The Tennis Player's Profile of the Third Millennium

If we gather some facts to analyze tennis in the last decades, it is possible to predict the player's profile in the future.

Regarding the physical aspect of the athletes, nevertheless nowadays we often talk about "power tennis", nothing indicates a change in the athlete's profile in the next millennium. This is because the physical aspect has always been a very important issue, as we see in the past when the matches used to be played in more than 5 hours since all men's tournaments used to have best-of-five-set matches. To reinforce such argument, I remember a match in Rio de Janeiro that the umpire stopped at three o'clock in the morning of the next day, because a tie of 51x51 persisted yet in the first set. None of the players had been successful to win 2 games in a roll to close that set. I also remember a doubles semifinal in Santos (São Paulo), in which Antenor Zuquetto and I beat Maneco Fernandes and Aírton Cunha in an unforgettable score of 16x14, 11x13, 11x9, 15x17 e 11x9, playing a total of 126 games in more than five and a half hours.

The big changes have happened, in fact, in the technological development of tennis equipment. It has been spectacular the quality improvement of racquets and strings, and also of tennis shoes. A few years ago racquets were made of wood, and men used to play with the heavy and medium weight wood racquets and women exclusively with the light ones. Today racquets are a lot lighter than the "light" wood ones of the past, and they also have a much superior power, spin generating, and control than the old ones. The new shoes, accordingly, have been designed to support the increase of ball speed.

We must also include on this list of great technological discovers the sensible quality improvement of tennis courts in general. In the past, grass and clay were the only court types accepted in official tournaments. Today synthetic hard court and carpet are becoming very common, because their surfaces are a lot more regular and they require a more sophisticated quality of players, consequently, providing a much higher game level than clay or grass. Although clay and grass court maintenance are a lot better today (also because of the technological development), they will continue to lose, in a game quality perspective, to synthetic hard court and carpet.

The foundation of ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) also caused huge changes in tennis history and the athletes' profile. Before its creation, the Wimbledon champion was considered the world's best tennis player. This scenario changed after the ATP instituted that a group of tournaments, which were played on different court types (fast and slow), would count points for each tennis player, creating then a large ranking that would change with each match played. This new rule promoted the baseline tennis style because it permitted the players to choose a circuit that would best fit their game. However, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the world's best must develop an all-around game style, winning on faster and slower courts.

Another fact that has caused significant changes in tennis is the TV coverage in sports events, raising the interest of huge audiences for tennis tournaments, but requiring certain adaptations due to the expensive time of media use. The following adaptations have taken place since its appearance: a) the average match time has shortened with the adoption of the tie-break; b) almost all international tournaments are now played in best-of-three-set matches; c) we are recently experimenting a no-let rule for the serve - and I personally suggest that a let should be considered a fault for first or second serve; d) we are also experimenting the system of "sudden death", in which the player who wins the point at deuce wins the game. For these reasons, the number of tournaments in the international circuit has increased, making tennis a sport that involves a huge amount of money prizes, and thus influencing more and more athletes to improve their technique in order to achieve perfection.

There are still some championships that resist the media requirements, such as the tradition of the biggest international tournaments known as the Grand Slam circuit (Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon and US Open) and the Davis Cup, which are still adopting the best-of-five-set rule to all their matches. However, this slow system, which takes in excess a TV time schedule, will be eventually surpassed because it is also unhealthy for the competitors. Their efforts on these kinds of tournaments - that require a lot more energy than the average - can provoke constant injuries, which will consequently take them off the courts for a long period.

All these changes have produced, up to now, two very distinct characteristics to the profile of today's tennis player, being easy to realize that one group of players adopt the serve-and-volley style and the other group adopt the baseline style. Although, since the ATP's institution for those ranking rules, the efforts of serve-and-volley players to win on slower courts and the efforts of baseliners to win on faster courts are becoming more and more common. Yet, in sports history man is gradually breaking records, surpassing his limits in an unbelievable way. That is why we will see, in a intermediate term, the appearance of new talents who will have outstanding performances on faster courts as well as slower. We don't need to know much in order to realize that the next millennium will be the era of this kind of player, for such performance is tremendously obvious to prevail due to man's characteristics. For being so predictable, man lives eternally in search for excelling himself.