Another Greek player receives lifetime ban

The ITF decided Greek tennis player Constantinos Mikos’s fate Thursday, issuing a lifetime ban in the wake of conviction on several Anti-Corruption Program offenses.

Sections D.1.a, .d, .e and .g, if you want to look them up.

The evidence that led to Mikos’s ban came from an investigation 3 1/2 years ago. The TIU said Milos made a “corrupt approach” to fellow Greek player Alexandros Jakupovic at a Futures event in in their homeland.

Mikos, then 21, was in on a wild card into that $10,000 tournament. He lost in the first round to No. 4 seed Liam Broady of Great Britain. Jakupovic, then 31 and ranked No. 507, lost in the quarterfinals to another Brit, Oliver Golding. He had played fellow Greeks in the first two rounds.

(As an aside on Golding, the former junior world No. 1 retired less than a year after that match, at age 21 as he wearied of the uphill battle in the minor leagues. Jakupovic earned only slight more official prize money in 17 years slugging it out in those trenches than Golding did in less than four).

Per the TIU, the approach “offered payment in return for agreeing to lose nominated sets and games in a match at the event.”

But Mikos was in far deeper than that. The report stated he had two gambling accounts and used them to bet on tennis. That’s also a major no-no.

He was ranked No. 937 at the time of his transgressions.

In approaching Jakupovic, Mikos was hardly trying to corrupt an innocent party. The Paris-born Jakupovic has already received a lifetime ban for similar offenses.

In addition to being guilty of sections D.1..d, .e and .g, Jakupovic also breached sections D.2.a.i (I) and (II), Essentially, he was approached to fix a match, and he failed to report it to the Tennis Integrity Unit as he was required to do.

Jakupovic hasn’t played since July, 2015. In his entire career, which began in 1999, he earned just over $116,000 US. That’s less than $7,000 on average, per year.

During the period between 2002 and 2014, even allowing for a couple of missing chunks (during which he might have been injured), he averaged over 20 tournaments a year, all over the world. He peaked at 33 tournaments in 2008 and another 30 in 2009.

Good player stuck at bottom levels

Jakupovic obviously could play. He qualified at the Australian Open juniors in 1999. And through the many years he played Davis Cup for Greece, he put up some impressive efforts.

He defeated future top-15 player Alexandr Dolgopolov in straight sets in a 2007 tie. Dolgopolov wasn’t the player he would later become, but he wasn’t a kid; he was 18 1/2 at the time. Jakupovic also went three sets with future top-10 player Gilles Simon of France back in 2004, when Simon was also about that age.

Even three years ago, at age 32, he took Damir Dzumhur of Bosnia to five sets in Davis Cup. He was up two sets to love, too. Jakupovic was outside the top 500; Dzumhur was just about to break into the top 100 for the first time.

Of the over 600 professional matches he played, two came at the ATP level (both in qualifying at Gstaad), some 50 on the Challenger circuit, and 563 in the Futures. Given how much he earned, clearly that was the place where he was best able to make a living. And clearly not on the court; $7,000 a year won’t get you very far.

Mikos played about 100 Futures singles matches, nearly all of them in Greece, Turkey, Romania or Bulgaria.

You know there have to be a multitude of players like this, trying to scratch out a living in the Futures by whatever means possible. But the total number of successful cases officially concluded by the Tennis Integrity Unit so far in 2017 is … six. The total number of successful cases in 2016? Also six, one of them involving a pair of Turkish tennis officials. One player, Daniel Garza of Mexico, successfully appealed his ban and is back on the Futures circuit.