The Czech tennis community is in turmoil over the prize money paid to Czech-American tennis legend Martina Navrátilová’s for her appearance at the ECM Open tournament held in Prague May 8–14.
Tennis officials agreed that paying appearance money to selected stars was more advantageous than striving to bring back bigger professional tournaments.
“It’s better to agree with some players and to pay them appearance money than to opt for hosting a big tournament,” said Miroslav Černošek, general manager of TK Plus, a company that regularly organizes the Czech Open tournament in Prostějov in early June.
“It’s certainly better to pay appearance money to players than to increase the overall prize money,” Černošek said. “Today, there’s no corporation willing to invest into tennis [here] and to support a major tournament, so it really makes more sense to spend the money available on helping bring in some top players who wouldn’t otherwise come.”
...he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, those are the best years of his life, cause they made him who he was. (From a film Little Miss Sunshine)