the Nitto ATP Finals has been a landmark event on the ATP Tour’s calendar. Tennis’ greatest champions have competed in the tournament, which has rotated through 14 different cities. In 2002 in Shanghai, the tournament became the most-viewed international sporting event ever staged in China at that time.
The city began hosting an event in 1996 — that tournament later became known as the Heineken Open — which intrigued the local government. “This is amazing. We want more of this kind of thing,” Charles Humphrey Smith, the Managing Director/International of Juss Event, remembers an official telling him at the time.
Juss Events, China’s largest sports and events management company, was then allowed by the government to bid for what was then called the Tennis Masters Cup. The state-owned organization was successful and in 2002, the tournament was held in Shanghai for the first time.
“It’s very seldom that an event acts as a pivot-point in the sport,” Smith said. “For us in Asia, and obviously for the globe, hosting the Tennis Masters Cup in 2002 under the global tennis world’s watchful eye was a defining moment in tennis, and has led the way to some amazing new things that have grown both the men’s and women’s sport.”
It’s not often a major city closes down its biggest highway for anything, let alone a tennis tournament. But Shanghai did so in 2002 for the Tennis Masters Cup. The organizers had built a stage overhanging the Huangpu River, which flows through the city. The players, escorted by a film crew, were driven to that location on The Bund. Thousands of police officers shut down all the ramps leading to the area, but there was a problem: Marat Safin was late and the ceremony was being filmed for live TV.
“He needed to get in the van with the players to go to the stage and they had the Chinese jackets on and everything,” Smith said. “Three minutes is a lifetime when you’re shutting down an entire city artery. Finally… we found Marat, put him in a car [and] the highway was still shut down.”Read More
