In the pass-fail world of professional tennis, top players often arrive in the fall season feeling down a break.

It has become a familiar refrain over the years — as familiar as a Vincent Price film festival during Halloween or a chorus of out of tune revelers stumbling through Auld Lang Syne as if navigating a lyrical obstacle course after the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. 

Ask top professional players for suggestions on improving tennis and many will supply the same answer:  shorten the season.

Former top-ranked players ranging from John McEnroe to Andre Agassi to Martina Navratilova to Serena Williams to Andy Roddick to Rafael Nadal have all advocated altering the current schedule to reduce recurring injuries many attribute to the rigors of a scheduled that stretches more than 11 months (on the men’s side) and provide pros a longer offseason for rest, recovery and training time.

Today in Shaghai, Roddick reiterated a theme he has raised in the past: if the ATP refuses to reduce the schedule, Roddick believes the Tour runs the risk of increasing player injuries and potentially shortening the span of competitors’ careers.

“I think it’s ridiculous to think that you have a professional sport that doesn’t have a legitimate off season to rest, get healthy, and then train,” Roddick told the media at a Shanghai press conference. “I just feel sooner or later that common sense has to prevail.”

Both World No. 1 Roger Federer, who became a first-time father to twin daughters Charlene Riva and Myla Rose
in July, and fourth-ranked Andy Murray are MIA from Shanghai this week.  Federer withdrew from the Asian
swing to “give my body a chance to rest, rehabilitate and fully recover from a physically challenging year.” Murray opted to skip Shanghai to continue to rest and rehab his sore left wrist.

They are the only two players in the top 10 who did not make the trip to Shanghai. However when autumn arrives the wear and tear from playing nearly 10 consecutive months of tennis combined with the physical and mental mileage players incur globe-trotting to continue their chase of the yellow ball between the white lines.

Nadal missed the 2008 Tennis Masters Cup Shanghai and the 2008 Davis Cup final with tendonitis in his knee.

A recurrence of the tendonitis prevented him from defending his Wimbledon title in June and sidelined him for two months. Both Nadal and his coach and uncle, Toni Nadal, have repeatedly said the lengthy schedule combined with the abundance of tournaments contested on hard court makes navigating the complete calendar unscathed a near mission impossible for players.

“It’s impossible to play 1st of January and finish 5th of December,” said Nadal. “It’s impossible to be here playing like what I did the last five years, playing a lot of matches and being all the time 100 percent without problems. I’ve been number one or two on the number of matches played. I was OK but sooner or later, it will be impossible.”

It presents a bit of a calendar catch-22 in that a Masters event like Shanghai pays a significant price for its status selling sponsors on the idea that the top players will participate and players reap the rewards of higher prize money by collectively agreeing to participate in the Masters events.

So why doesn’t the ATP just compress the calendar and conclude the season at the end of October — the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour’s final event, the season-ending Sony Ericsson Championships, ends on November 1st — to provide the players with nearly two months of offseason?

The two primary reasons are money and jobs.

Each tournament on the ATP calendar pays the Tour for its place and with both Tours eager to capitalize on the Asian market amid a slumping global economy, asking the ATP to commit to cutting its fall season is like asking players to agree to one serve and no on-court towel use during tournament play: they are unlikely to give it up willingly.

One of the most immediate challenges the ATP faces is recruiting a new global sponsor. Mercedes-Benz, which had served as an ATP sponsor since 1996, did not renew its sponsorship pact that expired last December 31st, and while the ATP has maintained since last September that it is “currently in discussions with a number of potential new sponsorship partners” securing a title sponsor in a sagging global economy may well prove to be problematic.  While you can argue the prospect of a shorter Tour may not be as attractive to a potential sponsor, the absence of top 10 players from autumn events is certainly no selling point either.

Then there’s the question of the ATP’s ultimate aim. While the most vocal players suggest the ATP has a responsibility to protect the players rather than potentially cannibalizing their careers by presenting a calendar that is unrealistically ambitious, the tournaments themselves have a significant voice in the ATP’s schedule structure.

The ATP itself has been transformed from strictly a player’s association, as it was when it was created, to a partnership between tournaments and players. Tournaments obviously want to protect their place on the current calendar and therefore do not place the same priority in cutting the calendar as top players do.

Additionally, more tournaments mean more jobs for players and players who are outside the top 50 (those are the same players who are not gaining automatic entry into Masters tournaments) generally favor more tournaments because it means more opportunity for them to win valuable prize money and ranking points.

Despite the disparate interests between the players and tournaments, clearly a schedule that spans 61 tournaments contested on six continents across nearly 12 months provides limited rest and recovery time for players, many of whom are already airborne once the holiday wrapping is removed from Christmas presents. It’s a schedule as inviting as the prospect of running a marathon in a series of 400-meter sprints.

The 2008 ATP season concluded last November 16th with the Tennis Masters Cup Shanghai final. This year, the season-ending event — the most lucrative ATP event — has been moved to London’s O2 Arena and the final day of play is set for November 29th. The ATP rationalizes the near two-week increase in length to the fact that the final will now be staged in the UK and since most of the top 10 players are European, it diminishes the travel time back home while theoretically ensuring greater coverage for a tournament that will now be played on favorable European time zones.

However, Roddick points out there doesn’t have to be a seismic shift in the schedule to create an offseason that rivals major American sports — he’s talking about trimming a few weeks rather than a couple of months — from the end of the calendar.

“We’ve tried to make our voice heard for a long time. And we end up finishing a little bit later now,” Roddick said. “I’m not talking about three months here, I’m talking about another two weeks. I’m not looking for an off season like other sports where it’s three, four months. I don’t think that works in tennis, especially where you have different parts of the world that want to see it.”

