If you go back several years to the times when tennis was still considered a royal sport and was limited for the elite few, the game was being played mostly on the grass courts and clay courts to a certain extent. There’s a reason why it is called ‘Lawn-Tennis’ which speaks for itself. Yet when we look at the way modern tennis is going, we see less and a smaller number of tournaments being played on the grass. Of course, the most prestigious and the biggest tournament and one of the four majors remain to be Wimbledon or commonly called SW19 (SW19 corresponds to the postcode of All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club). There are 65 major tennis tournaments played every year, out of which 23 are played on Clay courts, and the majority that is 35 tournaments take place on hard courts. Yes, this data was collected a few years back, now the number has gone up to 11 for grass including the ATP and the WTA tour, which is a positive sign. Let’s look into some of the factors which explain the scenario in a better way:
Maintenance and cost
Maintenance plays a huge role as to why more and more academies aren’t preferring the grass. Some of the best grass-court surfaces aren’t made from 100% natural grass anymore but mainly are a mixture of creeping red fescue and natural ryegrass. The proportion is mainly 70% in favor of the ryegrass and the rest of it is mixed with the red fescue. The weather obviously plays a huge role in maintaining the above-mentioned proportions. These kinds of perfect conditions can only be achieved during the summer season when the weather is quite dry and hot, which plays as an ideal foil for the grass to grow. For the same reason, the professional grass-court season is mostly played out between June and July when the European summer is at its beginning. In winter, maintaining the quality becomes very difficult, which is the reason we have an extended indoor hard-court season across Europe and China during October and December.
The costs involved in maintaining the grass are huge as compared with the hard courts, plus the kind of labor involved to maintain it on daily basis, to bring in the equipment to maintain the court, all of these factors go against the grass courts if we think about taking the game forward globally, and does not make them a sustainable option.
Playing style and surface analysis
Generally, the grass is one of the fastest tennis surfaces in the world. That’s the main reason the players whose game is more adapted to fast-paced tennis and who prefer to serve and volley rather than hang back at the baseline, usually succeed more. Which explains the difference between two of the most decorated athletes of the modern game in Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Federer who built his game idolizing more of a net-friendly game which suits the SW19 surfaces as compared with Nadal, who has embodied more of a rugged, warrior-like image, standing behind the baseline and belting shot after shot. Yes, you could argue that it worked for him initially against Federer (reminding us of the 2008 epic Wimbledon final), but if you look at the overall record, Rafa has been able to adapt his game too much slower surfaces and Federer and Djokovic have always preferred faster surfaces. Overall, grass benefits very few people in the world, and there are not enough tournaments between clay and grass, which can help the players to adapt to the surface. The uneven bounce of the ball can cause a lot of trouble for those who don’t adapt and very often, we see a lot of injuries to players cometh the second week of Wimbledon.
If you ask the players, they obviously love coming to Wimbledon and competing in front of the prestigious British crowd. But, playing-wise, a lot of them find it challenging to find consistent answers over a period of best of 5-sets. It’s a place where big servers like Raonic, Cilic, and Kevin Anderson have had their fairytale runs in the Wimbledon and some of the big names like a 3-time major winner Stan Wawrinka, who is yet to go past quarterfinals in the All-England Club.
Going Ahead
In simple words, having a greater number of grass courts is completely un-economical for the academy and club owners so it makes for a bad investment.
As the tournament on grass progresses, it makes it even harder to maintain the quality of the surface because the upper covering of the grass gets completely depleted and that leaves the soil beneath to let loose.
It was possible during the 70s because there was no scientific method involved and the game wasn’t as professional as it is today. The general speed of the game was very slow so there weren’t a lot of injury risks associated with it.
Though there aren’t many tournaments on grass, having a Masters 1000 on the surface wouldn’t be a bad idea for better preparation for Wimbledon. Maybe they could switch the status of the Queens Club Championships and promote it to being a Masters 1000? It could be a very small change but maybe it’ll be useful in some way in the longer run.
Maybe hard courts are going to be the future of tennis going forward and maybe that is the best way we can grow our sport and take it to new audiences. But one thing is for sure, Wimbledon and its famous strawberries aren’t leaving us anytime soon.