As Big Four era nears end, tennis looks to Nextgen to lead ATP Tour into the future

Osman Samiuddin looks at the generational shift starting to take place in professional men's tennis.

Australian Nick Kyrgios is one of the leading players of the so-called Nextgen of tennis stars. Alex Goodlett / Getty Images

Remember the “New balls please” campaign? Back at the turn of the millennium, when the ATP’s marketing campaign was first unveiled, tennis was going through a little bit of generational angst.

For so long, starting from the mid-70s, the men’s game did not have to worry about things like marketing (not unduly at least). These were golden years when the tour had a glut of players who could not only play some serious tennis, but were also utterly and colourfully human, with flaws and quirks and much spirit.

How boring could tennis be when it had Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe playing it? Or when it had a man as complex as a machine in Bjorn Borg? Or when it was feeding off the weird, simmering but unseen friction in the three-way rivalry between Ivan Lendl, Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg, both in their various styles of play as well as how they were off-court?

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And then, to ease us into this millennium we had Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras, who pledged allegiance to the same flag and were born 15 months apart, but who may as well have emerged from different eras if not different solar systems. Nothing separated them as much as their allegedly divergent philosophies on tipping etiquette, or at least according to Agassi.

But in 2000, the pair were closer to the end of their careers than the beginning and more importantly, had passed the high-water mark in their rivalry. After 2000, they would only meet twice more in grand slams, though admittedly the last — in the US Open final in 2002 — was memorable for the occasion of being Sampras’s last match.

So tennis, worried that it was finally coming to the end of a long, illustrious line of stars, needed new balls. Thus in 2000 began a campaign that would introduce fans to a new breed.

Eight players were featured in the original poster: Gustavo Kuerten, Lleyton Hewitt, Jan-Michael Gambill, Tommy Haas, Juan Carlos Ferrero, Nicolas Lapentti, Mariano Zabaleta and Roger Federer.

The campaign ran for a couple of years and was fluid, pulling in Andy Roddick and Marat Safin as well (Safin won the US Open in 2000).

You can see where this is going. Earlier this year, on the eve of Indian Wells and with what felt like less fanfare, the ATP launched the spiritual successor to this campaign: “#Nextgen”. Fourteen players were featured in it, fronted by Australian Nick Kyrgios and Croatia’s Borna Coric. There are players from South Korea, Great Britain, France and Japan.

And you can see why most visibly at the ongoing US Open. It feels like it is time for the men’s tennis to undergo another generational churn. Federer is absent at Flushing Meadows and has been off the tour for a while. Who knows in what shape and form he returns?

Rafael Nadal has been present but this is not the fierce Nadal of legend — he cannot be. Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray have time still, but Djokovic is in the middle of a genuinely weird US Open right now and so, all in all, this more acutely than most majors has felt like one truly bereft. In other words, it is the ideal time to identify the men who will take over from this quartet.

The problem is that anointing a new generation is a little bit more complicated and fraught than a marketing gimmick. Take that first batch of eight from the 2000 campaign.

Take Federer out and tally up the number of major winners: six grand slams between three of them. It is not to say they were unsuccessful — grand slams are not the only measure of a player’s success — but that a fair few of them did not perhaps fulfil the expectations of what the campaign implied.

More importantly, though, look at who the campaign did not include, and could not have done. Nadal, Djokovic and Murray are all half-a-generation after Federer so could not have made it for the campaign. But the angst of that time soon gave way to arguably the greatest age in men’s tennis and only one man from the campaign featured in that era.

Which is why we would do well not to worry unduly about being on the cusp of this new age in men’s tennis. Some will emerge, from this #Nextgen or, more charmingly, from beyond the dreams of marketing men.

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