This week I'm discussing the 2006 season, and looking forward to 2007, with ex-pro and expert analyst Hank Moravec (also known as Dunlop Maxply here and at Tennis World).
Steve,
I think it was actually very interesting to see the outpouring of respect the old WCT tour got this week.
However, interesting, but not that surprising. Although many a writer and poster has his or her own take on what would make the schedule better, almost every proposal agrees with a basic structure that spaces out the Masters Series events a bit more. There also appears to be a consensus that more combined mens/womens events would be good, and the tour is heading in that direction at least.
The WCT tour basically had all of this, but, of course with no women. I would love to hear about one potential criticism, though, perhaps from Chris Lewis if he has not already used up his allotment of posts this week. The main flaw in the WCT tour was that if you sign players up for a year, every player not signed has to find anothe job for that year. Because the current tour allows entries to vary week by week, the fairness for the guys at the margins is probably better.
But it also makes one wonder whether the ATP and WTA tour will ever evolve closer to the PGA tour system, where players qualify for "the tour" on a year-by-year basis. This is what WCT basically did. The advantage is that you can really promote the lower ranked playes in the draw. Of course, this development awaits a more unified tour, which could be a long wait.
But in the final analysis, who is to say that one of the keys to the tennis boom in the United States in the 1970's might not have been the fact that if you caught one WCT tournament on TV or live, it was much, much easier than it is now to know when the next WCT tournament would be held and how you could watch it.
There are probably some marketing people out there wondering how tennis administrators can all be so stupid, but I think we've taken the speculation train as far down the track as it will go, at least for this year.
Becuase it would not be much fun to simply agree, I must say the whole World Team Tennis concept never struck me as even remotely interesting. It was so very, very obviously made up out of whole cloth that when the "innovations" were added it ended up as almost a joke.
One of the benefits of having lived through the tennis boom years here is that I witnessed what "worked." In my opinion there has never, never been any benefit in terms of general interest to making tennis more of a "regular guy" sport. It is not a "regular guy" sport.
To really do the team tennis concept right, you need what the NCAA has, which is players committed to a team for a number of years, plus a built-in fan base which considers, say, UCLA vs. USC to be relevant from the start. The Houston Double Faults vs. the Nebraska Popcorns just doesn't have it.
Finally, thanks very much for the back and forth, your posts raised many more interesting points than I had a chance to address, so we'll circle back in 2007.
I look forward to your last post. Writing this much in one week is actually harder then my loose, unfocused, stream of conciousness prose would indicate. After a certain point, its best to leave things to the professionals.
Time to go back to being a random chap on the boards.
Hank