So after all of the controversy, the blue clay turns out to be . . . boring and conventional? My initial glimpses of it over the last few weeks had made it seem like a cool novelty—“Wow, the clay is a different color.” But after three hours of watching actual matches on two of the show courts from Madrid this morning, the effect is beginning to be reversed for me. Now it doesn’t look like blue clay; it just looks like a blue court. Not unlike the ones in Melbourne. And Indian Wells. And Marseille. And Valencia. And Cincinnati. And Flushing Meadows. And at the O2 Arena in London. And a dozen other places.
This wouldn’t bother me except that Madrid comes smack in the middle of the one long stretch of the season that isn’t supposed to be blue. Watching this event after Barcelona and before Rome makes me understand, and miss, the associations I have with red dirt. From my vantage point in the States, where most of our courts are asphalt and the ones that aren’t have a grayish tint, red clay signifies the Old World, and an alternative, century-old Continental tennis tradition. Blue clay, on the other hand, signifies the power of Ion Tiriac’s bank account.
I’ve only watched three or four matches, none of them involving a high seed, but so far the way the game is played on it looks less clay-like to me, less physical and flowing and various. There’s something about the bloody color of European clay that helps give dirtball its gladiatorial aspect. For an American, there’s a certain magic to seeing that courts can come in different colors—green and red—and can have different properties and produce different playing styles. It’s nice to know that, however well you may be able to see the ball on TV on them, not all courts have to be blue. (The one positive I can see so far is that the color looks better than red when it’s caked on players’ socks.) It’s not a coincidence that commentator Robbie Koenig mentioned today that he believes the best clay in the world is in Barcelona, at a club that was founded in 1899. There's a tradition and a history to the stuff, and it takes some time to get it right.
These are early impressions, and they may change when I see the top seeds go about their business on the tierra azul, though I doubt it. Even when the surface was red, Madrid has never been the most welcoming event—when I was there in 2009, the outer courts had been built too small, and the atmosphere inside the concrete walls of the second and third show courts was absolutely leaden (the main stadium, though, is very nice). But if blue clay is strange and dull to me, its insertion into the lead-up to Roland Garros should have a galvanizing effect on the players. It’s interesting that this controversy, as ephemeral as it may end up seeming, comes so quickly on the heels of the feel-good story of two weeks ago, when the Top 4 players went to the heads of the Grand Slams, asked for more money for their lower-ranked brothers, and . . . got it. Compare that to what happened in Madrid. According to Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, the color change was approved as a one-year experiment by departing ATP chief Adam Helfant with no input from the players. This, rather than the color itself or Tiriac's role in imposing it, has been their main beef.
“Players should be agreeing to the change,” Djokovic said this weekend. “There should be some value in what they say. I’m not blaming the tournament, it’s fighting for its own interests. But the ATP should have done a better job on player rights in protecting what the players want.”
The thing is, as the Top 4 proved with their successful pay-increase request, these days there is quite a bit of value in what the players, especially the top players, say. With their long-running dominance and their sense of sportsmanship and integrity, Nadal, Djokovic, and Federer have put themselves in a position where they can go to the Grand Slams largely of their own volition and make things happen. This comes at a time when the ATP CEO position has taken a lower profile, to the point of invisibility. After the 2008 ouster of Etienne de Villiers, a shake-up-the-troops tennis outsider who had too much ambition and too little political skill (but who was underrated in his effectiveness in my opinion), we got Helfant, a man described by Andy Roddick as “demure.” While he did negotiate a tour sponsorship deal with Corona and generally avoided disaster (until now), Helfant made the job look like an extended disappearing act. His successor, Brad Drewett, was panned for his underwhelming first speech in Melbourne in January and has kept quiet since.
Djokovic, Nadal, and Federer have all been members of the tour’s player council and have worked for change through it. It’s unfortunate that at a time when their prestige has never been higher, Nadal has resigned from the council, while the fourth member of the Top 4, Andy Murray, has indicated that he’s not interested in joining. I don’t blame them; it’s a time commitment and a potential distraction from their main jobs. And maybe it’s not all that unfortunate after all. The top players have shown that they can have an effect when trade on the respect they’ve built within the tennis world, whether its through official tour channels or not. At the same time, in the eyes of Nadal and Djokovic, the ATP’s executives haven’t been active enough on their behalf.
At the end of last year there were a lot of questions about how much the players could really do to change the sport (the issue then was the schedule). This year we’ve seen that they can, and we’ve seen what happens when they’re left out. The ATP helped create an avoidable mess in Madrid, while the top players helped solve the problem of getting more revenue from the Slams and lessening the game's income inequality.
Looking at the blue clay this morning, I have to believe that guys like Nadal and Djokovic understand the sport's appeal and its traditions—and that a good part of its appeal is in its traditions—better than Tiriac or the tour does. This is spring, not summer or fall or winter. This is Spain, not the U.S. or Australia or England. This is clay, not grass or DecoTurf or Plexipave, and to this observer its better when red.