I was sitting in our bureau newsroom yesterday with a colleague staring at the array of TV screens on our desk and focusing on the one tuned into the Masters Cup event in Shanghai.

Both of us have a keen interest in tennis but we showed our ignorance (to each other) as we debated who were those players we were staring at preparing to take the court. Was that Ivan Ljubicic or Nikolay Davydenko? And who was the other bloke? The opponent?
The commentators soon settled our minds, but the very fact that we weren't sure was enough of a sign that something is not as it should be in the sport which once displayed a large cluster of instantly recognisable faces.

With all due respect to Davydenko and Ljubicic and their contemporaries (pehaps barring Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal) they are simply not household names, certainly not household faces.

By the way, Davydenko (sporting a Ljubicic-style shaven head) was facing Tommy Robredo, a man who could quite easily walk down Oxford Street on a busy Friday afternoon and nobody would give him the time of day.

No disrespect to any of the above, whom, it should be stressed, are worthy of their allotted places in the prestigious year-ending tournament, but the fact that they are almost unknown outside the immediate circle of tennis fanatics bodes badly for the sport's wider image.

The year-ending event now known as the Masters Cup was previously known simply as the Masters. But alongside it, during the year, there are a group of tournaments which are known as Masters Series events. Once they had individual names like the Canadian Open, or the Paris Indoors, but now the word Masters has become part of those (and other) tournaments' names. It is unjudiciously splattered all over the tennis calendar.
Ahoy, corporate branders! Be certain that this has simply detracted from these events' uniqueness and is just another way of devaluing great tournaments. Thankfully, there are some constants which change very little, or not at all in terms of providing a unique attraction: I am referring to the four Grand Slams and the Davis Cup, which has undergone changes, but has fundamentally remained the same sort of event for over a century.

The corporate branding people advising the ATP and possibly also the WTA have not served their clients well if they are unable to inspire tennis fans to maintain interest in an event like the Masters (Cup) as in previous years.

Admittedly, they do have a much tougher task than before, when it appears that the winner of the tournament is almost pre-determined and the also-rans are about as recognisable as a North Korean foot soldier marching in the Pyongyang May Day parade.
I just wonder if Federer is as bad for tennis as was Michael Schumacher for motor racing. Both are so much better than their fellow competitors that it appears to have killed off much of the interest in their sports. The problem is that Federer and Schumacher are so dedicated to their sport that they forgot to concentrate on their personality traits. We do really miss the likes of John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors and Andre Agassi. These days it appears as if there is nobody to spice things up a little, play is all so businesslike.
But then again, I feel that we should marvel at the skill of Federer. I liken him to Steve Davis in his prime.

It’s true that tennis and snooker are about as different as chalk and cheese, but the skill of these two men could and can be appreciated by any spectator who has ever tried seriously to master the two sports, and even those who have not.

When the going gets tough, Roger and Steve simply turned on the skill and the style and strangled their opponents like a boa constrictor squeezing its hapless prey.

Once there used to be fantastic tennis rivalries, often with two fairly evenly-matched protagonists vying for top honours. At the moment that is not the case. The corporate branders should address that situation and it shouldn't be too hard for them to come up with a formula which has at its centre possibly the best tennis player of all time.