Is the Revolution in the Rain in danger of drying up already? What began as a fight over playing conditions and player safety at the U.S. Open has very quickly moved on to, well, slipperier ground: money, the schedule; the schedule, money. In other words, places we've been before.
Whether it’s going to be different this time around depends on whom you ask. The big player meeting that Andy Murray called for in Shanghai, where he said everything would get worked out “for sure,” is not going to be quite as big without Roger Federer, who pulled from the event. It might not even happen at all. And, as predicted by Andy Roddick at the Open, there’s little agreement, even among the game’s stars, on what should be changed. Murray, Roddick, and Rafael Nadal want the schedule “fixed,” but the other two members of the reigning Big 4, Federer and Novak Djokovic, seem fine with it. Federer, at 30, just doesn’t play the tournaments, like Shanghai, that he doesn’t want to play. If you can’t get those guys, who would seem to have similar concerns about injuries, burnout, and career longevity, on the same page, how can you hope to unite them with players ranked in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 100s, who have their own sets of issues?
Still, even though the odds of anything happening look daunting, and even though we have this conversation every fall, Murray and Roddick are continuing to talk, and talk pretty big. They’ve brought up the idea of forming a bona fide union, and even mentioned going on strike to get what they want—once they figure out exactly what that is, of course. On balance, their words, after a brief honeymoon period during the Open, haven’t generated a lot of good publicity. The reaction has mostly ranged from, “Who do these brats think they are?” to “We’ve heard it all before.” But the brief history of labor unrest in tennis does tell us that moves that seem radical or foolish at the time can eventually bear fruit.
Through the distorting lens of history, the 1973 Wimbledon boycott seems like an obvious and necessary step, something anyone could support. The tour had been professionalized for five years, yet the players’ lives, and their ability to pursue their livelihoods, were still controlled by volunteer officials. They could still suspend Niki Pilic for choosing to play a tour event instead of Davis Cup. How did the public and press react to this overdue call for justice? By vilifying them. The British people backed proud old Wimbledon and saw the players as greedy ingrates controlled by American business interests.
(Aside: It’s largely forgotten, though, that the Wimbledon boycott didn’t represent the final shot in the professional revolt. That was fired the next year by the unlikely insurgent Jimmy Connors, when he sued the ATP for backing the ILTF when he was banned from the French Open for playing World Team Tennis, a rival of the ATP’s at the time (wow, that was a complicated era). When the ATP backed down, Connors and his manager, Bill Riordan, claimed that only then did the players have real “freedom”—they could finally play anywhere, anytime, for anyone. But that freedom came at the cost of solidarity; tennis from then on would go the way of Connors and Bjorn Borg, stars whose allegiance was to themselves rather than any other players.)
More relevant to today’s situation was what happened at Flushing Meadows in 1988. That was the year of the famous “parking lot revolution,” in which the ATP's biggest stars, led by Hamilton Jordan, held a press conference outside the main gate at the National Tennis Center (they'd been denied access to the press room by the USTA—some battles never change) to announce that they were breaking away from the Men's Tennis Council and starting their own tour. Believe it or not, the reason this time wasn’t money or freedom. It was about creating a better-organized, less-scattershot sport. Basically, the top players wanted to play each other more often, in bigger and more significant events. Before that year's Open, Mats Wilander complained that he had played only three other members of the Top 10 the entire season. At another press conference, John McEnroe said, “It’s not about money, that’s what needs to be said right off. What we’re trying to do is to present a better image of tennis to the public, so they will see more big matches between the top players.”
What’s funny in retrospect is that the old guard, players like John Newcombe, who had fought simply to be paid for their work, couldn’t understand how it could not be about money. At the time, Newk thought the parking lot revolution was too radical and idealistic, too much risk for too little reward. Looking back, though, it’s clear that the ATP again got what it wanted in the eventual creation of the Masters Series (first called the Super 9). The Series forces the top players to play each other all year long, in significant events. I don't think it's a coincidence that men’s tennis has never been stronger, and that great rivalries have since flourished. Even the old solidarity—or at least the old mutual respect—has returned.
So what’s the message for Rafa, Andy, Andy, and any other would-be revolutionaries today? On the one hand, seemingly radical steps can work, and that when the players have taken them, the game has progressed and improved. The parking lot revolt also shows that the game's stars can be leaders, with or without the rank and file. In that sense, if there is a broad enough problem, forming a union to better represent their interests, particularly at the Grand Slams, makes sense. But when Murray and Roddick complain about the number of mandatory events, they’re flying in the face of their tour’s own history. The Masters Series doesn't work unless the events are mandatory.
The players should have more say at the Slams, which are not run by the ATP; but that’s hardly a world-changing topic. The bigger subject where I agree with Nadal, Murray, and Roddick is on the length of the schedule. It goes on too long, both for the top players and for me as a fan; we could both use an official, no-tournaments-played-anywhere off-season. Players could get away, rest their minds and bodies, play a (limited number of) exhibitions, maybe even make an improvement or two; fans could also get away, forget the game, and savor it more when it does come back. To my mind, that’s the next step in re-organizing the tour and, as McEnroe said during the last revolution, “presenting a better image of tennis to the public.”
Never gonna happen, you might say, and you’d probably be right. But history says that the players can make difficult things happen when enough of them agree and commit to a change. Whether that's ever going to happen is another story.