Are players wearing themselves out because they’re greedy or is the tour asking too much of them?

Further proving that Roger Federer should one day run for political office, he issued the following statement on his website last week:

2008 has been a tough year for me as I was always playing catch up after being diagnosed with mononucleosis at the beginning of the year. I feel fortunate to be healthy again, but I want to remain at the top of the game for many more years to come and go after the #1 ranking again. In order to do that, I need to get a proper rest and get strong again so that I am 100% fit for the remainder of the year or next year. At this point, I am not sure when I will be ready to play again, but I hope to be back at some point before the end of the year.

True to the tradition of standard political disclosure, this statement says everything and nothing. It hints at the possibility that Roger will skip the rest of the tour schedule or, at the very least, a large part of it. He scheduled himself to play Stockholm, Madrid, Basel, and Paris, and now he might not play any of them. So wha’ happened?

His statement says that he’s “healthy again” but he’s not 100% fit. We’ve been hearing that “healthy again” part all year and he may have believed it himself else he wouldn’t have entered four tournaments in four weeks. But clearly his viral levels are preventing him from playing the fall session of the tour schedule.

Mario Ancic suffered from mononucleosis last year and he had a relapse this summer, and now we learn that Vera Zvonareva had the same problem. I saw her play in the 2004 year end championships – the last time they were held in Los Angeles – then she dropped off the map and I always wondered what happened to her. In 2006 she learned that she’d had mono for some time and it took her a year and a half to recover and two years to feel good again.

I’ll throw one more thing into the pot before I get to the main question today. In case you were wondering if pro tennis players travel too much, Agnieszka Radwanska didn’t play in this week’s WTA event in Moscow because Russian authorities wouldn’t let her in the country. Why not? There was no space in her passport for a visa because all the pages were filled up! That’s a big deal for her. She’s currently number 10 in the rankings and it could mean the difference between making the year end championships or not.

So, should the pro tennis tour have required events? Or, to put it another way, do required events ease the players’ workload or add to it?

Masters Series events were designed to make it easier for tour players because their workload was clearly delineated. ATP rankings points tally up the results of the four grand slams, nine Masters Series events, and the five best results at lower level tournaments. That’s 18 tournaments and 24 weeks of work on three continents.

That’s a pretty cushy job if you think about it, so is player greed to blame for everyone getting worn out? Partially. Players fly off to Dubai before coming to the US for Indian Wells and Miami because Dubai pays far more than other optional events. Federer had lucrative Asian exhibitions planned this fall in his very short off-season.

But a players’ job is to chase the rankings and you can’t afford to skip parts of the tour schedule and expect your ranking to stay steady. That means filling up passports: an early season fling in Australia followed by a trip to South America for the spring clay court season or, alternatively, the spring indoor season in Europe or the US, a quick stop off in Dubai on the way to Masters Series events in the US, the European clay court season followed by the European grass court season, the summer hard court season in the US, the fall indoor season in Asia, and then back to Europe for the end of the season. That’s seven seasons with a few side trips thrown in.

The players dropped the ball when they let Etienne de Villiers trade the Masters Series event in Hamburg for a fall Masters Series event in Shanghai. They fired their player representatives on the ATP Board of Directors but by then it was too late. A required event in Shanghai all but made a fall trip to Asia mandatory.

Notice that there will be one less required event next year because Monte Carlo is no longer required, but so what if it means a trip to another continent? The problem isn’t that Shanghai is required but where it is, and it’ll be interesting to see if de Villiers did a good thing by spreading tournaments all over the damn place. Did he insulate the tour against the current financial crisis by diversifying its portfolio, so to speak, to Asia? Or did he spread it so thin that his main product – the players – will be too tired to turn up at required events? Some of them are already too tired as it is.