World Of Hurt

ABUNDANT POVERTY? Team of mavericks? Boneless ribs? As oxymora go, they have nothing on "tennis off-season." The sport has never been more physically demanding, the players more in need of repose. Yet the 2008 campaign that began the first week in January came to a close only last week with the ATP Masters Cup in Shanghai. Most players now have barely a month to regroup before the 2009 season commences.

One result of so little downtime: The tennis workforce has become the walking wounded. Rafael Nadal, the indefatigable Spaniard, is suffering from tendinitis in his right knee, which forced him to forgo the Masters Cup as well as next weekend's Davis Cup final against Argentina. (See, even when the season's over, it's not over.) Having already missed a big chunk of 2008 with neck and back injuries, Andy Roddick withdrew in Shanghai after spraining his right ankle during practice. Roger Federer slogged through his matches last week, slowed noticeably by back trouble as he bowed out in the quarterfinals.

The women's stars suffered too. The WTA's year-end championship, in Doha, Qatar, was won by a valiant Venus Williams—who prevailed over Vera Zvonareva in a third-set tiebreaker—but was marred by the withdrawals of Serena Williams (stomach muscle strain) and Ana Ivanovic (virus). Maria Sharapova, the leading light in the WTA cast, was a nonstarter, out since August with a rotator-cuff injury. "I think too much is asked of us, playing 11 months of the year," says Roddick. "At a certain point you would hope [the ATP] would start respecting [the players'] opinions a little bit more."

Both the ATP and the WTA have made changes, but they don't figure to be helpful. The number of required tournaments has been reduced by three, but the ranking system has been altered so that players are all but forced to enter more high-tier events. And if the on-court demands weren't onerous enough, tennis's global nature compounds the problem. As any business traveler knows, working in, say, Amsterdam one week, Dubai the next and Palm Springs the week after that exacts a physical price.

"I respect Andy's view," says Brad Drewett, the ATP International CEO. "But the board decided, [after] taking into account everyone's perspective, that this would be the best way forward."

Best for whom? The rash of injuries brought an anticlimactic end to an otherwise fine year for the sport. In 2008 Nadal proved he was no longer Salieri to Federer's Mozart and overtook the Swiss maestro in a spellbinding Wimbledon final to become the world's No. 1 player. Showing mettle he hadn't previously been called upon to demonstrate, Federer recovered to win the U.S. Open, continuing his assault on Mount Sampras with his 13th major title. The Nadal-Federer rivalry, arguably the most stirring in all of sports, still goes strong. The Williams sisters each won a Grand Slam title in 2008, confirming that—rankings be damned—even in their late 20s they are still the best in the business.

A number of other promising talents took star turns as well, not the least Andy Murray, a solemn Scot who wins with clever shot making rather than might-makes-right power, and third-ranked Novak Djokovic, a capricious Serb who relied mostly on accuracy to win the Masters Cup. Those two, both 21, threaten to turn Nadal-Federer into a Gang of Four in 2009. Provided, of course, all remain healthy—no small condition these days.

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