Not only is it unfair that women, by playing at most three sets, get a better hourly pay rate than the harder-working men but, most importantly, they are being deprived of a format that has provided tennis drama. Given its current weakened state, the women's game could use more of that magic ingredient.
Exhibit A: the men's singles final here on Centre Court last year. Widely considered the greatest men's final ever, it would have been a letdown in the shorter format. Rafael Nadal would have won 6-4, 6-4 in 94 minutes. We would have been home, a trifle disappointed, in time for tea.
Instead, capitalizing on the second chance the longer format offers, Roger Federer staged a mythical comeback, taking sets three and four 6-7 (5) and 6-7 (8) to push Nadal into the decider. At 4 hours, 48 minutes, it was the longest men's final in Wimbledon history. No one who saw it can forget Nadal lifting the golden trophy in the quickening gloom, after his chewed-fingernail 9-7 final-set win.
We'll never get such a drawn-out epic with women.
"Over five sets, you'd likely see a lot of changes in a player's mental and physical state. I think it could be a bit more interesting,'' said world No. 16 Zheng Jie after her 6-3, 7-5 second-round defeat here to Daniela Hantuchova.
"We could try it for the finals and semifinals.''
Exhibit B: Nov. 18, 1990, for the first time since Bessie Moore beat Myrtle McAteer 6-4, 3-6, 7-5, 2-6, 6-2 at the U.S. National Championships in Philadelphia in 1901, a women's match goes to five sets.
"In a five-set match, I'm not mentally as tired as in a three-set match,'' Monica Seles said after the 6-4, 5-7, 3-6, 6-4, 6-2 defeat of Gabriela Sabatini in the final of the season-ending Virginia Slims Championships. "The longer I keep going, I'm not as tired. It's very strange.''
Under pressure from television broadcasters who found such 3-hour, 47-minute marathons too long, best-of-fives were abandoned for the season-ender - the only women's tournament to have them - in 1999. But Seles, Sabatini and others had by then shown that women could be as physically resilient as men. That valuable, positive lesson could do with reinforcement - as men's former world No.1 Lleyton Hewitt demonstrated at Wimbledon this week.
"I don't think a lot of them would last five sets,'' he said of the women.
Exhibit C: There were already empty courts at Wimbledon on Thursday, just four days into the two-week championships. Those lush, unused spaces undermine the argument that five-setters for women are a nonstarter because they could not be packed into tournament schedules.
By Thursday morning, the 79 men's matches at Wimbledon had on average only lasted 40 minutes longer than the 80 women's matches. Doing the sums, you could estimate that allowing women to play five-setters would add about 85 hours of play to the Wimbledon fortnight - or just six hours for each day. That would be a squeeze, especially when rain clogs the proceedings, but impossible?
"It would present all kinds of scheduling issues,'' said Larry Scott, outgoing head of the women's tour. "But our position has been (that) players are willing to do that.''
After decades of lobbying by Billie Jean King and other pioneers of the women's game, tennis' top 10 events now all pay men and women the same. But, in rates of pay, men get a bad bounce. Nadal earned 2,604 pounds (US$5,156 back then) per minute last year in winning the final. For women's champion Venus Williams, the rate was 6,756 pounds ($13,376) per minute in her 7-5, 6-4 victory over sister Serena - one of several absorbing encounters between the siblings over the years that we gladly would have watched more of.
Now for some downsides.
Longer matches could lead to more injuries and leave women too tired to play doubles, as many them - including the Williams sisters - do now.
Nor does quantity guarantee quality. Last year's Nadal-Federer final was the exception not the rule because it was brilliant from first ball to last.
"Men's matches are too long,'' said the 2006 Wimbledon women's champion Amelie Mauresmo. "Eight matches out of 10 aren't worth being played out over five sets. Yes, you do get some fabulous five-setters, with an incredible finish and where everything comes together and is perfect. But for one or two like that, there are many, many, many that are not worth it.''
True. But the matches that are worth the extra time etch themselves deep in our memories. Shouldn't women get that opportunity, too?
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John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org
