Hewitt Leaves a Void in Space City

A year ago in Shanghai, Australia's Lleyton Hewitt won the Tennis Masters Cup, the men's end-of-season showdown, for the second successive year, further establishing himself as the No1 player in the world and successor to Pete Sampras.

This year the tournament has switched to Houston, Texas, the self-styled "space city of infinite possibilities". Not for Hewitt. He is nowhere to be seen, having dropped out of the top 10, and even temporarily relinquished his position as the top-ranked Australian to Mark Philippoussis, who is here as a first reserve should any of the world's top eight players go lame or sick in the coming week.

Hewitt's dramatic fall from the elite highlights what has been a decidedly fractious year in men's tennis. Effectively the 22-year-old Australian, currently in the midst of a legal wrangle with the ATP, the men's governing body, has turned his back on the circuit and concentrated on winning the Davis Cup, with Australia playing the final against Spain in Melbourne this month.

Some would argue that Hewitt has cut off his nose to spite his face, and he generally performed poorly in this year's four grand slams, losing his Wimbledon crown in the process, but the game can ill afford his absence. Furthermore it reflects the ineptitude of the ATP, whose chief executive Mark Miles only narrowly survived a behind-the-scenes putsch in Paris recently.

Miles's stature was hugely diminished when the $1bn (£600m) deal with ISL went belly-up, and he has been fighting to hold his place ever since. Just before Wimbledon he was threatening a players' strike at the slams, as the ATP desperately attempted to shore up its finances. Added to the eminently avoidable row with Hewitt, and coupled with the admission that its own trainers had been responsible for a series of failed dope tests, the ATP has appeared weak and poorly led.

All that has made the rise and rise of Andy Roddick something of a face-saver for Miles, the young American's success helping to deflect the criticism. Roddick's victory in the US Open final had all the inevitability of Juan Carlos Ferrero's success in the French Open, so it is fitting that they will fight it out for the end-of-season No1 spot here.

The Spaniard opens against Argentina's David Nalbandián in the initial blue group round- robin match today, with Roddick playing tomorrow evening against Carlos Moya of Spain in the red group.

This year's two other slam winners, Andre Agassi, who won in Melbourne, and the Wimbledon champion Roger Federer, of Switzerland, make up the field, together with Germany's Rainer Schüttler and Argentina's Guillermo Coria.

Of the eight only Agassi, 33, is a former winner of the Masters, and incredibly that was way back in 1990 when he defeated Sweden's Stefan Edberg.

This event was staged in Houston in 1976 when Spain's Manuel Orantes brought an end to Ilie Nastase's domination of the event, the Romanian having won four titles in the previous five years. Perhaps it will be a lucky omen for Ferrero.