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Mornin', everyone. I'm coming up for a little air after a pretty intense day of moving. I won't bore you with the details. Checking the scores today, I noticed that the the fall routine is kicking in: with the exception of Gael Monfils in Metz, the finalists in Bucharest, Tashkent, and Seoul are an assortment of solid, hard-working journeymen and established veterans, a group longer on staying power than star power.
The only marquee player to make big news this week was Roger Federer, and it had more to do with not playing than playing. Fedrerer, citing fatigue at the end of a year during which he played all four Grand Slam finals and won two of them, is taking a pass on Tokyo and Shanghai(despite that status of that event as a Masters 1000).
"After consultation with my team and doctors, I decided to take the difficult decision to withdraw from both tournaments," Federer said in a statement. "This will allow me a chance to give my body a chance to rest, rehabilitate and recover from a physically challenging year.
"I'm disappointed that I have to withdraw from Tokyo and Shanghai as they are two of my favorite cities, The fans have been great to me over the years."
You have to be out of your mind to criticize Federer for that decision, but that won't make the promoter of those events - or the ATP - feel better about things. I feel for those promoters, but I feel even more for The Mighty Fed. The guy just shattered the Grand Slam singles title record, he had his first two children (twins), and he just backed up his run at the US Open with a successful Davis Cup tie. And now he's got to issue formal statements, and stroke the disappointed fans (although I have no doubt he's sincere)?
The two words that every tournament director sucked into buying a date on the fall ATP or WTA calendar is: caveat emptor. The people most likely to show up to play are those who can use a late-season infusion of ranking points and disposable income. Good for them: they're willing to chase the rewards. But given the state of Rafael Nadal's banged-up body and Juan Martin del Potro's "to do" list, I wouldn't be surprised if one or both of them dropped out of the Asian events as well. For most players, traveling to Asia after the US is a little like getting home after a long day at work and realizing you forgot to stop at the store for milk.
Shahar Pe'er is in the final at Tashkent (facing Akgul Amanmuradova), and in some ways it's a perfect symbol of the season. Shahar has been knocking around some pretty exotic path places this year, including Fes, Pattaya City, Bad Gastein, and Monterrey, as well as the outpost where she reached her only final of the year until this week, Guangzhou. Well, there's one for the record books, or in any event for Trivial Pursuit: Who was the last person before Pe'er to make the finals at Guangzhou and Tashkent, back-to-back!
Give Pe'er points for her work ethic, and let nobody say she's ducking the competition.
This portion of the calendar is interesting in an esoteric, for-diehards-only kind of way. If you're one of those fans who's going to stay up all night because you simply must know if Albert Montanes is going to win Bucharest, you're in hog heaven. And lets face it, don't you just have to smile when you read that Kimiko Date Krumm has upset Maria Kirilenko the achieve the final in Seoul? Krumm is coming off a 12-year break, which in many ways is an even more staggering accomplishment than the one turned in recently by Kim Clijsters at the US Open. Thats a full career's worth of time off; in fact, most of the women in the WTA can only hope to have a continuous career of that length.
So hats off to Kimiko Date Krumm; it would be great to see her win the event .
It's great to see journeymen get their day in the sun and make a little rankings progress at the expense of their peers, and I would feel less conflicted and prone to criticism at this time of year if that were the express purpose of the the fall tour. But the two player organizations cling to a dogmatic desire to have a year-round tour in which the late season events are on equal footing with earlier ones. They try to accomplish that by leavening the mix with some officially big events, which also has something to do with the desire to develop the emerging Asian market.
Local, on-the-ground conditions may suggest that Fall is a great time to stage an Asian leg, and recruiting promoters who aren't afraid to have a Pe'er or Montanes in the final involves some wizardry. But my gut feeling is that the promoters of the ostensibly big Asian events are already wondering what kind of relief they can get from the ATP for Federer's withdrawal. The ATP hopes that a fall tour in Asia could eventually flourish like, as, say, the Spring clay-court events in Europe (They'd better hope that, or we'd be dealing with de facto fraud). But I don't see that happening.
Ever since they were formed, the ATP and WTA hoped to create tours that might ultimately be strong enough, week-in, week-out, and country by country, to level the playing field among the tournaments. But the pre-eminence of the majors, and their every-growing prestige, is one of the main themes of the past decade in tennis. In fact, it seems that as the tours get stronger, the Grand Slams gain rather than lose cachet. Now more than ever, the Grand Slam events write the tennis calendar. It's not supposed to be a seasonal sport (in the big picture), but it is.
A Grand Slam-event contender - a Novak Djokovic, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Federer or Serena Williams - just isn't going to have much motivation left at this time of year. He, or she, can't be expected to, either. Having premium grade events in the fall serves only purpose: it makes the tours seem more like a horse race than they really are. If Tomas Berdych (don't laugh) wins Shanghai and Paris, he catapults right back into a conversation where he probably doesn't belong.
I guess you can say there's nothing wrong with that, at least not until you pretend to be offering something you know you can't deliver. I don't know how much these ostensibly big events in the fall help the game in general, but everyone might be better off if the tours adopted the philosophy - endorsed by public opinion - that the tennis year begins with a major (The Australian Open) and ends with one (the US Open).
Keep the calendar full to allow the Pe'er and Davydenkos and Monacos and Zvonarevas jockey or postion, but don't set yourself a mission that you can't possibly fulfill.