And it would be very welcome by the majority of tennis fans.
Schedule: all that would be required is for Wimbledon to start two weeks later than its current starting date. The new tournament would then start one week after the end of RG and it would end one week before the beginning of Wimbledon. So everything else (Queens etc.) could remain the same.
Location: it would be odd to have a Masters followed by Wimbledon right in the same city, so the new tournament should take place somewhere else in Europe. Germany looks like the ideal candidate, since they lost their Hamburg Masters a few years ago, and they have the best means to put something like this together. They could for example enhance their current facilities in Halle for such an event, or create a new site.
The tennis calendar would still remain heavily tilted toward hard courts, but it would but an improvement. Everybody finds the grass season much too short. A tournament like this would be the single most effective measure to improve the balance between surfaces.
The Shanghai masters could be made optional, so there would be a total of 10 Masters 1000, two of them optional.
1 Grass
3 Clay (1 optional)
5 Hard (1 optional)
1 Indoor Hard
Schedule: all that would be required is for Wimbledon to start two weeks later than its current starting date. The new tournament would then start one week after the end of RG and it would end one week before the beginning of Wimbledon. So everything else (Queens etc.) could remain the same.
Location: it would be odd to have a Masters followed by Wimbledon right in the same city, so the new tournament should take place somewhere else in Europe. Germany looks like the ideal candidate, since they lost their Hamburg Masters a few years ago, and they have the best means to put something like this together. They could for example enhance their current facilities in Halle for such an event, or create a new site.
The tennis calendar would still remain heavily tilted toward hard courts, but it would but an improvement. Everybody finds the grass season much too short. A tournament like this would be the single most effective measure to improve the balance between surfaces.
The Shanghai masters could be made optional, so there would be a total of 10 Masters 1000, two of them optional.
1 Grass
3 Clay (1 optional)
5 Hard (1 optional)
1 Indoor Hard