Coach Tarik Benhabiles shakes his head in dismay when asked to describe the current state of tennis.
"There's too many tournaments, the agents have too much control and the players have too many commitments," Benhabiles said during a visit to Jakarta and Balikpapan last month for a series of coaching clinics. "The players today don't need a coach, they need a concierge."
He talks of trying to coach a young promising French player, who initially had good results.
"And then she got caught up in all the other things," he says with a shrug.
Of mixed Algerian-French Vietnamese descent, Benhabiles knows the game from the inside out. He was the junior boys champion at Roland Garros in 1981, and played the men's tour for several years - "I was a good player, not a great one" - before becoming a coach. Most famous among his charges was American Andy Roddick, who already possessed the fearsome pounding serve that was enough to blast away most opponents.
"I'm glad to see that he has really become a tennis player today, he knows how to construct a point, how to play it through," the 45-year-old says of Roddick's current partnership with Larry Stefanki.
Although he is positive on Roddick's development, he believes the sport has been on a downhill slide since what he calls its heyday during the modern professional era in the mid-1980s to 1998.
Many cite changes in equipment technology, particularly strings, that have made it easier to strike the ball harder than ever. For Benhabiles, the real issue is the big business of the game, and the demands on players off the tennis court.
He is particularly critical of the women's game.
"I ask you, what does that say about the state of tennis when women can come back after retiring and immediately get back on top?" he says of the spectacular returns of Belgians Kim Clijsters, who won the US Open as a wildcard in 2009, and Justine Henin, who managed to reach the Australian Open final this year in her second tournament after two years out of the game.
There is much truth to the Frenchman's statements, and many - from players to WTA Tour officials and the media - have criticized the demands of tournament commitments for causing a spate of career-ending injuries and mental burnout in young players. In response, the women's tour administrators introduced a streamlined schedule to allow more free time for players to rest and recuperate.
Another contention among critics of the women's game is that it lacks variety, particularly among the lower-ranked players, where it's hard to tell the difference between one baseline-hugging, hard-hitting teenager from another.
But in the top ranks, despite Benhabiles' comments, there are still players with individuality to their playing styles. This year's French Open, with its group of surprise semifinalists, as well as the return of players such as Maria Sharapova - demonstrating that she can play on clay after her clay-court victory in Strasbourg in May - Henin, back in her happy hunting ground, and even hobbled Kimiko Date-Krumm, springing a surprise over Dinara Safina, showed this fact.
There is Italy's Francesca Schiavone, the intense, emotional Italian journeywoman of the circuit, whose crafty play was too much for resolute counterpuncher Caroline Wozniacki (the favorite whipping girl today for those critical of the rise of the "pusher" in women's tennis).
Russian Elena Dementieva, with her brilliant arsenal of groundstrokes, and for much of her career hampered by a woeful serve and questionable mental toughness, is the perennial crowd favorite. Serb Jelena Jankovic, a former world number one, brings athleticism and grace to her relentless retrieving (contrast her style with the workmanlike attrition of Wozniacki), even if her attention-getting behavior is a matter of taste.
Most interesting of all is Samantha Stosur, the determined fighter who could. After being waylaid by serious illness a couple of years, the Australian has worked on her game, and emerged as a formidable singles player from her former reputation as a "doubles specialist". Focused and usually subdued on court, she is winning over fans and respect from other players with her victories, including over Henin and world number one Serena Williams.
As her opponents have noted, she plays like nobody else on the women's tour, with a huge serve and a dazzling all-court game.
Justine Henin said, without any hint of disdain, that her ability to hit hard and heavy strokes is almost masculine in its strength. In fact, in the context of today's harder-hitting game and superior technology, it is a much more powerful brand of tennis than Martina Navratilova's classic serve-and-volley play of the 1980s.
And winning and losing in the upper echelons of tennis are never about the statistics and the formbooks, but the mental side of the game. "Anything can happen in tennis, so I just hung on," France's Aravane Rezai said last year during the Bali women's event, after nearly losing in the first round (she went on to sweep the title).
That was Date-Krumm's philosophy in keeping the ball in play and letting rusty Safina self-destruct, and, despite her loss to Stosur, Serena Williams throughout her career in battling back from matchpoints down. And it's also found in Stosur's growing confidence in her abilities.
Back in France, even Benhabiles may be interested in the surprises in Paris.
"I'm a happy man," he said of coaching youngsters, even if he is no longer interested in taking care of players on the tour. "I get to do something I love, and I really love tennis."
