Green Thoughts on a Red Day

So let's take another breather from ruminations on red dirt and re-visit some tournament, calendar and surface-related issues that have been rattling around like stones in a tin can at TennisWorld since, well, forever.

A few weeks ago, the All-England Club held an informational presser, and three items that emerged from it caught my eye. Many people rolled their eyes when Wimbledon decided to use a three-plus-one Hawkeye challenge system (players were allowed three unsuccessful challenges per set, plus one more in the tiebreaker). It seemed like Wimbledon was just going against the grain of 2-plus-one because, well, it's Wimbledon - always insistent on its unilateral right to do as it sees most fit for itself. Since then, though, the Wimbledon approach has been embraced as standard practice, tour-wide. In retrospect, Wimbledon's decision was less grandstanding than good decision making, driven by something akin to intellectual integrity.

Item 2: The horrific first-week rain delays last year once again raised the outcry: Play on the middle Sunday like everyone else in the danged world, you arrogant, fey numbskulls! Officials at the presser noted that the decision to avoid Sunday play "was correct" (besides, poor weather was forecast for the Sunday in question anyway), insofar as the tournament was concluded on schedule. So Wimbledon is holding out against Sunday play for the foreseeable future, because, as a club official put it:  "Play on middle Sunday creates its own tensions in the future Order of Play. It will remain an emergency option."

It may seem like Wimbledon is continuing to play British roulette with the weather (the UK version being to put five bullets in the chamber, leaving just one blank) but there's no doubt that Wimbledon presents better, more defensible scheduling than any other Grand Slam event, and its ironclad scheduling philosophy looks better and better with each passing Grand Slam. There are two reasons for this: There is no night play, which ensures that each day's schedule is packed with premium matches. More important, Wimbledon clings to the "alternate day"  regimen that, under normal circumstances, gives every player a day off between matches.

This is a welcome kind of inflexibility, given the way the other tournaments, for various reasons including split-sessions and Sunday starts, spread the first-round action out over three or more days (depending on weather), and half-a-dozen sessions. It used to be that if you bought a ticket for the first Monday of a major, you were pretty much guaranteed a rich feast of top players, even if the matches typically tended to be one-sided. These days, though, you may hold a Monday day-session ticket for the U.S. Open without being at all certain that you'll get to see Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, or Novak Djokovic (should the tournament decide that local hero Andy Roddick, with help from perennial Grand Slam semifinalist Nikolay Davydenko and former U.S. Open champ Marat Safin, be enough to carry the day).

Item 3 is related to no. 2, and it underscores the point. Wimbledon is bucking the hottest idea in tournament scheduling by holding out against the Sunday start (thereby adding the precious extra weekend day). It's an admirable move, although it's good to keep in mind that, thanks to its vast popularity and success, Wimbledon doesn't really need a Sunday. But by that standard, neither do any of the other majors. Once again, it looks like reactionary old Wimbledon is the tournament most interested in maintaining the standard of fair scheduling that gives players equal periods of play and rest for its own sake, because it's the right thing to do. The only fly in Wimbledon's ointment is the ever-present problem of rain delays, but those are random, equal-opportunity disadvantages.

Some time ago, some readers of my Spheres of Influence post lobbied for a grass court season (to accompany my tripartite plan of having three distinct tours:  spring (clay/Europe), summer (hard/US) and fall (hard and indoor/Asia). That it never occurred to me to grapple with this issue wasn't an oversight. The thing is, I see Wimbledon as a unique event that grows increasingly irrelevant in terms of  how the game is played, an on what it is commonly played, while simultaneously growing more distinguished and significant.

Instead of pretending we can shoehorn a "grass-court season" into the precious few weeks between the middle weekend of Roland Garros and Wimbledon (by which time many good players are looking for a way to kill time), why not ratchet up the notion that Wimbledon is our sport's version of the All-Star break (the ritual mid-season break during which popular U.S. sports like baseball, basketball hold an exhibition game featuring the top players)?

I don't think this demeans Wimbledon at all because, among other things, Wimbledon is not exhibition, nor should it be. But I like the idea of the world's most important and closely watched tennis tournament becoming the centerpiece of a multi-week celebration of the game. Give everyone a chance to rest, adapt to grass, take part in activities promoting the game (including a few big warm-up events, like Queens and Halle), culminating with Wimbledon. Instead of trying to find ways (more tournaments) to justify a specific tour or surface-based segment of the calendar, we should try to find ways to promote the game at the critical mid-point of the year, when the entire world is watching, thereby building even greater momentum toward the great big clash in London.

Speaking of Queens, TennisWorld's good friend David Law, who runs the media operation for the Artois championships, wants to share this link with you. Thanks, David. You may now remove your tool belt and sip a Stella!

We now return you to our regularly scheduled clay-court programming. . .