Well, the rain just won’t go away. It’s frustrating for fans, I know, but it’s been a pretty welcome development for me, given that I didn’t get home until 3 A.M.last night, and the last thing I felt like doing was hustling out here to throw myself into the fray at 11 in the morning.
So far today, I did a pundit drive-by for MSNBC, and I had a nice chat with Andre Agassi’s mother, Betty, who’s here with Ribbon of Pink, a breast-cancer awareness program put together by a New Jersey pharmaceuticals company, Novartis. I’ll write a post on the Agassis of Las Vegas tomorrow, or in the coming days. Betty told me some interesting stuff. I also tried the Mexican food here at the USTABJKNTC (heh, heh, heh) and I liked it, but then I once mistakenly ate a can of Alpo and said it was the best foie gras I’d ever tasted. . .
A lot of the buzz these past few days has been about the ATP’s press release regarding contemplated changes in the tour structure. Some of the ideas – regrettably, the ones that might be called no-brainers, but for the fact that nobody had enough brains to back them until now - are excellent. The Sunday start for most events is a good idea, but for the logistics of how the finalists can be expected to be in two places at once (if they’re scheduled to play successive week). And you thought The Mighty Fed and Jet Boy Nadal had it tough after their exhaustive and epic confrontation in Rome last May!
This segues nicely into the ATP’s next suggestion, the elimination of five-set finals in their events (as opposed to Grand Slams). This means that tournaments like Rome, Hamburg, and Key Biscayne will shift to best-of-three finals. Another fine idea - especially at clay-court events. It was an embarrassment to the game when Federer and Nadal, tired as they were, simultaneously pulled out of Hamburg.
The real big-ticket item in the proposed changes is the embrace of round-robin as a tournament format. The link above will give you the details. And this one, to me, is a real puzzler, given the back-story: The ATP (as well as the WTA’s) overriding concern these days is player fatigue – you know, that whole tangled “too many tournaments, too little time” issue over which our TW tribe has routine bloodlettings.
The advantages of round-robin are: tournaments can guarantee that a top star will stick around at a tournament for at least three days and, more importantly, can lose a match and still go on to win the tournament. Promoters and television will really like this. It also means that a promoter or television executive can tell the public, definitively, that, say, Marat Safin will play on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday – and then perhaps go on in the single elimination portion that will begin with quarterfinals (for the top eight finishers in the round-robin).
The disadvantages of round robin are especially perilous, given the conventional wisdom about overplaying and fatigue (issues that I think are much more in the hands of individual players than the enabling tournament schedulers who hang those tantalizing carrots before them). Even the best players have the odd first or second round loss here or there, and that translates to an unexpected – and, theoretically, much needed and welcome – rest. Those weeks will no longer matter, as players will have to continue in the round-robin portion after they’ve lost a match. Now, in a typical one-week, 48-draw event, the eventual winner will play six matches (the eqivalent of a full 64 draw) in, at most, eight days.It's even worse for a 32 draw event. Is that any way to reduce player match commitment?
Another disadvantage of the round-robin will affect the foot soldiers instead of the stars, and contribute to the general rich-get-richer climate that characterizes the pro tour – something I don’t automatically have a problem with, but which certainly enhances the dog-eat-dog character of the pro game.
In a long press conference (more on that later), ATP CEO Etienne de Villiers took a very hard-nosed and realistic, but, to some, mean-spirited position toward the rank-and-file ATP members. He essentially said the new format would eliminate the very common phenomenon of second-rate players copping titles at sub-Masters grade events. His message: Spectators care about the stars, so we want TMF vs. Jet Boy finals - the Paul Goldsteins and Andreas Seppis of this world can like it or lump it.
The ATP has also introduced (“re-introduced” would be a better word, as this concept is a direct lift from the Doubles Revolution Gone Wrong) another idea for future consideration, playing a super tiebreaker instead of a third set. This, folks, is the Golden Fleece for the progressives in the game. Introduce the super tiebreaker as a legitimate scoring system and you’ve suddenly solved enormous scheduling and timing problems, especially for television.
The details in this, from the structure of the round-robins to the nature of the Super Tiebreaker scoring system, are complex and multitudinous, and I’m not going to take them on here (see my next post up). But I think the Big Picture message being sent here is that tennis has decided to tackle this ongoing battle for the soul of the game (The question: which is of higher priority, “entertainment” value or the perceived integrity and continuity of the game?). And the ATP has fired another shot across the bow of the traditionalists. The organization is saying that tennis has survived too long with no major changes, and we’re about to change that.
