By Richard Osborn

?INSIDE TENNIS: Sally Jenkins penned the infamous 1993 Sports Illustrated cover story that asked “Is Tennis Dying?” More recently, in The Washington Post, she wrote another postmortem for the game that claimed “Tennis is dead. It has been dead before, but at the moment it’s dead without precedent. Combine aloof players with basic business errors, and what you have is a sport with no heartbeat...Matches are generic, strokes homogenized, with fewer interesting contrasts in styles...Tennis has slowly but surely dislocated its audience...It has squandered its star power, its history and its tradition.”
JIM COURIER: Where was Sally during the U.S. Open when tennis was so alive and took over New York City? The media capital of the world was completely spellbound by tennis. Tennis is healthy when it has rivalries. Right now, we have a player without peer on the men’s side in Federer. We’ve never seen tennis like this. If tennis is dying, then who is Roger Federer? That guy is so alive, so vibrant. Let’s go to court. Sally, you present your case, I’ll present mine. I don’t disagree with her that there have been some bad business practices and tennis has suffered as a result, but look at the star power of tennis. Look at Rafael Nadal or Lleyton Hewitt. The Australian Open final was the highest-rated TV show of the past 52 weeks in Australia. You’re telling me tennis is dead? Maybe it’s dead in her house, but it’s not dead around the world.
TODD MARTIN: It just so happens that she’s fallen out of love with the sport. There are lots of people who have. But there are also lots of people who are falling in love with it. It’s a matter of getting more of those and less of the others. In some ways, yes, the sport can go in a better direction. In others, it’s going very much in the right direction.
IT: How about a European perspective, Goran.
GORAN IVANISEVIC: What’s happening with Nadal is great for tennis. Never in the history of Spanish sports were there so many [TV] viewers watching than during the French Open final. It was bigger than Formula 1, bigger than football. That never happens because in Europe football is the biggest. Now Nadal is the biggest thing in Spain. It’s incredible. Tennis isn’t dead. It’s very healthy.
IT: What about doubles? Mats, you won the ‘86 Wimbledon title. Goran, you were twice a French Open finalist. Jim, you won Rome with Sampras in ‘89. Todd, you were a Davis Cup hero. What’s your reaction to all the ATP doubles changes?
MATS WILANDER: They’re not giving doubles a chance. Ninety percent of the people who play tennis play doubles. These are the people who make the sport go around. Kids play it. People who are 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 — they play doubles. Make something happen. [The ATP] should tell them, “You’ve got to play doubles. You don’t have a choice. You play 10 events.” Just like they make them play 15 events to be part of the ATP Tour, you make them play 10 doubles tournaments. Do that or cancel it. There’s no in between. Now we’re in between. Doubles has to be part of tennis.
COURIER: The tournament directors say, “On my profit and loss, doubles is killing me. People are not buying tickets to see doubles, and I’ve got to put guys in hotels, feed them and drive them around. I’m not adding to my bottom line.” That’s a business decision. How do doubles players change that? Mark Knowles is a very good doubles player and my best friend. We have lots of conversations about this. I don’t agree with them suing. That was the wrong way to go about it. But that’s how they proceeded, so here we are. What they’ve now become aware of is that they need to figure out a way to help the tournament directors if they want to keep their jobs. How do you do that? The doubles-only players should do mandatory pro-ams. Give the sponsors a reason to want to pay your salary. They need to implement it yesterday. It’s got to happen, because if you don’t reach out to the sponsors, you’re not selling tickets. People will stay to see doubles; they will not pay to see doubles.
MARTIN: This is an opportunity for tournament directors to take the bull by the horns and generate something for the sport. It’s not going to pay off for them today or tomorrow, but it might pay off in a few years. Whether you shrink the draws or not, you have several guys on site all week who have little to do. As tennis players, most of our time was spent trying to pass time to the next competition, the next practice, the next meal. Fill that time. Like Jim said, it’s a matter of value. Send the players out to the schools. Send them wherever people are. Introduce them to the world. It’s good for the players, it’s good for the game. Eventually, it’s going to be good for the tournament.
COURIER: These players could be grassroots ambassadors. But the second part of the equation is making it easier for the top singles players to play. Then the fans become more interested; then your product is better. You play two sets and a super-tiebreaker so you know that match isn’t going to last more than an hour and a half. The top players can look at it as an opportunity to work on their volleys, on their returns. “It’s good practice, but it’s not going to take gas out of my tank for my singles match tomorrow.”
MARTIN: Which has eight times as much money riding on it.
WILANDER: Doubles has to be around. Goran is a perfect example. There’s no way he would have won Wimbledon in 2001 without having played doubles. After being injured, he basically quit playing. He wouldn’t have won unless he had this depth, this knowledge of the game. For somebody like Nadal, his game isn’t wide enough without doubles. John McEnroe would never have been John McEnroe without doubles because he didn’t practice. Doubles was his practice. Doubles needs to be around because one coach will get his player to play doubles, and that player will be much more solid. But Federer doesn’t have to play doubles. Lleyton rarely plays doubles.
