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by Pete Bodo
The headlines come in from Stuttgart and Prague, Bastad, Ljubljana (that would be the Slovenia Open) and Palermo. Yes, there is life after Wimbledon!
Players not named Federer, Nadal, Williams or Clijsters are struggling as mightily as ever in tennis' version of a dog chasing its tail: trying to improve a ranking that rolls over every week, and in which the ultimate prize goes only to one man or woman at a time—the No. 1 ranking. Of course, for someone ranked No. 167, climbing to 166—never mind 122!—represents a partial completion of the mission, a step in the right direction. Which is why the entire system is tolerable and tennis players aren't in the habit of flinging themselves from rooftops.
Of course, only one player can hold that ranking at any given time (although I suppose we could theoretically have a tie at some point, right?), which is unfortunate. But it sure keeps things interesting. And even that ranking is fleeting, lasting all of seven days. As Robert Browning wrote, A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
The game is designed to ensure that everyone has very short arms.
I appreciate what might be called the continuous tennis loop. I always thought that the concept behind the classic surfing movie, The Endless Summer, applies to tennis just as well. Just try telling a warrior bleeding sweat in Melbourne during the Australian Open not to get so stressed and bent out of shape; it's only winter. The sun is always shining on a tennis court somewhere. The tennis tour doesn't exactly ignore the seasons, it merely works around them. It follows the sun, with the exception of some indoor events that strive to be a different sort of spectacle and can be surprisingly successful at it, if less so in recent years.
Still, I'm having a little trouble embracing all these post-Wimbledon events on the European clay-court segment currently underway for a simple reason. I see red clay and I think, Hey, I thought we were done with all that! Granted, the two big U.S. hard-court events that precede the European clay-court circuit in the spring might also seem out of place. But the continuity is better. It would be better still if the Australian Open came at the end rather than the beginning of a winter indoor/hard court segment, but you can't have everything. I just look at the winter hard-court circuit as a film running in rewind.
It's tempting to assume that tennis would be much better off if that one Grand Slam Down Under really were the climax of a significant run-up, but then grass court fans who bemoan the ridiculously short window for grass play before Wimbledon have a legitimate beef, too. If you were to redesign tennis from the top down, I'd say to hail with this idea of an off-season for its own sake, or just because most team sports have one. Just schedule the four majors at appropriate times and have run-up events on the same surface leading to them.
But given our present calendar, and the rising tide of European and South American players, a clay-court segment after Wimbledon makes a certain amount of sense, even if it's a narrative without a satisfying conclusion. Because at about the time things should be getting really interesting, the players drop everything and head for the U.S. and the hard-court circuit culminating with the U.S. Open.
Among the four majors, only the French and U.S. Opens generate that satisfying sense of climax on the heels of a long and often arduous warm-up. But let's remember that Wimbledon and the Australian Open aren't entirely crippled by their placement. Wimbledon, to my mind, has always been more like our own Major League Baseball's just concluded All-Star game and break, except in tennis' case the game counts—it counts more than any other. For those people lucky enough to know what Wimbledon is and what it stands for, it's an opportunity to celebrate the game, and a place unlike any other (which becomes more and more evident to me with each passing year), but in a deadly serious context because Wimbledon remains the undeclared world singles championships. For Wimbledon, the lack of a lengthy run-up is actually an asset.
And the Aussies made a great decision when they moved their tournament to the beginning of the year (it used to be in late December). Would it be better if the Australian were played at the end of an early hard-court season? In a practical sense, yes. And maybe having a few more fairly big events before the Aussie Open would help build and drive interest in the tournament. But there's also a lot to be said for delivering high-quality, critically important tennis to an audience starved for it in January. Maybe that outweighs the drawbacks of the tournament taking place well before most of the tournaments that comprise the Aussie or hard-court quarter of the year.
It's valuable to think of tennis in terms of quarters. In the best of all worlds, each Grand Slam would be the dominant fixture and final confrontation of a given quarter. Or is that too rigid a view? To me, the U.S. Open Series was a great idea; it's a pity that it hasn't received the player support it deserves. The French Open, aka Roland Garros Series, does much better that way. It features outstanding, popular, traditional events, with a wind-up at the World Championships of Clay in Paris. But perhaps that's a happy accident, and it isn't like the French Open overshadows the other majors. Maybe we shouldn't spend so much time trying to fit square pegs into round holes.
The patchwork nature of the calendar hurts tennis in some ways, but I doubt that the answer is an off-season. Tennis is an interval sport in which periods of intense activity and effort ought to alternate with periods of rest or low activity. And keep in mind that for all but the top players, there's plenty of time between tournaments, given how few rounds most of them have to play any given week. The dark little secret of the tours is that the players don't want to put all their eggs in the Grand Slam basket. They don't want too ironclad a template. They want options, and their individual needs and surface preferences are best met by having them.
There's no law saying everything has to be ultra-organized and of equal or near equal value. The folks in Hamburg must be thinking that, because they're continuing to put on their big event (demoted from Masters status by virtue of a naked if justifiable power play) on clay next week as if the daffodils were in bloom and everyone was wondering if anybody can stop Rafael Nadal at the last minute at Roland Garros.
The sun shines every day on a tennis court somewhere in the world, it's a pity not to take advantage of it and have players out there, battling to improve their rankings and to make a living. The sport takes a lot of criticism for the compression of the action, but it's also taken some real strides toward making sense out of the chaos. After all, I don't see where playing Wimbledon and Roland Garros so close to each other has really hurt either event; maybe it's even helped, at least in an era where the two best male players are competitive at both.
Maybe things aren't so bad after all.