Madrid Crisis Center 10.17

Mornin'. everyone. We're back in Crisis Center mode, because it's a Masters Series week. Which reminds me, are you all practicing for the upcoming transition, when this will be a "1000 Week"? Ugh. I really hope the ATP rethinks that one. And not just because the current name is so clear, intuitive and widely accepted. It's also that I am such a creature of habit that I'll be calling Madrid, Cincinnati, Monte Carlo, et al Masters events for a couple of years - at least. Hey, I still call the Miami combined event, The Lipton.

The funny thing is, I always hated calling it "The Lipton." But it got to the point where I couldn't help myself, which must have led to a round of back-slapping and cigar-lighting somewhere on Madison Avenue.  This capitulation somehow came to represent the triumph of Evil Marketing (as opposed to benign marketing) over my brain. It was like the name just infiltrated and took over that corner of my mind, as if the tournament director of The Lipton (which later became the Sony Ericsson, the NASDAQ 100, etc. etc.), Butch Buccholz, was some alien who crawled out of a pod to brainwash and subjugate  solid citizens here in the US of A.

The only other time I dropped my guard and lost the battle against over-commericialism was in the 1980s, when Jim Westhall put on a sweet little mid-summer red-clay tournament in bucolic North Conway, N.H. That was the Volvo International. It was a hugely popular regional event in New England, and it came to be known as "The Volvo." So you would be walking down the street in North Conway and you would hear these people asking each other, "Are you going to The Volvo today?"

If you didn't know better, you might have suspected that "The Volvo" was some ancient, vine-covered British racing green wreck from the pre-air bag era, well-hidden in the woods, where members of a certain cult would gather to commune with supernatural spirits and chant incantations, while each of them laid a hand on a fender or door.

The Lipton, The Volvo*. . . They were high water marks for the the marketing crowd.

Anyway, back to Madrid 1000. We saw The Mighty Fed in action yesterday, and today we'll have Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, so wade right in and discuss the action here, or tell me if the marketing honchos ever got to you the way the did to me, leaving you embarrassed and fuming about their powers of manipulation.