COURIER: When he does, he wins.
WILANDER: But doubles has to be there for the guy who wants to play. We have to keep it around.
COURIER: Todd hits it right — it’s an opportunity. People need to look at all the areas of how they can make this better not only for themselves, but for tennis. Yes, it’s about jobs, but I’m telling you, if these guys stay on this course, there won’t be any jobs for them to worry about.
MARTIN: What Mats said addresses some of Sally’s complaints — the homogenization of the game, the strokes...
COURIER: She’s not watching tennis.
MARTIN: She isn’t, but there’s going to be more variety to everyone’s game if doubles is out there.
IT: The serve-and-volley game?
MARTIN: Not only that, it’s another way to defend and offend. It teaches you more about the dimensions of the court and how to construct shots that are necessary in certain situations. You can’t replace it.
IT: Let’s talk about a guy named Roger Federer. Goran and Todd, you guys played him [they were a combined 0-3 against Federer]. What makes him so potent?
IVANISEVIC: He’s a natural talent. He can play on any surface. He really doesn’t have any weaknesses. Maybe his second serve could improve, his volleys. But in certain situations, you think it’s impossible for him to hit a winner, but he does. He finds solutions better than others. He’s two steps in front of everybody. There’s no competition. He’s too good. He’s better than everybody.

IT: Roger versus Pete. Who wins on a medium hard court in their prime?
IVANISEVIC: It’s a five-set match. Pete had a better serve, better volleys. Federer has the better forehand, better backhand. It’s a great match.
IT: Mats, as you discovered in ‘88 when you won three of four majors, no matter how great your game is, winning the calendar-year Grand Slam is a daunting task. Does Roger have what it takes to do it?
WILANDER: Yes. I’m surprised he hasn’t, actually. Once he figures out how to win the French Open, he’ll do it. He should win the French. He grew up on clay. Something has told him that he’s not solid enough on one side and he doesn’t have the patience. He’s perfectly capable of doing it. You’ve got to be defensive and wait for the opportunity to do something with the ball. He tends to react to the situation. On clay, you need to think a couple of shots ahead. Roger’s secret is that he could think a few shots ahead, but he doesn’t. He’s more of a reactionary player. He’s so smart because he comes up with a solution so quickly. He’s not playing a couple of slices. It’s [demonstrating Federer’s strokes] “This has to go here. This needs to go there.” That’s not good enough on clay. Once he figures out that he needs to play a month on clay before the French, whew... He was very close this year but played a s—tty match against Nadal in the quarters [losing 6-3, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3]. There is a big difference on clay, but it’s there for the taking. If he wins the French Open within the next two years, we’ll have the first Grand Slam since Rod Laver.
IT: Todd, you’ve worked with Mardy Fish, so you know the importance of coaching. Does it say that much more about Roger that he’s been able to do all he’s done largely without a coach?
MARTIN: With most of us, what happened early in our careers matters as much as anything. Roger had a very good foundation laid for him. He’s a natural talent. He sees the game differently than all the other players, sees it more like the guys of yesteryear. He was obviously taught very well. Whether he’s got somebody with him or not, he understands the game. It’s not that big of a deal that he doesn’t have somebody playing the puppeteer role.
IT: As the Mark Miles era comes to an end, where does he score on a scale of 1 to 10?
IVANISEVIC: Zero. Below zero.
IT: Because...
IVANISEVIC: He was bad for tennis. He didn’t do anything good for tennis. I don’t like him. With me, especially, he did a bad thing. Blackmail, I can say, because I was the first player ever suspended for two months [a series of fines resulted in his 1994 suspension, causing him to miss the Hopman Cup]. You get fined $10,000, you get another $10,000, then you get suspended. Agassi did the same thing two months after me in Memphis. He was an American, No. 1, so they didn’t suspend him. I was No. 4. Mark and I had a conversation. I said, “Come on — I miss four tournaments. This is very important.” He said, “Listen, you can’t play.” Plus, all the things with doping. I think there were a lot of guys caught, but they didn’t release the names.
MARTIN: I have to disagree.
IVANISEVIC: For me, he did nothing.
MARTIN: When it comes to doping, Mark had no control to cover up. That’s a fact. I can understand why people feel it’s the case, because there are guys who go through changes physically that don’t seem natural. But that’s certainly not the executive staff at the ATP.
IT: So what’s your score, Todd?
MARTIN: I’d like to hear a couple of other scores before I give mine. [Laughs.]
