This Week in Tennis History: The Parking Lot Revolution

In 1973, it looked as if men’s tennis finally belonged to its players. A professional union, the ATP, had been formed, and it had proven its seriousness and power by bringing 80 of its members together to boycott the world’s most important tournament, Wimbledon. It was only a matter of time, it seemed, before the tour, with the full backing of the players, would be running the show.

That’s not exactly how it worked out. While the game’s amateur days would never return, the officials from that time spent much of the next 15 years regrouping and re-establishing their relevance. By the late ’80s, they had formed a Grand Slam Committee, revamped each of the traditional major championships and made them more lucrative and prestigious than ever.

Another traditional event, Davis Cup, had been successfully reorganized into a World Group in 1981. Beyond that, the old guard had continued to share leadership duties with the players in the game’s governing body, the Men’s Tennis Council. During this period, Philippe Chatrier, head of the French Tennis Federation, was head of the council and the de facto head of the sport.

By the 1988 U.S. Open, the players had had enough: They wanted, finally, the power that had seemed to be theirs for the taking in the 1970s. They wanted to run their own tour. With Hamilton Jordan, President Jimmy Carter’s former chief of staff, leading the way, the ATP decided at the ’88 Open to announce that the players would go their own way at the start of 1990. (It was too late to put together an entirely new schedule for the following season.) At first, the Open’s officials—descendants of the amateur guard—refused to let the players use the most logical place for the announcement: the interview room on the grounds. So Jordan led his troop off the grounds.

When USTA officials backpedaled and said that Jordan (pictured at right) could have the interview room, after all, the ATP said no thanks. As journalist Richard Evans wrote in Open Tennis, “The tackle had been missed and Jordan was not about to turn around and give the USTA another go. He knew where the line was—right outside the [National Tennis Center] gates, where the ATP would get the maximum exposure simply because it added spice to an otherwise dull story.”

The Parking Lot Revolution was born. Jordan, with Mats Wilander, Yannick Noah, Brad Gilbert and other players alongside him, made his announcement just outside the Open's grounds. Two days later, Chatrier and his fellow Grand Slam tournament directors called their own counter-presser to announce that they were standing firmly in opposition to the players.

As in 1973, the issue was control. The players still had little to no say in how the Grand Slams and Davis Cup were run, and even at their own tour events, they had to share power with the old guard. But unlike in ’73, prize money was not at the top of the list of player concerns, at least among the elite—the money, they knew, was never going to go away at this point. What they wanted, as hard is it may be to believe now, was to play each other more often.

Structurally, even after 15 years, the tour still felt like the wild west. There were tournaments of various sizes and significance held all over the world, with little thought to player health or fan interest. Quantity, rather than quality, was the name of the game when it came to events; consequently, few of them outside the majors made any impact. Exhibitions and under-the-table appearance fees sent the big names off in all directions, and reduced the number of weeks when matches really mattered. It was less a tour than a tournament free-for-all, in which surfaces, and their specialists, ran on separate tracks. Pete Sampras and

Marcelo Rios, the greatest fast-court and slow-court players of the late ’90s, respectively, faced each other just three times in their careers. The bottom line was that the players didn’t enjoy the tour as it was run.

At the Open in ’88, Wilander mentioned that he had only played three of his fellow Top 10 players at ATP events that year.

“That’s no fun,” he said. “Playing No. 40 in the semifinals every week presents no sort of challenge. It’s difficult to find the motivation week after week unless we’re playing against players as good as ourselves.”

“It’s not about money,” John McEnroe said. “That’s what needs to be said straight off. What we’re trying to do is present a better image of tennis to the public, so they’ll see more big matches between the top players.”

Twenty-eight years later, it’s safe to say that mission has been accomplished. In an odd way, by the late ’80s, tennis players had too much of what they had fought for in the early ’70s: freedom. So the tour set about giving them a little less. The biggest innovation the ATP made after it took greater control of the game in the ’90s was to link the most important tournaments into a series called the Super 9 (later named the Masters 1000s). These events killed two birds with one stone: They were mandatory for the top players, and they were not allowed to offer appearance fees.

And they worked. Today’s men’s game is led by a group of small stars whose careers have been fostered together by the Masters series. Between them, the current ATP Big Four—Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray—have faced each other roughly 200 times. By focusing on a limited series of events, they’ve also avoided the globe-trotting money chase that wore many of their forebears down and burned them out. Best of all, fans everywhere know that the Masters 1000s matter.

It’s safe to say that the Parking Lot Revolution, while it’s largely forgotten and is saddled with a less-than-glamorous name, set the stage for this most recent Golden Era in the men’s game.

Black-and-white photos from Wikimedia Commons.