Masters 1000 events are really not important at all

Crisstti

Legend
Blue clay is the same clay died blue and a bit more slippery thats like me saying Djokovic's and Nadal's victory on hardcourt in Australia doesnt count because they won it on Plexicushion and not the original rebound ace. Atleast think before you post next time

It didn't play properly, as admitted by the organizers and the ATP. That's what people refer to, not the blue.
 

Towser83

G.O.A.T.
they have become important, but it's hard to compare to the 70s and 80s because the 9 masters system is very new relatively speaking. So you can only judge player's greatness based on masters results, with players from maybe the late 80s onwards. People even forget Lendl won 22 equivalent titles.

But masters are more relevant to the last 20 years than anything before. In terms of titles that have been recognised across the history of tennis, and when they acheived approximately their current level of importance we have

Wimbledon
US Open
RG


All recognised at current level throughout the vast history of tennis

WTF/Tennis master cup etc

Recognised at current level since early 70s

AO

Recognised at current level since late 80s/early 90s (probably being generous with this one)

Masters

Recognised at current level since mid 90s probably

Olympics

Recognised at current level in the last 2 to 3 events.

This is open for debate though, and individual masters events have been at their current level of prestige for longer than others, for example Rome, MC, Cinci
 
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Gizo

Legend
For many players, winning their home title (if it is an optional tournament and not a slam or masters series event) is probably also more important to them than winning a masters series title.

Finally winning the Basel title in 2006 was one of the proudest moments of his career and meant more to him than any of his masters series triumphs, and he was often happy to prioritise that tournament over Bercy.

Nadal is a member to tennis club at Barcelona and winning the title there seems to mean even more to him than winning the titles at Monte-Carlo or Rome. Moya finally winning a title in Spain at Barcelona in 2003 ranked as one of the proudest moments of his career.

I think Henman might even have willingly traded in his Bercy title in 2003 (despite the incredible run he had there that year) for a Queen's title (where he was a runner-up 3 times) on British soil.
 

timnz

Legend
What is 'Important'?

The OP's opening thread raises some questions:

'Masters 1000 events are really not important at all'

How do we establish what is important?

Is it

1/ The majority of what most tennis followers think?

Or

2/ What I think?

Or

3/ What objective evidence establishes?

Or

4/ What the established tennis authorities have laid out.


re. (1) when was the majority ever always right about anything? And it is very questionable whether the majority would agree with the idea of Masters not being important.

re. (2) That's fine if that what you think. But one can't extend that to being 'true' across the board. It is what you think.

re. (3) & (4) are somewhat similar. Objectively most of the top players contest the Masters 1000's. They contest them hard and as far as we can tell as focused on winning them. They view them as important. Not as important as Slams but still important. re (4). The ATP have deemed that the Master's 1000 events are as much as 1/2 of the points that you can win in a Slam. That's a lot. Hence, that establishes their importance.
 

Moose Malloy

G.O.A.T.
Federer from his peak till now 03-12 has missed MC 4 times.
Djokovic has missed MC last year.
Sampras played MC only 4 times.
Agassi played MC only 4 times.
Chang played only once in the 90's.
Courier played 3 times.

In the 90's the MC masters gathered the weakest draws in comparison to ANY other MS.

Most top ten players skipped it...

None of the masters series were mandatory in the 90s. sampras skipped a ton & never got 0 pointers, you can look it up at atp tennis. the fact that they offered more prize money & points made them big events, but they weren't nearly as big a deal as they are today(which makes it odd when so many compare career MS won by players, its not exactly an apples to apples comparison)

hamburg also didn't get many top 10 players in the 90s(like the year a qualifer won it)

some of the canadian open fields in the 90s were pretty weak as well(one year it was even held at the same time as another atp event)

think Henman might even have willingly traded in his Bercy title in 2003 (despite the incredible run he had there that year) for a Queen's title (where he was a runner-up 3 times) on British soil.

I don't think so, only one tournament was a big deal for British players to win. A MS was way bigger than Queens, esp from 2000 on.
 
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Gizo

Legend
^ Sure masters series events were bigger in status, but Henman living in London (although he wasn't born there) and not being able to win a grass court title in that city there was a pretty major source of frustration to him, and he often mentioned that in interviews. If he couldn't get the job done at the big W where he and his serve was never good enough, he would have loved to have at least win a Queen's title in front of the British public in his city of residence.

