Tennis fans around the U.S., if they’re anything like me, got a rude awakening when they turned on their TVs this morning. There was, for the first time in weeks, no tennis on. Or at least there was no live tennis, no Roger Federer vs. David Ferrer in an important match from the World Tour Finals, the men’s year-end championship that many of us think of as the sport’s fifth biggest event. This was surprising and annoying, obviously, but it also was symbolic of something I’d been asking myself this week: WTF?
By that I mean: Just how important is this tournament? I’m not asking in a skeptical or belittling way; I mean it as an honest question. I know the WTF features only the best of the best. I know that getting there is a goal of many top players from the start of the year; I can remember watching Carlos Moya drop to his knees and practically begin to weep after winning an early-round match in Paris that clinched his trip to what was then called the Masters Cup. I know that it’s a major production, that it comes with crazy prize money, and that the sport’s all-time greats—Lendl, Sampras, Federer—make up its roll call of past winners. I also like the round-robin, two-heavyweight-fights-a-day format. Still, despite all of that, I have a hard time feeling the WTF's significance, the way I can when I hear the names of any of the Grand Slams.
In my memory, at least, it wasn’t always this way. The Masters, when it was played on that light blue court at Madison Square Garden in New York, was unquestionably a big deal. Maybe that’s my American bias. Maybe it’s because the players who were in it—Borg, McEnroe, Connors, Lendl—will always be larger than life to me. Or maybe it’s because the clear and simple name, the Masters, accorded it an automatic gravitas. I'm guessing that golf’s Masters would lose some of its prestige if it were suddenly called the Augusta Invitational or the Ping Cup. Another tournament that used to be known as tennis’s fifth major, the Italian Open, hasn’t felt quite the same since we had to start calling it ATP Masters Series-Rome.
The WTF suffers in a similar way with casual fans who can’t easily identify it, and its significance, from the name. It has changed three times in the last 15 years, from the World Championships to the Masters Cup to the World Tour Finals, a progression that has made it harder to understand, and sound a little less significant, each time. When I describe it to friends or fellow tennis players, I tend to say something like, “I’m watching the year-end thing from London, with all the top guys.” That doesn’t have quite the same ring as “I'm watching Wimbledon.”
(Aside from the Confusion-in-Tennis Department: The current WTF is a combination of the ATP’s World Championships and the ITF’s old ultra-lucrative but ill-fated Grand Slam Cup. The fact that the men’s game no longer has two competing year-end tournaments should be seen as progress.)
In the case of the WTF, all would not be solved by a better name. There’s also the tournament’s timing—i.e., it comes after the U.S. Open. For those aforementioned casual fans, at least in the States, that means it might as well not exist. Some of it is shown on ESPN2, but most of the live broadcasts are on the Tennis Channel. I can compare this attitude to the one I bring to golf, of which I am a very casual fan. I tune into all of the majors, and the Ryder Cup is one of my favorite events in any sport. But the thought of sitting down, for one second, to watch the PGA’s season-ending FedEx Cup playoffs inspires feelings of despair and uselessness. Golf, like tennis, is a game of events as much as it players.
For those of us who follow tennis more closely, we know the WTF exists and matters and can produce tennis for the ages—the 2006 semifinal between Federer and Nadal in Shanghai was one of their very best, a true heavyweight showdown. But we also know that the season’s events of record, the ones that will be at the top of every player’s career résumé—the Grand Slams—are over. More than that, I think many of us watch the regular Masters events throughout the season with more of an anticipatory buzz than we do the WTF. Key Biscayne and Indian Wells, being 10 days long and dual gender, feel like junior Slams, while the spring clay and summer hard-court Masters whet our appetites for the majors that follow them. Whatever happens at the WTF, it doesn’t lead anywhere or connect to anything else, so it doesn’t inspire the same speculative chatter and energy that the earlier Masters do.
Then again, the old version at the Garden was played even later in the season than the current World Tour Finals. In fact, it was played in January of the following year. (As with the elimination of the Grand Slam Cup, the fact that the men’s game has figured out how to fit its year into 12 months should be seen as real progress.) Maybe having the tournament float out on its own, as a kind of special all-star event in the middle of winter, was part of the appeal in those days. The one advantage that the WTF might now is it that it can decide the year-end No. 1 player in the world. That was what made the 2000 edition in Lisbon, in which Gustavo Kuerten beat Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi in the semis and final to pass a young Marat Safin for the top spot, such a thrill. But there hasn’t been much drama on that front in recent years, as Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic have had No. 1 either clinched or nearly clinched by the time they got to Shanghai or London.
Along with the significance of the tournament itself, it can be hard to judge what a player’s record there means. Sampras and Lendl won it five times, and Federer has won it six times, but those numbers aren't typically cited when their careers are assessed—in most people’s eyes, the number of Slams they have trumps everything else. The fact that Ilie Nastase won the year-ender four times, but only won three majors in total, is generally used as evidence not that he was an all-time great, but that he was a high-strung choker who couldn’t win the big ones. Rafael Nadal has never won the WTF, but it isn’t seen as a hole in his career résumé the way, say, Sampras’s inability to win the French Open or Borg’s lack of a U.S. Open title is.
(Aside from the Hardcore Fan Department: I should also mention a theory I’ve seen in the comments section at tennis.com, that the devaluing of the WTF is a way for Nadal fans to devalue Federer’s standout record there while excusing their own favorite’s poor one. This is similar to the idea that clay as a surface is devalued by Federer’s fans because of Rafa’s dominance on it. There may be some truth to both cases. After all, every argument in tennis is just a cover for the Seven Year (and Counting) War between Roger fans vs. Rafa fans, right?)
In truth, the hard, and only important, truth about the WTF is that it is not a Grand Slam. Even if it were played the week after the U.S. Open, broadcast live around the world, and attended each day by the Queen of England and Lady Gaga, it would not be a Grand Slam. The ATP does its best to try to make us forget this. It parades the players in suits, works theatrical magic inside the 02 Arena, hands out its year-end awards to the top achievers on court and loads them up with bonus cash. The tour is successful to certain degree—in London especially, the WTF has become a tremendous show, a glitzy but warm celebration of a booming men's game. And Federer’s six titles really should be mentioned more often. That he could still, in 2010 and 2011, at 29 and 30 years old, when he wasn't No. 1 or in his prime, face down the other seven best players in the world is one his most remarkable achievements, and a sign, as Janko Tipsarevic said earlier this week, of his bedrock professionalism.
But tennis and the Grand Slams are like the Mafia as portrayed in Goodfellas and The Sopranos. The majors are the sport’s equivalent of made men: They can’t be killed, or ignored. The Australian Open was a backwater event for years; by the early 1960s, it wasn’t even the biggest tournament in Australia. That honor went to another national competition that determined who was considered for the Davis Cup team. But the fact that the Aussie Open had been designated as a Grand Slam allowed it to get back on its feet in the 1980s and reclaim its place among the Big 4. Federer's 17 majors, his stat of record, includes four Aussie Opens. Everyone understands that the Masters are not as prestigious as the Slams, but the WTF, the biggest property the tour owns, is left somewhere in between—major, but under-recognized from an historical point of view and by the general public.
Anyway, now that I’ve written all of that, I realize that I’m looking forward to seeing the next match from London, between Juan Martin del Potro and Janko Tipsarevic. If these two played at another tournament, it would not be must-see viewing for me. But the fact that they’re at the WTF makes it something close to that today. Tennis is about events, as much as it is players, and while it can never join the Grand Slam club no matter how much money it has, the World Tour Final in London has become a special one. We’ll understand that even better next week, when we get another rude awakening: No tennis on our TVs at all.