![]() Clubs play in a competitive league with promotion and relegation, and they pay their players. #Relative obscurity meaning professional#The son of a former tennis professional from Chile and a German mother, Urrutia grew up in Berlin and was headed for a life of coaching tennis and playing for his club, TC 1899 Blau-Weiss Berlin. That meant Urrutia almost broke even that week. “The other guy gave it to me.”īut Urrutia did earn two ATP ranking points - Roger Federer received 2,000 for winning Wimbledon - and 400 euros (about $470) in prize money Federer earned $2.87 million for winning Wimbledon. “I didn’t take it,” he said while sitting in a lawn chair in bare feet at the TK Spoje club and casually retaping the handle of one of his rackets. After a recent victory in Prague, a fellow player congratulated him on taking a match against a frustrated opponent who made many critical errors. Laid back and refreshingly self-aware off the court, he is also realistic. Urrutia is typical of many players on the lower levels of the men’s tour who are desperately seeking a breakthrough. That is more than Urrutia has earned in his career ($25,967). Although he would survive the I.T.F.’s cutoff in the new system, he is still a long way from playing in the highly lucrative major tournaments like the United States Open, which begins this month and which will award $50,000 to first-round losers. There is a large group that are semiprofessional, and I don’t expect them to stay on the transition tour.”Īt 27, Urrutia is starting to play some of his best tennis, but he is ranked No. “But we want a distinct majors and minors with a clear pathway to the top, a realistic transition from the juniors to the ATP and WTA tours. “It is not up to me to determine who makes it and who doesn’t,” Dent said. is to continue to promote the sport globally so that there are still avenues to the top in places like Africa, Southeast Asia and South America. would continue to assess and possibly tweak the system to establish a major league and a minor league with a clear link between them. The remainder would play on the new Transition Tour, which would be restructured to favor promising young players through a new ranking system and to make it less costly. The plan is to funnel the top 750 men and 750 women into the Challenger Tour, where total prize money at each tournament would equal $25,000 or more. “These smaller tournaments have no TV, no sponsorships and no one paying any money to go see them, and they never will.” “That’s quite astonishing for a sport that has almost $300 million in prize money,” Dent said. It hopes to recategorize about 90 percent of the players into a more streamlined amateur structure, leaving players like Urrutia with some hope that they can soldier on, at least until the Darwinism of the rankings system spits them out. has decided to radically restructure the tour, beginning in 2019. At worst, it is a cynical charade of mediocre athletes playacting as tennis pros, vulnerable to corruption. “It’s a complete free-for-all at the lower levels of tennis,” Kris Dent, the I.T.F.’s senior executive director of professional tennis, said in an interview this summer.Īt best, the Futures Tour is a proving ground for elite prospects, a costly but potentially rewarding journey to fame. Such conditions create fertile grounds for stagnation, frustration, petulant behavior and match fixing. With professional tournaments aplenty in roughly 75 countries, and no age restrictions, thousands of players continue to enter hundreds of tournaments each year, despite the offer of very little prize money. But many just seem to keep playing, often with little realistic hope of reaching the top 100 or even the top 500. Theoretically, players should know by their mid-20s whether they can make it as pros. The tour was established to help young players navigate their way from the juniors to the top level of the professional ranks, the ATP Tour. The scene was made even more absurd because Groen is 49, a curious age for a player on a tour named Futures. “Another day on the tour,” Urrutia said with a shrug a few hours later. ![]()
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