The UCLA Sweatshirt Syndrome

When I first wrote about the inter-related subjects of injury and the calendar, the strong response and long discussion I triggered made me think that i had just pushed the wrong (actually, the right) button at the right time. Now I see that almost any post on the issue throws sparks the moment it touches the grindstone of the Tribe's collective mind. Toss in the third critical ingredient - player responsibility, or lack thereof - and the mix becomes extremely unstable and in no time - Ssshhhhpow! Fireball!

I think Hank has it right (see his string in the Comments section of Temporary Indoor Superstar, below) when he says that the arguments and discussion inevitably becomes circular: The chicken-or-egg question in this area roughly boils down to a debate over which came first, and/or which is most responsible, for the downward spiral of player commitment to tournaments: spoiled superstars, absurd scheduling, or the increasing rate of injury - a jump that may have something to do with the fact that injury remains the only legitimate, ATP-sanctioned excuse for pulling out of an event to which a player has committed.

I suppose I take the increasing frequency with which players blow off events to which they've made a formal commitment (or which they're nominally required to play, like Masters Series events) more seriously than most. And did you notice that the last refuge for hamstrung tournament directors dying to save some semblance of face when faced with sudden withdrawals is to declare: Oh, sure, Mr. Superstar blew us off, but he's a class guy, he came all the way out here to do an official press conference and he even attended the sponsor cocktail party! What a guy, huh? The amount of rationalization, backpedaling,  and excuse-making that TD's, the players themselves, and even their Kool-Aid drinking fans practice never fails to astonish me. And I'm amazed by the degree to which the standard-issue, blithe rationalization is accepted as legitimate: Sorry, I have to do what's best for my game.

Okay, now put  yourself into the place of, oh, an honest tournament director (I know it sounds oxymoronic). Better yet, put yourself in your own place. Imagine that you have entered into a contract with someone - software provider, home seller, movie producer. Then, just as you're all juiced up and ready to go -that is, execute the terms of the contract - the guy or woman tells you, Gee, I had a couple of tough weeks on the job, so I'm tearing up my contract. Hey, I need to do what's best for my business, right?

I'm sorry, but this is exactly what a player does when he or she pulls out of an event in which he might otherwise compete. I just don't see any way around that. I'll tell you one way in which I  think tennis players, even the best of them, like Justine Henin-Hardenne, are no different from you and me. When they give their word, that's a binding resolution. It is, after all, the very basis of the sanctity of a contract.

You might scoff at the idea as too rigid and literal, and all I can say is that I hope you're never the victim of a broken contract, starting with your marital one. It hurts. It hurts, big-time. No matter how many UN ambassadorships, endorsements, prize money checks, or swooning fans you claim, your word is your word.  Don't you think that software provider who breaks a contract has his own perfectly valid rationalization for doing it? If he didn't, he wouldn't be breaking the contract in the first place, right?

Actually, I chose to use Henin-Hardenne for a reason. For despite her self-dramatizations and orgies of self-pity, she seems to have taken a high road of sorts. She's decided that she needs to play X and only X number of events to spare her body and reserves and maximize her talent. She's very deftly used her injuries and afflictions to carve out exactly the niche she presently occupies - that of a player who only plays the big ones, or a few events helpful to her ambitions at big ones.

And she's orchestrated this without going to war with the WTA (granted the commitment policies of the WTA are less stringent than those of the ATP). H2 apparently has decided that she will do exactly as she pleases, but she allowed the WTA to save face without every framing her approach in those exact words. She has the outfit over a barrel, and everyone knows it. Her self-absorption may be off-putting, but at least she she admits it's her driving force. If you accept her terms of engagement, there is a basic integrity about how she's gone about out-maneuvering the WTA. And I never thought I would find myself saying that.

The result, though, has been interesting. Nobody dumps on Justine for playing so few events, while everyone wishes she would play more. The game undoubtedly suffers from her absence, yet it doesn't get buried in an avalanche of criticism of the game itself, or inspire phony but expedient  public hand-wringing (or groveling) by the powers that be. I think the game would benefit if Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal sat down with the ATP and said something like this: "I'm playing four Grand Slams next year, plus Davis Cup. I won't commit to playing all the Masters Series events, but I'll play seven and guarantee that, barring serious injury, I'll be there to do my best. More I can't promise, but even more importantly, I won't agree to."

But I don't want to demonetize the top players. I'm sure they've done the math on all of this and figure that their willingness to play loose and fast with the rules - their word - is somehow justified by the fact that even in compromise, they're helping the tour. They've helped create and hype an event, and what's Ivan Ljubicic or Tommy Robredo going to do, leap to his feet and shout, Federer withdrew? Heck, I'm outta here, too. I can't possibly take this seven-hundred grand payday on false pretenses! Under the current system, everybody wins. And that's exactly whats wrong with it - and why nobody will fix it. It's a model the mob might envy.