COURIER: I’ve never walked a mile in the executive’s role, so I don’t really know what the blind spots are. My vision has nothing to do with Mark as a person. I’ve always gotten along with him well and respect him. With me, he’s never been anything but straightforward. He’s a personable guy. Having said that, look at his record, at how things were under his watch. When you look at tennis from my American viewpoint, a lot of important events left the U.S. and went overseas. The marketing of the tour could have been managed better. Mark has many strengths. I don’t think marketing is one of them. I would give him a five, because I know he’s passionate. He tried to put through many initiatives that were turned away because of other people. Ultimately, he didn’t have control of the entire sport. He was the ATP CEO, not the Lord of Tennis. I’d love to walk a mile in those shoes, because I bet it’s a lot harder than all of us imagine.
IT: You got a number yet, Todd?
MARTIN: Somewhere between a seven and an eight.
IT: His stock is rising.
MARTIN: It’s hard not to go up from Goran.
WILANDER: He didn’t even give him a zero — it was below zero.
IVANISEVIC: He was freezing, a refrigerator. [Laughs.]
MARTIN: Jim touched on something very important. Mark was not the commissioner. Mark was the CEO. He had a board that he was directed by. Not every decision could be looked at as being his fault or his success. He made a lot of decisions. Whether they ended up being good for the sport is debatable, but his heart was in the right place. He’s a smart man, and where he lacked, like Jim said, in marketing, he made up for in others. He left the tour with, if not with a momentum, in a state where whoever came in next wouldn’t have to drop a bomb on it to start over.
COURIER: Ultimately, his particular role is that of a visionary. You can have nuts-and-bolts business people who can manage a staff and keep the machine moving, but at some point, if you want to grow a sport, you need a visionary. That’s what the job is crying for.
IT: Mats, you were the agent provocateur when the players broke away from the MTC Grand Prix to establish the ATP Tour in 1990. How far have we come?
WILANDER: We’re really talking about a game that’s only 15 years old. We’re not talking about the PGA, NBA, NHL or NFL. We were trying to do something to tennis to make it different. We were trying to get away from the classic, all-white, upper-class sport. We tried everything. We tried music during changeovers. We tried to make it more “Agassi”, what Agassi was about — rebellion. It was hard for Mark. But Todd’s right — the momentum is there. Tennis is back to its classic standards. You have some warriors out there. You’ve got Nadal, Hewitt, Federer. You’ve got good guys at the top and they’re likeable. I hate to say it, but we don’t need a bad guy for tennis to be a big sport — like McEnroe or Connors. It’s a sport for good kids with a lot of personality. Does that have anything to do with Mark Miles? Yes, of course. It’s such a new sport that it’s hard to give him a score. I couldn’t. Tennis certainly isn’t run by the federations anymore. We could still be stuck in that time warp, but we’re not. We’re going somewhere else. Overall, the ATP is better off than it was in ‘90 — I’ll tell you that much.
MARTIN: I’d like to take my score away and just reiterate what Mats said. Ditto. [Laughs.]
COURIER: I’ll throw one more in there — the players need a union. We need a separation of church and state.
IT: The ATP is supposed to be the players’ union. It’s the Association of Tennis Professionals.
MARTIN: It’s not.
COURIER: I don’t like a scenario where players can sue their own union because they feel like they’re being misrepresented. There needs to be some separation there. That’s my outsider’s perspective.
IT: Goran earlier touched on doping. The Argentines seem to be testing positive for performance-enhancing substances on a regular basis. How do we address this problem in order to avoid a situation like Major League Baseball is now mired in?
MARTIN: The reason Major League Baseball is on the front page is because they were allowed to be on steroids all these years.
COURIER: Baseball records have an asterisk because they closed one eye and allowed players to juice and to obliterate long-standing, cherished records. They’ll never be able to erase that asterisk. It will always be there.
MARTIN: Guillermo Canas has a huge black eye right now, but the sport took only a glancing blow, because 99 percent of the Olympic testing program is in place. Of the major pro sports, tennis’ is by far the strongest. As long as we have that, there are going to be guys who test positive because they didn’t show their card of banned substances to their doctor when they were being treated for something like an asthma attack, which is what happened to Mariano Puerta. There are going to be those cases. It’s going to hurt the individual, but not the game.
COURIER: We police the game aggressively, and that’s the best you can do. In some respects, it’s a positive that we have had some players test positive, because it sends the word out to the world that we are policing the sport.
IVANISEVIC: They were testing us eight or nine times a year. I didn’t mind. But when [Guillermo] Coria was caught, he was suspended, but didn’t lose any points. He came back at the same ranking. That was a mistake. They should take all the points away and start over. He couldn’t play nine tournaments, but he didn’t care. The clay-court season started and he was back. After two months, he was top 10. In other sports, if you’re caught, you’re gone — one year, two years. But in tennis, they don’t know what to do yet. If they get Puerta again, he should be suspended for life.