In the bigger picture, though, the omni-present obstacle for year-end championships in any configuration has been the prestige and historic significance of Grand Slam events. Nothing - not even a computer ranking system that has injected a potentially enormous amount of signficance into the YECs, seems to have loosened the stranglehold of the majors on the game. Whether or not this is a good thing depends partly on your point of view, but it's also true that proponents of a YEC have to some degree mismanaged - or perhaps merely failed - the effort to make the YEC something like the Super Bowl, World Series, or any of the annual futbol tournaments that determine a clear, uncontested champion for a given year.
Given the history of the YEC, you can make the case that the Lords of Tennis overshot the mark in their ambitions, and created a model that (over nearly 40 years) has proven unsustainable. Nadal's decision to skip Shanghai this year is neither historic nor unprecedented. It's a reflection of the way the players view the YEC, as an opportunity to pick up ranking points and a big check while paying a polite degree of lip service to the idea of the event. It's only different on those rare occasions when the YEC might determine the year-end no. 1 ranking, as it did for Pete Sampras in 1998, or Gustavo Kuerten in 2000.
This dyspeptic attitude toward the YEC is neither novel nor out of line with the history of the YECs. In fact, despite numerous changes in format, venue, sponsorship and other features, the YEC has remained true to the roots struck when hall-of-famer Jack Kramer came up with the idea in 1970. Kramer, taking his cues from Formula 1, envisioned an annual "Grand Prix" in which players earned points in all of the sanctioned Grand Prix events they played. At the end of the year, and following a year-end "Grand Prix Masters" event, they received "bonus pool" payments based on their standings in the Grand Prix (Cliff Richey, who finished on top for the first year, earned a whopping bonus of $25,000).
There was a significant subtext at work in all this. At the time, visionary sports entrepreneur Lamar Hunt (father of the American Football League, North American Soccer League, and the Super Bowl) had his eyes focused on tennis. He signed top stars to compete on a World Championship Tennis (WCT) circuit, a highly organized and remunerative tour that sought to impose a new template on tennis.
WCT players were divided into clearly identified groups (you could almost call them leagues); each one played a series of tournaments (a regular season), at the end of which the top point-earners at those events advanced to the Dallas WCT Finals, which threw together the top performers from the various groups in a playoffs-style competition to determine the official WCT champ - irregardless of the Grand Slams, which Hunt seemed content to work around, at least in the short term.
The International Tennis Federation, wigged out by Hunt's aggressive attempt to organize the pro game and bring the top players under contract, backed Kramer's plan, not least because it preserved the integrity of ITF events (i.e., the Grand Slam events). The Grand Prix would never overshadow the majors (this was a prophetic analysis, it seems), yet the Grand Prix would keep entrepreneurs like Hunt, or anyone else who sought to use all those long stretches of time between majors to build a league, from stealing the thunder of the ITF or the majors.
Oddly enough, the Grand Prix approach worked fine; in fact, the GP Masters brought a new measure of clarity and transparency to the tennis calendar. At time time, the Australian Open was still held at the end of the year, and the GP Masters followed shortly thereafter. Granted, the nominal YEC of one year was held at the beginning of the next, but nobody really had much of a beef with that.
Things took a downhill turn in 1990, when the ATP, fresh off the revolution that destroyed the old Pro Council order, determined that the Masters would become the ATP Tour World Championships (the title appeared to have more heft than the more modest "Grand Prix Masters"). This once again put the ITF on notice, but this time there was no ally of Kramer's heft on the horizon.
Various philosophical differences between the ITF (as represented by the Grand Slam Committee, an organization that represented the four majors with a unified face) and the ATP led the ITF to create the Grand Slam Cup, a direct rival to the ATP YEC. The GS Cup, with its astronomical prize money, recruited its field on the basis of points earned exclusively at Grand Slams, and for some years the players were buried in an embarrassment of riches with two YECs - even as the credibility, and image, of the game took a huge hit. John McEnroe, for one, called the $1.5 million winner's check handed out at the GS Cup "obscene."
Over the years, the ATP and GS Committee came to a stand-off; neither party was able to wrest control of the game, and both realized that it was probably in everyone's best interest to co-operate instead of compete. The GS Cup quietly folded its tents in 1999, leaving the ATP YEC as the lone year-end mega-event. But a lot was lost in those interim years, especially on the credibility front. It's significant that neither the ATP championships nor the GS Cup ever was able to generate the cache that the Grand Prix Masters once enjoyed.
The reasons for that are numerous and to some degree difficult to quantify. To me, leaving Madison Square Garden and following the money to Frankfurt, Germany, was a blow (but then, the heyday of the Masters coincided with that electric McEnroe-Jimmy Connors- Bjorn Borg period in tennis) - as were subsequent changes of venue, some more productive than others. I'm not saying the Masters had to be held in New York ad infinitum, but continuity in these matters counts for something. The ATP YEC had a great run in Frankfurt and that other German host city, Hannover. But in retrospect the success of tennis in Germany was too closely linked with the success of German players for the period to have been called a "growth" phase. In retrospect, the ATP just found a huge jackpot in Germany - but when the fortunes of German players dried up, so did the stream of support and revenue.
From Hannover, it was on to Lisbon, Houston, Shanghai. . . and I'm not sure the original glory was ever recaptured, or can be recaptured. To me, the YEC loses relevance in direct proportion to the degree to which the annual no. 1 ranking issue is settled, and the extent to which the establishment (the ITF, the press, television networks) supports or withholds its approval.
For the YEC to achieve ultimate meaning and credibility, the ITF and ATP would have to get together and decide to make a two-pronged effort to promote the YEC as a "fifth major." They would have to sell the event on that basis, perhaps adopting a format that put greater weight on the performance of players in Grand Slam events as a criteria for acceptance, and adding other elements that were appealing to the ITF. Perhaps the calendar could be tweaked to move the YEC up to an earlier date.
If you had a tennis season culminated with the US Open, two rounds of Davis Cup, and the YEC (ending sometime in early to mid-October), you would not just give the players an off-season, you would also give tennis fans a tennis season, with a crescendo of important events from the end of August into the early fall. This, of course, would wreak havoc with the fall indoor season.
So be it. You can't have everything.