He even spoke about how great it was to finally win a title of some kind in London on the senior tour at Albert Hall last year. When Murray won his first Queen's title in 2009, the British media made a big deal about there finally being a British champion there for the first time since Bunny Austin. Plus Queen's is a tournament with a very long and rich history while Bercy only became big in the late 80s.

He did win a relatively minor British title at Brighton in 2000 (which in previous years had been a green clay tournament in Bournemouth), but that was his only career title in the UK.
 
Another idiotic thread from an idiotic poster.

Monte Carlo is so important it nearly had its masters status revoked. Now it's optional and guys like Federer/Djokovic often opt not to show up.
 
they have become important, but it's hard to compare to the 70s and 80s because the 9 masters system is very new relatively speaking. So you can only judge player's greatness based on masters results, with players from maybe the late 80s onwards. People even forget Lendl won 22 equivalent titles.

But masters are more relevant to the last 20 years than anything before. In terms of titles that have been recognised across the history of tennis, and when they acheived approximately their current level of importance we have

Wimbledon
US Open
RG


All recognised at current level throughout the vast history of tennis

WTF/Tennis master cup etc

Recognised at current level since early 70s

AO

Recognised at current level since late 80s/early 90s (probably being generous with this one)

Masters

Recognised at current level since mid 90s probably

Olympics

Recognised at current level in the last 2 to 3 events.

This is open for debate though, and individual masters events have been at their current level of prestige for longer than others, for example Rome, MC, Cinci

Ranking WTF ahead of AO is just ridiculous. Casual fans of tennis know what the AO is and understand that number of Grand Slam titles is the ultimate barometer of a player's greatness.

The WTF...unless you're a tennis fan, you don't even know what that is.
 
N

NadalDramaQueen

Guest
Ranking WTF ahead of AO is just ridiculous. Casual fans of tennis know what the AO is and understand that number of Grand Slam titles is the ultimate barometer of a player's greatness.

The WTF...unless you're a tennis fan, you don't even know what that is.

All he is saying is that there was a time when the WTF (or what evolved into the WTF) was more highly regarded by the players.
 

Towser83

G.O.A.T.
Ranking WTF ahead of AO is just ridiculous. Casual fans of tennis know what the AO is and understand that number of Grand Slam titles is the ultimate barometer of a player's greatness.

The WTF...unless you're a tennis fan, you don't even know what that is.

You're not reading what I said properly. I didn't rank it ahead, I'm looking at how long events have held the amount of prestige they currently hold.

The AO is MUCH more highly regarded these days than it was up to the late 80s.

The WTF, was regarded as highly as it is now even back in the 70s.

I'm not saying the WTF is better, but the AO has gained a lot of prestige where as the WTF has been on the level it is for longer. That level is not higher, but it's important to recognise the differences in eras.

Example, players in the 70s and 80s not winning the AO is not comparable to today's players not winning it, because it wasn't seen as a big deal back then. For the last 20 years or more the AO has been one of the big 4 tournaments, equal to the others, but back in the 70s/80s, it wasn't.
 
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Towser83

G.O.A.T.
All he is saying is that there was a time when the WTF (or what evolved into the WTF) was more highly regarded by the players.

pretty much yes.

To go further into detail, with the WTF, you go back to the 70s when it was new and it was as highly regarded as it is today - maybe more so. So comparing past winners to current winners is pretty fair.

With Wimbledon, RG and the US Open, again ypu can go back to the start of the open era and even further and they were as highly regarded as now.

But if you go back to the AO, even in the 80s it wasn't seen as highly as now, so comparisons between past players and current ones regarding the AO are not quite fair.

I brought this up because likewise, masters have become more important more recently. Even up to the mid 2000's a lot of players skipped masters more. But say Djokovic wins as many slams as Borg, you can't really use his masters record to "prove" he is better, because the importance of masters events is more recent.
 

10is

Professional
Ranking WTF ahead of AO is just ridiculous. Casual fans of tennis know what the AO is and understand that number of Grand Slam titles is the ultimate barometer of a player's greatness.

The WTF...unless you're a tennis fan, you don't even know what that is.

I doubt that would've been the case had the powers that be not tinkered with the name of the "Grand Prix/TWC/TMC/WTF" so many times.
 

benmarks1984

New User
So how would your system of halving the number of Masters and making the remainder identical to Slams (same draws, same duration, 5 sets matches, equal ranking points etc.) improve the present situation? There would then be 8 virtual Slams instead of 4 increasing the pressure on the players and a host of much smaller tournaments vying with each other to fit into the schedule and attract the top players.