Well aware that players have been making the same persistent plea since the early 1980s, Roddick suggested players must create a common voice for negotiation if they are to enact change, but realizes the prospect of an implied strike is a losing public relations proposition.

“(A strike or boycott) is the last thing that anyone wants to do, but, you get pushed against a wall. I don’t think any of us wants to do that, because even more so than feeling a responsibility to the powers that be in tennis, we feel a responsibility to the fans,” Roddick said. “The last thing we want to do is cause something, let’s say, (at) the year end championships where, (if) you bag that, (it’s) the ATP tour’s biggest moneymaker.”

What exactly are the options players can pursue?

Collectively, the players need to decide if there is a unanimous or near-unanimous view on the issue or if it continues to be a request from top players who generally play deeper into draws and often face greater physical challenges as a result.

While top players — Roddick, Nadal, Federer and Novak Djokovic — have spoken out in the past about the importance of addressing the calendar, it’s uncertain if they speak for most of the top 50 or merely represent the elite player interest. If the demand for change exceeds the top 10 then there’s a greater chance of seeing it enacted.

Secondly, since cutting from the end of the calendar seems unlikely given Masters events in Shanghai and Paris and the debut of the season-ending event in London, can the Tour and Tennis Australia work together to start the season later in January?

At the start of this season, ATP Player Council president Federer proposed moving the season’s first major back a few weeks to create a longer lead-in time of Australian and Middle Eastern tournaments.

“I guess to fix the Australian Open problem, you know, having more tournaments beforehand it is to move it backwards a couple of weeks, so you have more of an Australian swing coming, and maybe also the middle eastern tournaments,” Federer said in Kooyong last January. “It would maybe better to have Doha and Abu Dhabi back-to-back instead of Doha and then coming back to the Middle East. So there are a whole lot of issues we are trying to solve.”

The problem is the Australian Open coincides with its nation school holiday and the height of the summer season Down Under. Understandably, Tennis Australia feels the Oz Open, which already has pushed its start time later in January, is sometimes unfairly targeted as the only major to make calendar changes whereas the other three majors have not made similar sacrifices.

Australian Open tournament director Craig Tiley said the subject has become a recurring theme for players and while Tennis Australia is “open to constructive suggestions,” Tiley said the TA has no plans to move the Open to a later date.

“Every year there is a discussion on the dates of the Australian Open. This is nothing new,” Tiley said during the 2009 Oz Open. “The Australian Open is at its most successful in its current position on the calendar. As usual, we are always open to constructive suggestions. But at this stage we have no plans to move dates.”

Some players believe the brief turnaround time from the start of the New Year to the beginning of the Australian Open poses a health hazard to players and creates withdrawals in Melbourne that do not occur as often at other majors.

“I think players need more attention because health is coming in the matter of question, really,” 2008 Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic said. “You have a lot of pull-outs (in Melbourne) and you don’t want to see that as a sponsor of the tournament or as a fan, that some of the top players in the top 10 are not coming to your events.  Tennis is by far the longest season in sport and I think we should do something about it in the future. But, still, it’s not only about the players. It’s about the tournaments. It’s about a lot of things. Hopefully we can make an agreement.”

While both the ATP and WTA Tours have worked to shorten the seasons, Djokovic said revising the calendar completely is not feasible.

“I don’t think you can change everything from the start, from the bottom, because it takes a lot of energy and work,” Djokovic said. “As I said, it’s not only about the players — tournaments — there is a lot of tradition and history everywhere around the world. The thing is that if you want to see the top players performing on the high level on every tournament, then we have to make an adjustable schedule.”

Australian Open tournament officials have asserted the need to shorten the tennis calendar by concluding the season earlier to give players a longer offseason and more recovery and training time before the travel Down Under. Injury and inadequate preparation have depleted draw in the past.

The proposal to revise the tennis calendar has been under consideration for years. Many players and tournament officials have endorsed the idea of shifting the Australian Open to a later start date and separating the end of Roland Garros and beginning of Wimbledon by more than the customary two weeks. As the schedule stands now, there is little continuity between the first three Slams of the season as the Australian Open typically starts three weeks after the New Year and is often played amid the oppressive heat of the Australian summer followed by a four-month break before the beginning of Roland Garros and the abrupt start of Wimbledon two weeks after the French Open concludes.

Since the possibility of moving the Melbourne major out of January seems remote — and even if the TA did agree to a move existing contractual commitments with tournaments, television networks and sponsors make a radical reconstruction of the schedule in the near future unlikely — then what recourse is left to the players?

Unless the majority of top 10 players agreed to collectively sit out one of the fall Masters tournaments to persuade the ATP to make a change, it’s likely going to continue to be business as usual. Players will have to put up with the nagging aches and pains that accompany the long season and be prepared to take the financial and ranking points hit by pulling out of late-season events to preserve their health and protect their bodies.

It’s not inconceivable that tennis, billed and sold as the game for a lifetime, compels players to consider the comeback as  a career path.

Nearly everyone in tennis — from fans to tournaments to media — love a good comeback story, which can infuse the sport with interest, buzz and new storylines that come from reviving familiar rivalries (not to mention the financial incentives for both players and tournaments).

In recent years, top-ranked women ranging from Serena Williams to Maria Sharapova to Kim Clijsters have taken time off only to make successful comebacks and former World No. 1 Justine Henin will launch her Grand Slam comeback in Australia next January.  Will we see that approach carry over to men’s tennis?

Is the mid-career break the antidote to burnout and the schedule breakthrough some have been seeking for years?