More German tennis gloom as World Team Cup leaves (News Feature)

By John Bagratuni Dec 14, 2010, 14:28 GMT

Berlin - 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.

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