“I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say the seniors tour is necessary for the health of the game,” said Todd Martin in a reflective mood at the Royal Albert Hall in London. “But it is important to take tennis to places that the ATP and WTA tours can’t cover and to find ways of connecting with your audience. I think we manage to do that.”
Martin, the former U.S. Open finalist who lost to Andre Agassi in five sets in 1999, had just been beaten by the former Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanisevic in the final of the ATP Senior Masters event — the last of a year-long circuit that now encompasses 11 events with more to be added next year.
The tour is thriving on a lot of levels, not least because the former champions who choose to play have kept themselves in great shape and still play some pretty amazing tennis.
“That is the best Goran has ever served against me,” said Britain’s Tim Henman, who is not a man given to hyperbole. “The fast court helped him, but his speed and rhythm was amazing.”
But it is not just big serves that draw the kind of crowds we saw at the Albert Hall, where youngsters mingled with middle-aged tennis enthusiasts from middle Britain. They come to see a side of their former heroes they were never allowed to see before.
There are not many poker faces left on this tour. There is repartee across the net, and some of it is quite funny. When Ivanisevic held up the new balls for Martin to see midway through their ace-riddled final, Todd called out: “You don’t need those. You serve quite fast enough!”
Goran begged to differ. Holding the ball to his nose and taking a deep sniff, he shot back: “But I do! The smell! It’s wonderful. It gives me such a high!”
Then he promptly missed his first serve, and the crowd fell about laughing. The previous day, after he had beaten Patrick Rafter, the two-time U.S. Open champion, in a wonderful serve-and-volley encounter, 6-7, 7-6, 10-8, Ivanisevic told the crowd: “I saw Patrick eating a banana sandwich before the match. There’s no way I’m going to lose to a guy who eats banana sandwiches.”
Martin says that he loves the banter but acknowledges that he was in a minority during his time on the main tour.
“I needed a distraction, because I could always refocus,” he said. “But most players were afraid to lose their concentration. Pete Sampras would have a completely different public image if he could have a reacted to a few funny things that happened on court. Chris Evert has a great sense of humor, but she was always afraid to break concentration.”
Martin knows that players have to stay within their limits while trying to turn themselves into on-court comedians, because there is nothing worse than an unfunny person trying to be funny.
“We are used to the stage and enjoy performing,” he says. “But we know that Mansour Bahrami is the only one of us who is a better entertainer than he is a tennis player.”
Bahrami, the French-Iranian, is now renowned in France as a comedic performer whose juggling tennis skills are enough to turn him into a one-man show — or at least a double act with someone like Ilie Nastase.
But there is another question that needs to be answered. Why do ex-champions with plenty of money want to return to an arena that can never be as big as the one they used to adorn?
“It’s a good question, because 10 years ago I would have stated vehemently that I would never play senior tennis,” Martin said. “But then I got a call from Jim Courier, who runs his own senior circuit in the States, and halfway through my first match, I thought, ‘Gee, this is really good fun. I’m really enjoying this.’
"We are all competitors, and missing competition is certainly one reason why the unlikeliest people, like John McEnroe, have become stalwarts of the tour. John takes it very seriously, and I like that, because it is important for people to realize that we are all here to win. But it is also the camaraderie. We all travelled the world together for years, and it is great to sit with the guys here at the Albert Hall and talk about our lives. There are always hatchets to bury, but I was surprised when I came back to find them well and truly buried. People only remember the good times.”
And so the good times continue to roll. Courier’s Champions Tour, which this year held events in places like Boston, Tampa, Fla., and Charleston, S.C., will continue in 2011, while the Masters circuit — underwritten by the ATP — will have an American stop in Delray Beach, Fla., in February, where McEnroe, Rafter and the gang will be proving that old skills die hard.
