The beauty of completing a Career Grand Slam used to be that a player would have to prove himself capable of not only adjusting to all sorts of conditions, but dominating in them. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Recent trends in tennis have been towards a homogenization of all surfaces to favor an almost exclusively baseline game. The addition of more sand at the US Open, the continuous slowing of grass, the use of heavier balls at Wimbledon, and many other adjustments have resulted in the loss most of serve-and-volley tennis and even much of all-court tennis, leaving a dearth of variety in professional ranks. It sad that even Wimbledon has been won from the baseline in recent years. Having the conditions at all Grand Slams tournaments amenable to a single style of play cheapens what made the achievement of a career slam so great. To compare doing so today to achieving it in the past is an insult to those players who completed the career slam with true variety and, more importantly, it is an insult to tennis. This is an open petition to the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and tournament organizers to stop and reverse this worrying trend. Let clay favor the base-liners, but let hard courts favor the all-court players and let grass favor the serve-and-volleyers. If you miss the days when tennis was not so uniform and the Grand Slams were played on four drastically different surfaces, then please join me in letting the ATP know. Thank you for your support.

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