But let's move on to an even more potentially volatile issue: the geopolitics of tennis. The U.S. is often accused of being the bully on the block - in tennis as in everything else. And I notice that many of you are very keen on the idea of making the tour(s) a more truly global, representative entity. The rallying cry is, "Let's have more tournaments where tennis is hot, or in those nations that are supplying so many of the players." This is an altogether reasonable chain of thought. It suffers from just one flaw: ignorance of tennis history. Jingoistic as the American public sometimes appears, and despite how fervently many people want to see the U.S. as a nation of ignorant, flag-waving louts, the reality appears to be that no nation is more open and accepting of foreign components in its tennis mix - probably because no nation has so many "foreign"  components in its own cultural mix.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence for this statement, but I'm going to illustrate it with a major, very on-target fact of tennis history. At the height of the tennis boom in Germany, when Boris Becker and Steffi Graf held sway, the game absolutely exploded in that nation. At one point in the early 1990s, Germany had, in addition to a full plate of summer and indoor events, the ATP year-end championships (the current Masters Cup) and something called The Grand Slam Cup, which was the ITF's attempt to promote a rival, year-end throwdown - this one featuring the top performers in the Grand Slams, vying for a staggering first-prize of up to $2.5 million USD (see link above). In fact, German tennis was so strong in the mid-90s that at one point over 90 per cent of the ATP's operating revenue was derived from the sale of tournament broadcast rights to a dizzying variety of German television stations.

We know what happened next. Graf retired, Becker declined and eventually called it quits, too. Michael Stich couldn't improve on his lone Grand Slam title, which was better than Anke Huber did. Nicholas Kiefer and Tommy Haas failed to emerge as impact players at big events.

End result: tennis crashed in Germany, and hard. Within years, all that money evaporated - as did the tournaments, and the interest of the networks. Germans turned out to love tennis in direct proportion to the number of German players who occupied the upper rungs of the rankings.

Granted, Germany is known as a wildly chauvinistic nation. But my gut feeling is that the Spanish, Croatians, Argentinians or Chinese would not flock to tournaments if they did not feature homegrown stars, either. The fact is, almost all nations prosper in tennis - or even retain an interest in the game - along the same trend lines as Germany. No native stars usually means no native interest and the game dries up.  This, of course, is somewhat true of the U.S. as well.

But the U.S. - and you can throw Australian as nation more similar than different - has five, powerful, interrelated things going for it: a rich and lengthy mainstream tennis tradition rivaled only by that of Great Britain and Australia; vast wealth; a strong supply line of champions and champion-making machinery; great hands-on experience as entrepreneurial promoters of tennis events; a leadership role in global sports and entertainment that puts many nations into the famous position of Groucho Marx when he words to this affect: I wouldn't want to belong of any club that would have me as a member.

That is, the lack of a strong U.S. tennis industry could tend to make other nations lose interest in tennis, and it would certainly happen if the nation in question hit hard times, a la post-Becker Germany. Oh, I know there are diehard, true-blue tennis fans all over India, Italy, Chile, Singapore, South Africa. But there's a reason why every teen-ager in Europe is wearing flip-flops and shorts modeled on U.S. Army standard-issue fatigues, cut off below the knees. I call this The UCLA Sweatshirt Syndrome, because the first time I noticed it was in the 1970s,  when every kid in western Europe was running around in a baby-blue and gold UCLA sweatshirt, and each of them, blind to the acronym, thought UCLA was an actual word (Yoo-Kla).

This analysis will offend some, no doubt. I'm sorry, but that can't be helped. To anyone who would delight in the de-construction of the game in the U.S., I can only repeat the old saw: Be careful what you wish for - it may come true. America was the engine driving the rapid transformation of tennis into a professional sport (although the British were the first to check off on Open tennis, with Wimbledon at the forefront), and it occurred at a time when the U.S. wasn't  even the dominant world tennis power (that honor went to the Aussies or Rod Laver's vintage). I don't know that anyone else has the entrepreneurial savvy and experience to build and grow the game in quite the same way.

I wouldn't mind watching someone else give it a go, for a couple of reasons, starting with simple curiosity about what might happen. I would certainly like to see more big tournaments in South America and parts of Asia. But there ought to be an asterisk right about here: a redistribution of the tournament wealth, like that of private wealth, seems in some ways a great idea - on paper.It would certainly make the game more representative, but that certainly doesn't mean it would be bigger, better, or even as, never mind more, stable than it is today.

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