!Dogs by Pete Bodo
Howdy. How does it feel to be treading water, waiting for Sunday and the start of the ATP World Tour fnals? Well, get used to it, because you'll be doing a lot of paddling over the coming weeks, and even more in the future if the ATP votes, as expected, to lengthen the off-season to six or even seven weeks.
So what's the upside of such a move, beyond giving the players a longer period for rest and recuperation?
Well, a couple of things. For one, it will give those players who need or want to work on their games a larger chunk of time to tweak and tinker. That doesn't mean we're apt to see Roger Federer return for the 2012 season armed with a new, two-handed backhand. But it will certainly allow promising young players, or even re-dedicated older ones (can you hear me, David Nalbandian? Marcos Baghdatis?) to roll down to the antipodes loaded for bear. Unfortunately, the top players will also be more likely to hit the ground running.
I've never really supported the idea of a longer off-season, but when you look at the current break has affected the start of the following year, it seems pretty clear that the calendar has worked to the adavntage of lesser lights. Ambitious, fit players have always had great incentive to come roaring out of the gates and maybe catch a few highly ranked players by surprise in January. But a longer off-season will give the top contenders greater motivation—and time—to start the year with a bang. That's a significant psychological factor that will show up in the results.
Federer will not benefit as much as some of his main rivals, because he's always been diligent about showing up in Melbourne with his "A" game, following the trend established by Andre Agassi. You remember that Agassi won four Australian Open titles—twice the number he bagged at any other Grand Slam venue. Agassi showed up in Melbourne in peak condition, and he loved to play in the heat. Even more than that, he loved to make his opponents wilt in the oppressive climes. By contrast, Pete Sampras, almost always a factor at the end of any given tennis year (there's a reason he was the year-end No. 1 for a record six years), would look at his calendar and exclaim, "What, it's January already?"
With his affection for Dubai and the scorching desert heat, Federer seems to have an Agassi-esque attitude toward the often debilitating conditions in Melbourne (as did Ivan Lendl, the player who raised fitness to a new level on the pro tour). His record bears it out. Federer has been to the semifinals or better in Melbourne seven years running (winning the title on four of those occasions), a brilliant record whose luster is dimmed only in comparison with his history at Wimbledon. And the U.S. Open. But that's one of the tough things about being The Mighty Fed.
In recent years, Federer single-handedly diminshed the chance that Melbourne would produce the customary "surprise" finalist or semifinalist by almost 50 percent, which is a huge change from the past. And if a longer off-season is in play, the players on the cusp of contention will be even less likely to catch the top players in pre-season form. A longer off-season also will boost the status of the isolated Slam, although there isn't much room for improvement there. It certainly might heighten fan interest, especially among casual fans.
For diehards, a longer off-season will have one welcome benefit—it will focus greater attention on the tennis is being played in November and December, which is basically minor-league tennis of the Challenger, Future and ITF grades. Sites like this one will continue to function and focus on tennis; now we'll have a longer time period to think and talk about developing players, not just main-tour events and the players who love them.
And a longer off-season means more income-generating opportunities—exhibitions—for those players lucky enough to have them. Although, one of the great sea-changes in recent decades has been the ascent of the game's top stars to a zone where no amount of money seems large enough to make them pack their racket bags and hop on the private jet. Back in the early years of the Open era, the low six-figure fee a top player like Jimmy Connors or Bjorn Borg could pull down for an exhibition was too big a paycheck to pass up.
It's different today. With escalating prize-money, long-term clothing and shoe deals, and off-court commercial affiliations, the top guys can afford to pass up the kind of money that can be offered by a promoter who needs to recoup his investment from ticket sales. Tennis promoters, I suspect (I don't have data to prove it), just can't afford to hire...tennis players.
But given how the theoretically free market works, another factor has emerged to keep the concept of exhibition tennis alive. That's the high-profile charity event. Tennis players were among the first athletes to get on the charity bandwagon, often because charity affiiliations and appearances conveniently offer the accountants wiggle-room when it comes to taxes and write-offs. That area of activity has been hot in recent years—you're nobody if you don't have a foundation or host some great big charity event, and staging one enables you to button-hole friends and prevail upon them to show up and support the cause. Instead of cold, hard cash, you offer them a good time with their friends and what celebrities you can roust out. It's the Entertainment Tonight approach, and it works on and for those who won't do things just to fatten their wallets.
Something has been lost in this process. Tennis might be better served if the players spent their "hit and giggle" capital on something more closely resembling competition. That three-stop tour featuring Federer vs. Pete Sampras a few years ago created a lot of buzz for tennis in general, but that was a case where the promoters were able to pay the two warriors a king's ransom because of the high degree of interest in those matches. It was a rare opportunity, which is why it was feasible.
A few extra weeks of off-season may encourage some big names, if not necessarily the biggest of names, to play the occasional exo. You can be sure that some budding or established entrepreneurs out there are already trying to think of ways to fill the expanded void that will be created by a longer off-season.