I was all set to write an upbeat, counterintuitive post about how a big tournament like Paris-Bercy doesn't need stars to make itself worth watching. As long as a Masters event has a representative sample of Top 25 talent, it will take on a life of its own, with interesting matches and stories unfolding in surprising places. The chase for Shanghai by Blake and Robredo; the home-country hopes of Gasquet and Mathieu; the prospect of a Berdych-Murray odd-couple showdown; the sometimes awe-inspiring athleticism of Tursunov; the continued presence of beloved knucklehead Marat Safin—all of this made me think as I got up today that Bercy was going to come back from the withdrawal abyss and end up being an entertaining week. After all, it still had that groovy, lounge-blue (or lavender, or something) court going for it.
By 3:30 I had been proven utterly wrong. Gasquet pulled out of what might have been the match of the tournament, with Safin, while Blake, Murray, and Tursunov were sloppy and slump-shouldered in their straight-set defeats. Only the beloved knucklehead remains.
The quarterfinals will be played Friday, and of the matchups left this week, Safin’s hold the most promise. First he goes against Tommy Haas. These two talented underachievers have a history. Haas won 9-7 in the fifth in Davis Cup seven years ago; Safin won in five to reach the Aussie Open final in 2002; and this fall Haas eked out a win 7-6 in the fifth at the U.S. Open. This one should be close again; I’ll pick Safin, the three-time champion here, though Haas had everything dialed in against Blake. The winner could get Berdych in the semifinals.
On the brink of making it to Shanghai, Blake couldn’t muster his best stuff when it counted. Now he must hope that both Haas and Mario Ancic lose. I thought Blake’s shot selection and body language were poor today. His choice of serve and volley on a few big points felt like copouts. Not so for Robredo, who played what may prove to be the match of the week in his three-set comeback against Grosjean yesterday. He willed himself out of defeat, and did it with fearless shotmaking. I still don’t like the hair or the watch, but it’s been nice to see this (high-end) journeyman raise his game when it counts. Robredo has fully earned his first trip to the Masters Cup. Hopefully he can keep it going and eliminate Jarkko Nieminen tomorrow—Bercy deserves that, at least.
Is there a solution to this tournament’s yearly star shortage, short of reducing its Masters Series status? I don’t think you can blame top players who want to do their best at the huge-money Masters Cup that the ATP is staging in two weeks. But, like I said, I also don’t think dropping the number of Masters events drastically is the solution. They’re the best weeks in tennis outside of the Slams, and we need as many of those as we can get.
In a perfect world, there would be at least one Masters before each Slam—dual-gender Sydney before the Australian Open; Rome and Monte Carlo before Roland Garros (drop Hamburg; three Masters before the French Open is plainly too much); Canada and Cincy before Flushing (add a week in between); keep Indian Wells and Miami but add a week between them; and have just one indoor Euro Masters event before the Masters Cup, which will likely be held in Europe in the near future, if the ATP chief has his way.
To make up for one of the two lost tournaments in that scenario, you could add a dual-gender Masters event on grass before Wimbledon. Now that the grass game is no longer a glorified serving contest, and Wimbledon is no longer tennis' annual, one-off freak show, it’s time to make the surface a factor in the regular tour again. Also, grass is more aesthetically pleasing than cement, and it provides fans with a link to the sport’s past, the way a stadium like Camden Yards does for baseball. To do this, of course, means going back to the root of all scheduling evil in tennis: getting more time between the French Open and Wimbledon. Hey, there are more impossible dreams in this world—aren’t there?