Andy Roddick and Rafael Nadal both backed out of their next scheduled tournaments citing knee injuries. Nadal had been scheduled to play at Umag; Roddick was expected to turn up in Los Angeles. The money quote from this report: “Roddick didn’t mention the injury in his post-match news conference. He did, however, complain about the demands of the ATP tour’s crowded calendar.”
“This is ridiculous, the schedule we’re expected to play, year in and year out,” he said. “The last two years, I overcame it; this year, I didn’t.”
I don’t know the specifics of either of these cases—Nadal certainly has rolled up the mileage this year on clay courts, and the hard courts Roddick prefers are not user-friendly. But the real issue here is scheduling, and the demands on top pros—meaning the ones who get beaten up all week, most every week, while journeymen have scads of weeks when they play a match—maybe two—then have nothing to do but practice until the next tournament.
So now tennis fans are between a rock and a hard place; the players they most want to see are increasingly hurt, or reaching for the ever-convenient doctor’s excuse to get out of playing compulsory events.
The system stinks. It encourages players to lie, and sustains a crazy calendar in which a large market like Chicago, or Dallas, has no tournament, while Indianapolis and Cincinnati (a tournament I love, otherwise) take place just a week apart. And, in effect, they’re protected from competition because the ATP has control over who gets tournaments—meaning who gets a slot in the calendar to put on a tournament. At the very least, I think, there should be a lot more free time on the calendar for players to either rest or take part in low-key events that bring pro tennis to towns that presently don’t have it, like Pittsburgh, Denver, Portland, et al.
Like I’ve said before: It’s time to think of blowing it up and starting over.