I'm not suggesting big change here.Miami and Indian wells are nearly 2 weeks each as it is, then combine Madrid and Rome, and also Shanghai
And Paris. If you said to the top players your only required to play the 4 slams, 4 masters and end of year, but they could chose how Many 250/500 events they wish to play I think they would be happy with it. Your probably right smaller events may suffer but at the moment the 9 masters events dont mean enough, players don't think twice in skipping them, when Federer equalled the record of masters 1000 wins a while back he said afterwards the record meant nothing to him!
 

Enigma_87

Professional
None of the masters series were mandatory in the 90s. sampras skipped a ton & never got 0 pointers, you can look it up at atp tennis. the fact that they offered more prize money & points made them big events, but they weren't nearly as big a deal as they are today(which makes it odd when so many compare career MS won by players, its not exactly an apples to apples comparison)

hamburg also didn't get many top 10 players in the 90s(like the year a qualifer won it)

some of the canadian open fields in the 90s were pretty weak as well(one year it was even held at the same time as another atp event)

not saying otherwise. Hamburg was not regarded and attended high as well. Stockholm/Essen and Canada as well sometimes, yes but MC was the one event that had the weakest draws.

Sure the prize money drew the best players but that's the way to popularize the event and build legacy...
 
Yep, they suddenly become irrelevant when Nadal is clearly going to win the most Masters 1000 shields in world history (already tied for the most, 21 with Federer, and is 5 years younger).

aloeB.jpg
 

Sentinel

Bionic Poster
Nadal may be 5 years younger but physically Fed and Nadal are around the same age. For a 26 year old Rafa has been injured far too much. Unlike Fed who has only retired from 2 matches in his ATP career and the longest he was off was a couple of months with mono. All together, Rafa has probably taken a year and a half off the tour.

No, Sir. Considering that Fred has been playing throughout the year all these years, whereas Rafa has not, and has (as you say) taken 1.5 years off, Federer actually has more mileage on his body.
 

Sentinel

Bionic Poster
Ranking WTF ahead of AO is just ridiculous. Casual fans of tennis know what the AO is and understand that number of Grand Slam titles is the ultimate barometer of a player's greatness.

The WTF...unless you're a tennis fan, you don't even know what that is.

Just a point. You are using "casual tennis fans" in one sentence for AO, and non-tennis fans for WTF. Not really fair.

Non-tennis fans do not know of the WTF, but they hardly know how many slams there are, or about AO or who has won how many. Usually, they do know of Wimbledon. Of course, this depends on who these non-playing people are, and maybe which country you belong to.

Casual tennis fans is a bit difficult for me to pin down. Most of the people I play with don't follow the results too much.
 

Mainad

Bionic Poster
. Your probably right smaller events may suffer but at the moment the 9 masters events dont mean enough, players don't think twice in skipping them, when Federer equalled the record of masters 1000 wins a while back he said afterwards the record meant nothing to him!

Well, with the sole exception of MC, players can't just 'skip' them unless you are Federer who is allowed to skip one or two because of the number of matches he has already played in them. Otherwise you have to cite injury or some other recognised excuse. I think the main problem is that most of them eg. IW/Miami, Madrid/Rome and Canada/ Cincy are played back to back and inevitably there will be some players who are too tired to play both and so usually cite injury to get out of playing one. Shanghai and Paris often suffer from post-USO, end-of-season-I'm too tired/injured-to-play-them syndrome. This will probably get worse this year as, in addition to having the Olympics stuffed into this already crowded schedule, for the first time, Paris and the WTF will now be played back to back as well. That leaves just MC and Shanghai that are stand-alone. I'm willing to wager that if any of the Slams were played back-to-back you'd see more excuses and absences from some of them too! IMO, they need to avoid this back-to-back nonsense and allow the players some breathing space between tournaments.

As for Fed's comment, I suspect he doesn't much care about records he equals. He's only interested in records he sets! :wink:
 

BeHappy

Hall of Fame
I don't know why the ATP keeps trying to downgrade Mante Carlo. All the European and the South American countries and players love it.

I remember Nadal saying meaningfully "I love Monte Carlo and I want it to stay a masters" after he won it when that Disney Round Robin guy tried to downgrade it.
 
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