The ATP Tour: Ten Years of Superstar Tennis

Tennis has never known a decade like it. Soaring attendances, rocketing prize money, global television coverage and state-of-the-art, custom-designed tennis stadiums turned tennis into the most modern of professional sports. And while it had been set on this path since the advent of Open Tennis in 1968, it was the creation of the ATP Tour– a partnership between players from the Association of Tennis Professionals and tournament directors– that created liftoff and sent the men’s game into orbit. This is an action-packed record of those first ten years, studded with the exploits of some of the most famous names in sport– Pete Sampras, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, Andre Agassi, Patrick Rafter and many more. Appropriately for the world’s second most international sport, these superstars competed in every corner of the globe, jetting from Shanghai to Sydney and Moscow to Monte Carlo with a frequency that would leave many professional athletes breathless. Brilliantly illustrated with the work of some of the game’s leading photographers, this ten-year celebration of the men’s professional circuit is recorded through the words of such stars from the press box as Bud Collins of NBC television fame, Simon Barnes, award-winning columnist of the London Times , Peter Bodo of Tennis magazine, Alan Trengove, doyen of Australian tennis writers, the BBC’s John Barrett, Ron Atkin of the London Independent on Sunday and John Parsons of the London Daily Telegraph . From profiles of the decade’s top-ten title winners to articles on the Tour’s elite Super 9 events as well as detailed summaries of more than a hundred tournaments that have appeared on the Tour at some time or another during these ten memorable years, this volume brings you a close-up keepsake of men’s pro-tennis in the nineties.