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The
World Team Cup website was still advertising the 2011 edition in
Dusseldorf on Tuesday but the moving boxes will arrive soon to ship the
latest tournament out of Germany.

It follows the example of other tournaments over the past decade in
which Germany has turned from a tennis oasis into a desert.

Before the turn of the century, in 1999, 13 tournaments were played
in Germany largely due to the tennis boom created by superstars Boris
Becker and Steffi Graf: seven ATP events, five WTA tournaments plus the
money-laden Grand Slam Cup in Munich.

Winners in Germany included Serena Williams, her sister Venus and
then world number one Martina Hingis, while the top two 1999 men - Pete
Sampras and Marcelo Rios - were also successful on German soil.

The 2011 calendar will see a mere five tournaments, none them top
tier: the men in Munich, Hamburg, Halle and Stuttgart while the women
only have Stuttgart left.

Other licences have been sold or handed back over the years. The
World Team Cup was the latest after 33 editions since 1978 after title
sponsor Arag jumped ship and the city of Dusseldorf said it could not
come up with additional funds.

"The end of the World Team Cup is a big loss for the tennis location
Germany," said German tennis federation (DTB) chief Georg von Waldenfels
in the wake of Monday's announcement that the licence would be returned
to the ATP.

World Team Cup founding father Horst Klosterkemper said: "The
development (in tennis) is going against us over the last years.
Unfortunately Germany is out of the order in a negative way since the
heydays of Becker and Graf."

The Dusseldorf event which once attracted the likes of John McEnroe,
Sampras and Ivan Lendl struggled recently to get big-name players which
made it difficult to attract sponsors.

The icons Becker and Graf both retired in 1999 and no one has been
able to fill the void, with an absence of new stars leading to lesser
sponsor and television interest.

"The swing is enormous if a discipline has a boom on Germany. But it
is downhill as fast and steep as the rise," said the Sueddeutsche
Zeitung in a gloomy editorial on Tuesday titled "Goodbye tennis."

ATP chief Adam Helfant recently told the German Press Agency dpa that several factors must come together to ensure success.

"There are places that are perhaps not as strong as others. I
understand that Germany may be one of those places. Some of it comes
down to events, some of it to players. There have been great champions
from Germany," said Helfant.

"I wouldn't call it saturation. I know there have been times when
there has been more interest in tennis. That will come back when you
have the right combination of factors."

Germany has nine men and four women in the top 100 but none of them
is a household name. The best known player, Tommy Haas, has struggled
with injuries in recent years and now competes for the US on the tour.

Philipp Kohlschreiber is the best-ranked man at number 34. Andrea
Petkovic is the best woman placed 32nd, and the last German to win a
singles title, in July 2009 at Bad Gastein, Austria.

The current German generation has said on several occasions that home tournament are important to help local talent blossom.

But the Sueddeutsche Zeitung believes that the end of the line is yet
to be reached - given that four of the remaining tournaments each
depend on a big sponsor and the fifth (Hamburg) is run by the cash-
strapped national federation.

"The likelihood is very small that the World team Cup is the last
tournament that Germany will lose," the paper said on Tuesday.

الموضوع الاصلى : More German tennis gloom as World Team Cup leaves المصدر :منتدياتالأكام الكاتب: الأمير

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الموضوع الاصلى : More German tennis gloom as World Team Cup leaves المصدر :منتدياتالأكام الكاتب: الأمير