The ATP, and critics of the present game, would have us believe that tennis is the only sport that refuses to change, while every other game has been sweepingly transformed – and re-made for reasons that have more to do with entertainment than the quality of the game. I think this is nonsense, and I know about one-day cricket (a great idea, I think) and other evolutionary steps in sister sports.
But really, how much has football (either the U.S.or world brand) changed? Isn’t the tiebreaker as radical an innovation as, say, the soccer shoot-out, or three-point shot in basketball? How many games, with the exception of cricket, a true anomaly among sports, given that the traditional version lasts a week or longer, have altered the fundamental length of time the player are out there? Heck, they won’t even allow aluminum bats in baseball, and aren’t those 16-inning games fully as regressive and unsuitable for television as no-tiebreaker fifth-set tennis?
The idea that tennis hasn’t changed, especially now that we have things like injury timeouts, bathroom breaks, tolerance for coaching and instant replay, is our version of the urban myth.
This, to me, is the nut of the matter: the ATP is saddled with an amazingly cumbersome system, having oversold the calendar for years now. In case you’re not familiar with how it all works, you need to know that the ATP basically sold weeks (often the same week) to one or more promoter, and that individual or group has vested rights and great unilateral power to do almost anything it wants with its week - including move the tournament half-way around the world, pay appearance fees that are never acknowledged, or sell the event to other buyers (there are some approvals required, but the bottom line is that ATP tour is a collection of franchises owned by others). In order to cut down the calendar, the ATP would have to buy out the franchise holders for every event it would seek to retire.
So the ATP is doing the next best thing in a roundabout way. It’s trying to free up those troublesome weeks to be more experimental and flexible, while still having to operate under the ATP brand. In other words, it’s trying to create enough leeway for events to be official without being official in the most meaningful sense of the word. To really understand the intrinsic beauty – or depravity – of this idea, contemplate my own best-case scenario for tennis:
The ATP blows up the calendar and bases its rankings upon the results player earn in the four Grand Slams and a series of, oh, 10 or a dozen integrated Masters events, and perhaps a year-end championship. This leaves the players free to compete how, where and when they want the rest of the year. That means four-man exhibitions in Pittsburgh, small feeder tournaments through which young players would earn their way onto the big tour, or 10-night, Federer vs. Nadal Challenge of the Stars barnstomers through Mediterranean Europe. How about a 64-man tennis festival in Buenos Aires, featuring clay-court specialists and billed as the World Clay Championships?
There’s only one thing wrong with this straightforward scenario, and only one thing preventing it from even being considered: The ATP can’t blow up the calendar. It’s that simple and that complicated. Trying to do it would be a legal and financial nightmare (for the ATP would have to buy back each event, with nothing to replace it, or the income it generates). And it would be tantamount to the ATP declaring war on its second-most important constituents: tournament promoters.
So this is a slick way to tiptoe in that direction while keeping everyone happy. All told, I’d rather see the ATP come right out and say it wants to jettison its overload of tournaments and have a little more fun with the format and presentation of the game. For, as long as you have the majors and Masters-type events, and the rankings they generate, the integrity of the game would not suffer at all. Is that “traditionalist?” Is it “anti-progressive?” Who cares? The better question is, “Does it make sense?”
We may never find out, because the ATP is locked into an outdated system that it cannot abandon. I believe that knock-out tournaments, week after week, are a blight on the game. I don’t think that reducing the tournaments that actually matter would dilute the game; in fact, it would enhance the prestige and integrity of what tournament there are, just like having four Grand Slams is better than having 12. The tournament game is no stronger now that it was when the calendar featured far fewer tournaments.
So you have a deadly cocktail consisting of two very unstable elements in the making here. First, a somewhat delusional and insupportable idea that what tennis really needs to continue to grow is a radical transformation in how the game is played and presented. Second, a growing disenchantment with the current tennis delivery system – the surfeit of knockout events that are cumbersome, difficult-to-promote, physically toughest on the very stars most people want to see, and, quite simply, grotesquely overabundant.
I wanted you all to see just how volatile the situation is by linking you to the deVillier’s transcript, but it turns out that the USTA doesn’t like posting “official” ATP business on its web. I turned to our indispensable friend at ASAP, Jamie Morrocco, who told me that ASAP had to toe the USTA line and he couldn’t post the transcript independently, at least not until the tournament was over. I went to try to convince the USTA to put the transcript up at their site, and was rebuffed with a very chilly, “Why would we do that?”
“Ah. . .” I replied. “For the benefit of tennis fans? To get a few more clicks at your site? For the abstract ‘good of the game’ (yeah, I was working it, big-time!)”
But they still wouldn’t do it.
So I’m going to do an end run and post the transcript as a separate blog entry (he-heh,heh), right above this one. It’s really worth reading, if you’re interested in the state of the game, Have at it, folks!