Missing: Tennis indoor season.

Missing: Tennis indoor season
Missing since mid 2000s. Fast, fun and attractive part of tennis season much missed by tennis fans. Please send any information of whereabouts to…..

The tennis indoor season was once an unmissable part of the tennis calender. It meant something. Being good indoors was a vital part of the legacy of players of the likes of Lendl, McEnroe, Sampras, Edberg, Becker, Federer, too. On the women’s side Navratilova, Evert, Graf and Hingis all thrived on the surface.

It seperated the great from the good in many ways. Being great indoors meant being a great tennis player in the classic sense. Indoors rewarded aggressive minded players with touch at the net and the ability to do something sudden and surprising to catch your opponent off guard. Indoors, such players could show off their skills against more pedestrian tennis talents.

Tournaments on the ATP such as Stuttgart and Essen had five set finals that saw classic matches of the ilk of Becker and Sampras in the mid 90s, exciting precursors to the WTF. The women had Linz, Zurich and Phildelphia before the 16 player draw YEC in NYC. The top players turned up, crowds piled in and it all added up to a season finale that made sense.

That has all changed now. The season has got more brutal, the surfaces are homogenized with matches taking longer than ever, the media pressure at the top is a beast of a circus, and by the time the US Open is done, so are most of the players.

A short trip to Asia followed by the damp squib that is the European season, where the courts are likened to blue clay rather than the ice-rinks of the 90s, is anything but an enticing prospect to the already rich and well fed tennis stars of the 2000s. Top players don’t show up and most of those that do, conditioned to baseline slugging the rest of the season, don’t know how to play on the slow but still fast for post-modern tennis surface.

Had it not been for Djokovic working out that some net approaches here and there would allow him to go a 22 match winning streak and Serena just being so much better than the rest anyway, this year’s indoor season would have been a disaster. Thanks to those two we at least have the suspense of whether Djokovic will go on a similar tear in his beloved Melbourne and North American hardcourts and whether or not Serena will fulfill her potential as the Greatest player of all time on the women’s side.

But it would be much better if we were left to discuss those great indoor finals or which player is the greatest indoors. It would be better if the indoor season made sense, say it were located in one geographical region and the end tournaments were 32 player draws and the players cared. But that is not going to happen in a sport that year after year puts money before tennis and each year a little piece of its soul goes missing, just as the indoor season has.