ATP Tour

Hamburg will stage an ATP tennis tournament in 2009 despite a legal battle over the future of the event, the German tennis federation (DTB) said on Thursday.

"We have told the ATP that we are ready and in a position to stage the tournament next year," DTB president Georg von Waldenfels told German news agency SID.

The DTB is appealing against a U.S. court decision in August which upheld the ATP's right to downgrade the status of the Hamburg tournament.

With the ATP taking on a new look in 2009, many questions have come up.

From marketing changes, to revamped naming conventions of elite events, to stiffer penalties rendered, the tour is hoping for a more fan-friendly, healthier and streamlined structure. Here are 10 salient questions that will provide some clarity for the upcoming season.

1. How does the new tournament structure work?

By design, very simply:

Grand Slams (4): Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, U.S. Open

The German Tennis Federation plans to appeal a ruling that cleared the way for the ATP Tour’s planned tournament restructuring—a move that would downgrade a tournament in Hamburg.

The federation said on its Web site that it aims to maintain the Hamburg tournament’s status and assert unspecified damages.

A federal jury in Wilmington, Del., in August cleared the way for the Tour restructuring to go ahead next year. It rejected antitrust claims in a lawsuit the German federation filed with the Qatar federation as a co-plaintiff.

The ATP Tour will not increase its quota of Asian players in events held on the continent despite threats by Asia's tennis body to pull out of the tour and start its own rebel circuit, a tour official said.
 
Brad Drewett, a senior ATP official, said the global men's circuit would not bow to a demand by the Asian Tennis Federation (ATF) that 25% of the field in every event on the continent be comprised of Asian players.
 
"We have rules in place based on merit, and we have no plans to change them," Drewett told Reuters in an interview.