 |
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
Fresh start ATP set to unveil new system in Y2K
Posted: Wednesday December 29, 1999 04:53 PM
LONDON (Reuters) -- Men's tennis crosses the threshold of the millennium fresh from a marketing make-over and fans will hear a lot about "the race" over the next few months. The rankings system has been revamped so every player starts the year at zero. Only the one who ends the annual race with the most points can call himself the world No. 1. Top players will now be expected to play in the nine most important ATP tournaments, a series renamed the Tennis Masters. These nine, plus the four Grand Slams, will be the core of a men's tennis year that will build to a climax when the best eight players of the year come together for the end-of-season Tennis Masters Cup. The main thrust of the new strategy is to streamline the professional game, make it more understandable for fans and rekindle the excitement engendered by the rivalries between McEnroe, Borg, Lendl, Becker and Edberg. "Tennis is going to have a more colorful, exciting, clear look and presentation in the 21st century," says Mark Miles, boss of the men's ATP Tour. In the closing years of the 20th century, women's tennis overshadowed its men's equivalent thanks to the exploits of Martina Hingis, the Williams sisters and Steffi Graf. Andre Agassi's extraordinary recovery in 1999, culminating in his French and U.S. Open titles, redressed the balance. But the men's game, dominated by American Pete Sampras for several years, still lacks the characters of the women's tour and too often the best male players, be it through injury or loss of form, fail to contest the major finals. Before this year's Wimbledon final, Sampras had met Agassi in a final only once in more than three years and the two had contested only three Grand Slam finals since 1989. Todd Martin, ranked seventh in the world, made the ATP Tour World Championship this year after playing only three of the other seven players during the course of the whole season. "I think the players, the top players in particular, are going to be eager to have more of a chance to get at each other and the world will notice when they do that," Miles says. Rankings will be based on 18 performances: the four Grand Slams, the nine Tennis Masters Series and their best five results in other tournaments. If players miss a Tennis Masters tournament they will not be able to make up the missed points. Under the old rankings system, players were rated over a 12-month period. This threw up anomalies such as Yevgeny Kafelnikov becoming No. 1 in May after a run of six first round defeats, and Agassi taking over at the top the day after being thrashed by Sampras in the Wimbledon final. The Tennis Masters Cup amalgamates the end-of-season Grand Slam Cup and the ATP Tour World Championship after a ground-breaking agreement among the game's rival forces. The agreement to drop the Grand Slam Cup is the first major rapprochement between the ATP and the game's ruling body, the ITF, since the players' organization broke away in 1990 and signals a new era of cooperation, the ATP says. The two sides, and the officials who run the Grand Slam tournaments in Australia, France, Wimbledon and the United States, have agreed to a 'focused commitment" to avoid scheduling problems which often involve the Davis Cup team competition. "It is great achievement and very good for tennis in the long term," said Wimbledon's John Curry of the agreement. "You have to have some conflict to move things forward. This has been a duel and at last we have a conclusion." The catalyst for the changes to the men's game was a 1997 meeting called by the ATP Tour where five leading marketing and management firms gave their opinion of what was wrong. The message was that the game was seen as "elitist" and it had to update its image to have relevance in the modern sporting world and to attract new audiences. Wimbledon, with its tradition, all-white clothing and lack of court-side advertisements, still meant tennis to those not closely interested in the game. A follow-up survey by ISL, who have since signed a $1.2 billion marketing partnership with the ATP Tour, persuaded the ATP that the players, not individual tournaments and their sponsors, must become the crux of a new structure. "Elitist is maybe too strong but results showed that Wimbledon was still the image in most people's minds," says the ATP's Fran Michelman. "What we are trying to do now is to focus on the players and get the players' experiences, the intensity, out there through television." The ATP will try to build up rivalries between players as a part of what they call "hero-ing" the top performers, as happens in many North American sports. "For fans, the players are the most important part of the game," the ATP says. "Identifying with the players as people is an essential emotional element that keeps fans hooked." The ATP is taking over televising of the Tennis Masters Series and promises to make the game far more of a spectacle with coverage of all courts in the early rounds, 16 cameras on center court plus net and hand-held cameras.
The myriad sponsors will now be cut to 15 for the Tennis Masters Series, four of which have already signed up. Up to four more are expected to sign before the start of the 2000 season.
Copyright 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
| ||||||||||||||||||||
