The tennis season is among the longest in all of sports lasting from January to late November.  To be sure, unlike organized sports in the US which commits to a solid schedule, tennis players are free to schedule, within some constraints, when they want to play.  No top pro, for instance, plays four weeks in a row.  Long gone are the days when a player like Vilas would play eight weeks in a row.  But in those days, you could go games without seriously having to run, such was the lack of power in the day that most players opted to hit deep and crosscourt where it was safe.

Three weeks is usually the maximum a modern pro will play.  Even so, the time off is either to recover from the pounding a body takes during the weeks of tournament play or to train for the next year.

Most pros like at least two sessions where they can train, work on shots that have been getting inconsistent, work on movement, endurance, agility, and on every odd shot in the game.  There was a video of Novak Djokovic doing a drill.  Both players stood in service boxes.  The rule was that a player must hit the ball downward on their side of the court, and the bounce must cause it to go to the other side within the service boxes.  No real match is played like this, and yet, the players went nearly 70 shots before a miss.  The skill to play bizarre forms of tennis builds a feel for the ball that can be useful in odd situations, rare as they may be.

If you were to take a player like Jimmy Connors and expose him to all the kind of drills top pros do behind-the-scenes, he might think it’s peculiar.  Players train to fetch drop shots.  Back in the 1980s, players like Wilander never hit drop shots.  Like never.  These days, everyone learns how to hit them.  Back in the 1970s, Borg learned a bizarro two-handed slice.  These days, he’d be taught a proper one-handed slice.

The point is, players are trained so much better than their peers from 40 years ago.  They make far fewer stupid shots because they hit so many more balls, rely on topspin as a base, do outside physical training.

So a player like Andy Murray who was up for British sports personality of the year had to send a video to the UK.  Local sport reporters lambasted him for failing to make the trip out to lobby for the award despite tennis cognoscenti realizing all the top pros spend the few weeks at the end of December doing training, meaning they often miss out on Christmas with the family.

Indeed, in a week, the first tournament of the year will start.  Three tournaments, as a matter of fact.  Brisbane, Chennai, and Doha all start on Monday after the new year.  Even before that, there is an 6-man exhibition in Abu Dhabi.  Historically, Federer and Nadal play in this tournament, both with byes.  This year, Djokovic joins then.  Indeed, he’s already been in Abu Dhabi for about a week.  Djokovic has already claimed himself to be back to full health which is strange given he had 5 weeks off earlier, and that didn’t help.

Last year, Djokovic decided to play a different exhibition, the Hopman Cup, along with Andy Murray.  Murray had played Doha in previous years, but because Doha is played at night in cold weather, he felt it was interfering with his training, so for two years, he played the Hopman Cup in Perth where it was much warmer, and far more typical of Australian Open weather.   Murray has changed his schedule this year, and opted to play Brisbane, a standard ATP 250 event.  Last year, Soderling and Roddick played in the finals right before the floods hit Brisbane.

As usual, when players head into training, there is little information.  Players like Roger Federer rarely talk to the press during these periods.  Little news has been heard from any of the top four.

Robin Soderling announced that he was still recovering from mono and would skip the Australian Open.

The last piece of the Spanish Davis Cup team fell as Albert Costa stepped down as Davis Cup captain of Spain.  Martin Jaite was named as the new Davis Cup captain for Argentina.  David Nalbandian, apparently, did not see eye-to-eye with the previous Davis Cup captain.

Pretty soon, 2012 will be here and another year of tennis!