Taylor Fritz breaks ranks over controversial Masters 1000 format for one key reason
Taylor Fritz has gone against the grain and pointed out a positive side of the extended Masters 1000 tournaments.
In recent years, virtually every Masters event, bar Monte Carlo, has stretched into a second week, with some not that much shorter than a two-week long Grand Slam.
While that has generally led to an increase in prize money for players, an already overstuffed ATP Tour calendar continues to get longer, meaning a reduced off-season.
As the sport gets increasingly more physical – as injuries crop up left, right, and centre – players should be getting more time off and not less. The likes of Alexander Zverev and Stefanos Tsitsipas have come out against these lengthier tournaments, with the latter describing it as “inhumane”.
However, as Fritz tries to manage his knee tendonitis, he believes that having a day off between matches will allow him to recover better and manage his load.
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The American has been struggling with this issue for much of the season and just when it looked like those issues were ebbing away after a successful grass campaign, it reared its ugly head in his Wimbledon quarter-final loss to Zverev.
When asked about the injury, he said after that defeat, “Rest isn’t the way to fix knee tendonitis. It’s not loading it to a certain extent, which obviously is going to be time away from playing really physical like tennis matches. That helps, but it’s not like when I’m home and not playing tournaments. I’m resting.
“It’s a lot of strengthening and you want to push it and there’s a certain amount of pain that’s acceptable when you’re trying to strengthen and regrow the tendon. And that’s what I’ve done.
“And that’s what all my scans since November have shown is is that I am regrowing and strengthening the tendon and there was, you know, in November, there was just a hole, there was a hole there.”
Following the conclusion of Wimbledon, Fritz has the option to play events such as the 500 event in Washington and the Masters 1000 tournaments in Canada in Cincinnati.
The 28-year-old did say, however, he won’t be playing the week before the US Open at the end of August, which rules out the warm-up event at Winston-Salem.
When asked about his schedule, Fritz told reporters, “I mean, we’ll see. I think the positive thing about playing in Canada and Cincinnati is just the days off in between matches. That’s going to help a lot and obviously I won’t play the week before the [US] Open.
“That’s what I’ve been doing in the past. So going into the [US] Open, it should be similar to how I felt going into here. I need to get a scan. I have so many different scans I can compare and each one has looked better than the last. So, kind of just see where we’re at. I think if we were on the calendar schedule that we were on last year, then [Washington] DC would be kind of out of the question for me.
“But this year it’s like a week backed up, so there will be plenty of time for me to rest it, get back on my rehab programme and just kind of see how it feels.”
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