* !Picby Pete Bodo*
Tennis went from zero to 60 M.P.H. in the middle of April in the blink of an eye, and the pedal will remain pressed to the metal until the end of Wimbledon. In a span of roughly five weeks, three of the all-important Masters tournaments will have been played. It's the most intense concentration of elite tennis on the annual calendar.
Maybe I'm just a little exhausted and cranky after the long (and still unsettled) debate about blue clay. But I'm starting to think that this glut of spring tennis—something I like to call "the Roland Garros Series"—is too much of a good thing. That we are locked into these Masters events is telling, and as time goes on, this lopsided calendar may even be a drag on the game. As tennis continues to evolve all around the world, the Euroclay portion may start to look very much like an outdated and perhaps even oppressive model. Tradition is a great thing, but does a certain group really own it, and what happens when it prevents progress?
And the biggest problem of all may be that there may be no way to effectively change the situation.
The tennis tour is like a condominium, but instead of apartments the owners possess tournaments. They abide by some basic rules that the governing body of this condo draws up (usually in a more-or-less democratic process), but outsiders have no real influence short of the long arm of actual law.
I raise this issue now because, as you know, the Memphis tournament is moving to Brazil, where it will become an ATP 500 event (just below Masters-level), and San Jose is folding up its tents and relocating in Memphis. Can it be that dream of Butch Buchholz will yet come true?
Buchholz, a former pro and a major political and entrepreneurial figure in the Open era (as the founder and promoter of various events, including the Miami Masters), has long dreamed of a viable South American circuit, and even a South American Grand Slam. He made a few false starts in that direction, trying to get something off the ground, but eventually gave up. The problem, he told me, was that South American economies were simply too unreliable to make the risk worth it.
Perhaps the climate is changing: U.S. sports marketing powerhouse IMG has joined forces with Brazilian holding company EBX to buy out Memphis and mount the new Brazilian 500 event (Brazil also has the futbol World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016). The joint venture is a yet another three-letter entity, IMX. All this is a sign that the economic climate may be more favorable in South America, which has a history of producing great players but not great tournaments.
So what happens if the demand for elite tennis continues to grow? It seems that the Masters are maxed out; there were already significant contortions to turn Madrid—previously a fall indoor tournament—into a spring clay-court event, which was necessary because the ATP wanted to shoehorn Beijing—which is in another growth area—into the calendar. And we saw how the demotion of the Hamburg Masters came within a whisker of bankrupting the ATP.
I can't imagine the players embracing a larger number of mandatory Masters events, so is this endgame? If you create more of them, but reduce the penalty for missing Masters events, you've basically scotched the entire Masters concept—and tradition. And who would want to buy—or sell—a franchise with as high a value as Rome, or Cincinnati, absent an absolute and unimaginable decline in the viability of those events?
That raises the key question: Are we stuck with these Masters events, in these calendar slots, forever? If the game continues to grow, this question is bound to attain critical mass. Nations may rise and fall as tennis powers, but it seems that elite class of Masters tournaments may not be subject to the same natural fluctuations.
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