Prix tournaments plus the results of WCT events, playoffs on both circuits and international team competitions like the Davis Cup, all of which, except, of course, Grand Prix results, the ATP computer ignores.

The WCT rankings will also be programmed to include a "diminishing return" factor by which points received are devalued each week, thereby allowing hot players to rise more quickly to the top of the listings. Under the ATP system a player retains full credit for points won at a tournament until the following year. "Borg is still at Number Six on their computer," Humphries says. "He shouldn't be there. He hasn't been playing tennis. Arthur Ashe was Number Eight in the world seven months after he retired."