Of course they do, some of you will cry. Me, I'm not convinced - especially when I see players taking part in all kinds of exhibition and charity matches in the precious little time they do have off under the present regimen.
So let's look at the nature of tennis. Because it's an international game, it can hardly be called a "seasonal" one - not when the summer tennis season in the storied tennis stronghold of Australia, or South America, happens to take place when it's the dead of winter and six months after the peak of the "season" in the northern hemisphere (including North America and Europe). Ice hockey may not fly in Canada in July, but tennis sure works for Australia (not to mention Florida and southern California) in what is officially still winter.
If you take the seasonal component out of tennis (something that arena tennis, aka the indoor circuit, easily does), and appreciate that somewhere in tennis country it's always spring or summer, the major practical justification for an off-season loses relevance. I mean, December tennis isn't like December baseball - or mid-August football - right? And with today's high-tech indoor arenas and artificial surfaces, you could argue that no sport is seasonal in the traditional sense of the word (basketball, which has become an exclusively indoor game, is maybe the best example here).
In fact, I imagine that the only reason we still have a seasonal approach to athletics is because each of the major pro sports staked out its traditional seasonal turf back when time-of-year did matter, and divvying up the calendar evolved into a pretty good system that served everyone's best interest. It's less important in a significant international sport, but on domestic sporting stages an off-season is a highly desirable and valuable thing.
Now let's look at the nature of. . . tennis players, and of the kind of game they play. Although surfers neatly pilfered the theme, it's really tennis that chugs along on the theory of the Endless Summer. Tennis players have never sought extended layoffs from the game, because there's always tennis action to be had somewhere. Tennis is less a game of seasons than one of periodization. Tennis players want and need rest; they always did. But they need relatively brief periods of rest between no less concentrated doses of intense activity at major tournaments.
Not too many tennis players are, like NFL pros, happy to unlace their shoes and hang up their gear for weeks at a time. A tennis player needs to hit tennis balls, and most of them do it even when they're theoretically taking a little time off. The nature of the game demands it. And while the game has gotten much more demanding, physically, it's still a game of skill, in which there is no physical contact, with a premium on the kind of fitness that can be achieved without putting unusual stress on muscle and ligament.
When you look at how the game has evolved, and the priority of the players (maximizing their performance at a series of events, none more than two weeks long, staggered throughout the calendar), you can see why a lengthy off-season may not be quite as appealing in real life as it is no paper. And I think if the players had it, they would exploit it by maximizing their opportunities to play in exhibitions and other "unofficial" events - just as a way to keep their hands in the game and to pick up some extra cash.
This wouldn't be an altogether bad thing, either. Imagine if most of December were given over to, say, promoting the game, with the various national federations, sponsors (Nike, Adidas?), and entrepreneurial promoters sending the top players on lucrative, low-stress exhibition tours in cities that don't have sanctioned, first-rate WTA or ATP events (Chicago? Milan? Copenhagen? Sao Paolo, Singapore?). In this regard, it will be interesting to see what the WTA women will do with their new, extended off-season kicks in thanks to the Roadmap in 2009.
So to my mind, the best way to re-structure the calendar would not be to jam the events that already exist into a smaller time slot, leaving more room for an off-season. It would be to stretch and place the important events we do have in a more staggered formation, to allow players adequate rest alternating with meaningful play. The real problem with the calendar is too many of the most important events are played too close to each other. And the best example of that is the timing of the year-end championships. Ironically, those are tournaments that the tours themselves own - a fact that reduces the financial and/or legal implications of moving them. In this case, the ATP and WTA should know better.
Tennis doesn't need an off-season as much as it needs to give players more sensible intervals of rest and activity - in that sense, the calendar doesn't need to contract, it needs to expand. During the glory days of the YEC (back when it was called, simply, the Masters), the event took place in mid-January. Would it be too much to ask the ATP and WTA to move their year-end championships back into, say, the middle of December, allowing the top players a few weeks of rest before a grand finale - after which everyone goes home for two or three weeks?
