The ATP season goes another 5 weeks (6, if you're playing Davis Cup finals), and players are not happy about it.
“I can tell you that six weeks is simply not enough time to recover from
the excesses of a season,” [Roddick] said. “We played almost 11
months, we have a solid block of mandated events, we have to play four
of the 500 the number of ranking points on offer] tournaments, the
demands are getting harder."
It seems like this crops up in some form every year, but this was the first time I heard this bandied about:
Although restraint of trade is far from the players’ minds, it is
beginning to dawn on the more vocal among their number that
suggesting it may have a seriously unnerving effect. The
nine-tournament Masters 1000 series — which leads to the Barclays
ATP World Tour Finals that have moved to the O2 arena in southeast
London next month — is the ATP’s cash cow and any thought of a
boycott that affected those events would have the governing body’s
leaders in a terrible mess.
Strike? I think it's probably pretty unlikely, but at the same time, part of me wishes they would do it. Of course, I'm sure that's completely impractical of me; anyone who listens to Forty Deuce Podcast knows that I have a very hard time placing the interests of the business side of sports over the interests of athletes. But it seems clear (to me) that something needs to be done. 6 weeks of solid off-season is simply not enough to recover from a full season of a sport (like tennis) that demands international travel and near-daily competitive play for the other 10.5 months of the year. Certainly no tournament will volunteer to be cut out of the calendar, but when the push for money on the business side becomes such that it's hurting (literally) the people who produce the "product" that makes the business possible, something needs to be reevaluated. The current schedule ignores the simple physiological recovery needs of the athletes-- particularly of the top athletes, who play a full schedule right up to the end of the year.
There's no perfect solution. Obviously, the WTA has tried to restructure its calendar this year to give players a longer off-season and more rest periods during the year, and its efficacy is questionable-- the players who started the season off strong are mostly ending it exhausted, and Roadmap tournament requirements seem to have been largely responsible for a (nearly) season-destroying injury to a top player (Vera Zvonareva), who played a tournament against medical advice due to contractual obligations. In my opinion, pressuring a player to play when his or her doctors are advising otherwise is beyond ludicrous. But there will be people who point out that the same players who complain about the season being too long and hard on their bodies, and the off-season too short, are all too happy to play lucrative exhibitions when they could be resting-- and those claims are not baseless.
In short, the solution to this problem, if there is one, will take extensive negotiation between the business interests and the athletes that make up the fractious coalition that is the ATP. What I would really like to see would be for the Players' Council, which now includes 3 of the top 4 players in the world specifically in order to give players clout in the organization, take a hard line about the needs of athletes and force some productive changes. Not that I have any idea about what those might be, but I'm with Jon Wertheim when he says of Rafa
When one of the sport's most magnetic figures -- a supreme athlete
and consummate professional -- simply cannot make it through a season
abiding by the entry rules as currently written, think it might be time to
rethink the schedule?
