Dusselpalooza
*** 
There may be no week in the entire year when tennis is less closely watched than this one, and that's owing to a combination of factors collected under the single umbrella called Roland Garros.
Most of the elite players are having a few light hits but otherwise putting their feet up in preparation for the pending, two-week (each hopes) slog on red clay that begins this Sunday in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, hard by the Bois de Boulogne. In addition to having to live in the towering shadow of the year's second Grand Slam tournament, the ongoing ATP events in Dusseldorf and Nice also are hampered by the fact that at the end of this intense, five-week, three Masters-event run, everyone is a little bit overfed on red clay.
And that goes for the fans as well as players.
The other day, Ivan Ljubicic made some snide remarks about American players skipping European tournaments, but I prefer to look at it this way: If not for a few diehards (Gilles Simon? Radek Stepanek? Nicolas Almagro?), who else is going to show up this week for what has become a ritual humiliation in Europe but U.S. players? My countrymen seem vanish a week or two after the Miami Masters, only to slumber out of hibernation this week, rubbing their eyes and asking, "Tennis? Is there some tennis going on that I ought to know about?"
Thus, you have John Isner striking terror into the hearts of numerous forehand-backhand-rinse-repeat clay-court artists right now in Nice. And how about that truly sensational human interest story, Brian Baker? A former junior French Open runner-up, he's already planted the No. 4 seed in Nice—the formidable Frenchman, Gael Monfils.
Nice? Do we care?
You bet. Nice was one of the oldest and most beloved of events before it was swept away in 1995 by Roland Garros and Masters mania—other names for the influenza of "bigness" to which everyone, not just the U.S., is susceptible.
It was a pity to see the tournament go. Among other things, "Open de Nice Cote d'Azur" is about as pretty a name for a tournament as you'll find (that's the official title of the tournament; note the lack of affiliation with some financial services outfit, soft-drink purveyor, or jeweler). And you don't have to be a history buff or an F. Scott Fitzgerald fanatic to imagine what the scene at this tournament must have been like back in the days when tennis was an amateur sport and the idle rich would "summer" on that portion of the Riviera known, if you allow the pedestrian translation into English, as "the blue coast."
Should you want a little more gravitas than is afforded by Nice's long history, just peruse the roll of its champions: Ilie Nastase, Manuel Orantes, Jose Higueras, Bjorn Borg, Yannick Noah, Henri LeConte, Andrei Chesnokov—they all won Nice before the tournament fell on hard times and went dormant for 15 years.
Check out the draw—I think you'll find that this is a fair little tournament, made more rather than less interesting by the absence of any player from the Top 9. They're stacked up pretty thick after that, though, as if there were some kind of law about it. The tournament enlisted ATP Nos. 10 (Isner), 12 (Simon), 13 (Almagro) and 14 (Monfils). I don't know about you, but I'd rather plonk down a few Euros to watch second-seeded Simon battle Thomaz Bellucci (a third-rounder) than watch Novak Djokovic crush some hapless Latvian, oh-and-three.
The other ATP event this deadly week is the Power Horse World Team Cup in Dusseldorf, which may not have quite the romantic ring as the official name of the aforementioned event on the French coast, but then nobody ever mistook Dusseldorf for Nice. What Dusseldorf has, though, is what every tournament aspires to, and what Wimbledon itself has taken to the max: An aura, a reputation and an allure that makes people want to be there, even if the guy swinging the racquet is more likely to be Fred Flintstone than Roger Federer. That the aura doesn't spread far beyond the outskirts of Dusseldorf is neither here nor there.
The World Team Cup is a relatively new event, spawned in 1975 as the ATP's own version of the Davis Cup. It was the brainchild of the father of the ATP tour, Jack Kramer. In one of his many prescient moments, Kramer perceived a niche for an international team competition that took place during just one week, featuring the two top players from eight nations (the nations whose singles players had the highest combined ranking were the ones invited). The concept still must seem delicious to anti-Davis Cup (or Davis Cup-format) dissenters.
Back then, commercial realities as well as a certain respect for the tradition and history of the game made it unthinkable to attack (or skip) Davis Cup competition. Thus, Arthur Ashe worked both sides of the fence: The U.S. Davis Cup icon also combined with now disgraced con-man Roscoe Tanner to secure the U.S.' win in Kingston, Jamaica, in the first World Team Cup. Unfortunately, the tournament was a financial disaster. It would be three years before the WTC was revived by visionary tennis promoter Horst Klosterkemper of Dusseldorf's elite Rochusclub (no, it was not named for Olivier and Christophe).
The WTC has been held at the Rochusclub ever since, happily indifferent to the awkward slot on the calendar and the lack of participation by the very top players. The German people have been extremely supportive of their event, not least because the home team has won a record five times. Bogus? Who cares? You have to play it to win it, and if you can't be bothered to show up, somebody else will carry off the loot and the honors, and the Germans who flock to the event have a great time anyway. Check out the snaps of the winners over the years and then tell me that nobody cares about the event because Rafa and Nole can't be bothered.
Pro tennis once was inseparably yoked to the whims of the very top players, and in some places and ways it still is. But at its best, a tennis tournament is a happening, a Nicefest, or Dusselpalooza. During the ATP boycott year of 1973, Wimbledon proved that fans would flock to the tournament regardless of the field. It's great to have the top players all gathered under one roof, or rain cloud, but it's even better for the game when people want something other than a glimpse of a star, or celebrity, and find it in the places and players who aren't the headline makers. And that's the story of this deadly week.