This started out as a comment on Matthew Debord's post: U.S. Open Tennis: The American Tennis Boom Was a Fluke, but Huffington Post said my comment was 47 words past their 250 word maximum, so I thought I'd post it here
I have been playing and covering tennis for a few years and have worked at many print and online publications. Tennis is always a forgotten about piece of the sports section puzzle. If you wanted to find a typo, broken link etc. on a sports site, jumping into the tennis area is usually a good bet. I think the heads of the WTA and ATP tour need to sit down in a room and analyze what made the NFL America's current National Pastime. They have a condensed product (16 regular season games, as opposed to the schedules of MLB, the NBA and NHL) so every game is an event.
While McEnroe is getting press this week for complaining about the roofless Arthur Ashe stadium, if you gave him a choice between that roof for free and a greatly reduced tournament schedule, I promise you he'd pick a shorter schedule. And this doesn't need to come (completely) at the expense of the smaller tournaments.
If the Grand Slams were held every year and, say, a dozen other tournaments were held every year, the ATP and WTA could then have certain smaller tournaments be played every other year so that each time it appears, it feels like more of an event. This is never going to happen. But if such a meeting were to occur, they could also study the NHL, which diluted its product through expansion and now finds itself basically having to pay NBC to show its games.
If there's a shorter schedule, you guarantee many positive outcomes: The best players meet each other more frequently; Players will not be lost to injury as frequently; Each tournament will more closely resemble a Grand Slam in its star power and thus make the events more compelling.
