Last Go Round for the Acura Classic

The Acura classic will disappear from the U.S. after this year. Enjoy it while you can.

I’m at the Acura Classic for the first time. And the last time. The only WTA Tier One tournament on the tennis-mad West Coast has been sold back to the tour and may pop up somewhere else in the world.

It doesn’t look too good on the East Coast either. Charleston is no longer a required event and Amelia Island is getting downgraded to a B-Plus which will make it equivalent to a Tier III event. Matt Cronin of TennisReporters.net is the dean of journalists who cover the WTA. He doesn’t think Charleston and Amelia Island can survive more than a year or two because they’ll be selling a tournament that used to attract many of the top ten players and now they’ll be lucky to get a few players from the top twenty. What if the Los Angeles Dodgers dropped down to a triple AAA team? How many advertisers do you think they’d keep?

I’m staying at a local motel which means there’s a television screen staring at me when I wake up. I turned it on this morning and found myself watching Field of Dreams for the hundredth time. I wish it was as easy as building a tennis court in the middle of Iowa and summoning up the ghosts of Alice Marble, Althea Gibson and a few of their friends to get long snaking lines of vehicles headed towards tennis tournaments in the U.S.

Maybe we could go to Boston and kidnap Bud Collins instead of Terence Mann – the James Earl Jones character in the movie. I hear Bud has some time on his hands these days. Bud would be brave enough to walk out into the corn field with the ghosts of tennis past and find out what made tennis exciting.

But I’m not hearing any voices telling me what to do and no one would listen to Bud or me. Tournaments will continue to flow to the the new markets of Asia and Eastern Europe.

As sad as all of this is, I might as well enjoy the tournament while I can and that’s pretty easy. I’m at the beautiful La Costa Resort and Spa just north of San Diego. I can feel the sea breeze flow over me as I sip a cup of Starbucks on the veranda outside the media center. The veranda looks out over one of two 18-hole professional grade golf courses and I can stop in at Deepak Chopra’s clinic if my chakras need tuning. My second chakra is a bit out of whack, I can feel it. I think I’ll head over there later.

Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova and Martina Hingis are here and it’s just like old times. If you’d been here in 2001, you could have seen a doubles semifinal featuring Hingis and Anna Kournikova on one side of the net and Jennifer Capriati and Arantxa Sanchez Vicario on the other. You can bet no one left after the singles match that night. Thanks to Bill Simons of Inside Tennis for remembering that.

Venus beat Virginia Razzano easily today and after the match she said, “I think I’m playing actually better than Wimbledon.” WTA players should be afraid when they hear that. Very afraid.

Sharapova’s shoulder isn’t perfect yet but she didn’t have much trouble with Tamarine Tanasugarn either. Sharapova came out for the second set long before the chair umpire called time and bounced the ball impatiently while her opponent finished a bathroom break. She wanted to get the match over with.

I don’t know why she’s rushing so much, we’re in no hurry. We want to stretch this week out and push the skimpy U.S. tennis future to the back of our minds for as long as we can.


Check out our new myspace page page and add us to your friends network!