MELBOURNE — Aspiring tennis professionals are washing their shirts in hotel baths, sleeping on couches and relying on crowd funding to chase their Grand Slam dreams, a stark contrast with the top tier players that some fear could fuel corruption in the sport.
Tennis was rocked on Monday following reports that authorities had failed to deal with widespread match-fixing, just as the Australian Open, the first grand slam tournament of the year, kicked off in Melbourne.
Experts said tennis was ripe for corruption due to the ease of fixing a one-on-one sport, as well as the large disparity between the multi-million dollar earnings of top players and the lower rungs of professionals, where even mundane costs like laundry add up.