Whoa, nasty labor tactics in the usually civil world of international tennis.

The conflict started earlier this summer when the ATP announced that doubles matches will be played with no-ad games and five game sets starting in September. Also, beginning in 2008, only players in the singles main draw will be allowed to play doubles with two exceptions.

As you can imagine, doubles specialists are not happy about these changes. They are essentially being phased out of tournaments. At the US Open, a group of 45 doubles players announced that they have filed an antitrust suit against the ATP and the ATP’s board of directors.

The ATP Madrid Masters tournament has decided to retaliate by suspending the doubles competition until the suit is withdrawn or resolved. Since the tournament starts on October 17, the chances of the suit being resolved are close to nil. Therefore, unless the players drop the suit, they will lose out on a share of the $400,000 prize money and an opportunity to earn computer points to qualify for the year-end championships in November.

The tournament’s website states that “it [the players’ suit] makes no sense and therefore it is not coherent” for the tournament to offer a doubles competition because the doubles players are suing the ATP and the tournament is a member of the ATP. This is an interesting approach. You sue me and I fire you. Surely Europe has labor laws to cover such tactics. You have to think that the ATP is supporting, if not applauding, Madrid’s move because otherwise they would protest and we haven’t heard anything yet. It is an ATP sanctioned tournament, after all.

The October issue of Inside Tennis reports that Bob Bryan, he and his brother Mike are the defending champions in Madrid, called Patrice Dominguez, an ATP board member representing tournament directors, a “Hitler”. It also reports that Wayne Bryan, Bob and Mike’s father, described a DVD of the 2005 year end ATP highlights as “scrubbed clean like Stalin used to scrub clean the people he assassinated” because it didn’t include any doubles highlights.

Come on now, this is ATP doubles tennis where free-roaming, good-looking players get to make a lot of money playing in sun-filled stadiums, not the Gulag.

Come on now, this is ATP doubles tennis where free-roaming, good-looking players get to make a lot of money playing in sun-filled stadiums, not the Gulag.

Neither side is looking very good at the moment. Madrid seems to have taken the players’ suit as an excuse to drop doubles altogether supporting the players’ suspicion that this is the long-term goal of the new changes. Tournament directors complain that they lose money on the doubles competition.

The players have a problem because the issue is not politics, it’s economics. If your product isn’t selling, you’re gonna go out of business. If the players don’t propose an alternative, increase the number of exceptions, for instance, or settle for reduced prize money, they could be history.

I’d like to say that I’d miss them but I can’t remember the last time I watched an entire doubles match.