Steffi Graf has her memorial in Berlin: a stadium from the nineties with four to seven thousand seats, depending on how equipped. The concrete stands stand high in the clear blue sky, showing Avus and Railway Embankment the cold shoulder. From seats covered with red fabric, you can see the lush green of the tennis court or, beyond the center line of the Center Courts, the idyllic Hundehehee lake. The terrace of the club home of the LTTC Rot-Weiß is very busy; On the courts, tennis instructors teach schoolchildren the basics of their sport. In contrast, world-class tennis in the huge arena is largely empty.
The front of the mighty building remains open for a view outside. Just like the extendable extension of the grandstands, this was a concession by the architect to the situation in Grunewald when he built the stadium in 1996 for twenty million marks lottery money. For twelve years it served to host the German Open; if Berlin had not increased its capacity at that time, the WTA tournament, which Steffi Graf won nine times, would have moved elsewhere. It wasn’t until 2008 that it ended. Since then, the Steffi Graf Stadium has been a monument to the addiction to grandmothers and fleeting dreams for twelve years. Anyone who saw it rot was wondering why the members of this exclusive, more than 120-year-old tennis club had ruined their magnificent grounds on Gottfried-von-Cramm-Weg with such a dream. Nothing justified the existence of the arena except the past.
Thanks to the dogs of Adam Szpyt, thanks to the “Bett1Aces” invitation tournament, in the person of Wimbledon winner Petra Kvitova from the Czech Republic and Dominic Thiem from Austria, world-class tennis professionals can once again do their sport. Whenever the entrepreneur, who made a name for himself as a mattress rebel, went for a walk with the animals, he came across the empty stadium. “It hurt my soul,” he said when, as the main sponsor of a new Berlin WTA tournament, he started to wake up the stadium from its slumber.
The Covid 19 pandemic, however, stopped the tournament from being staged; but there was no stopping Szpyt. Due to the distance of the players, tennis was corona-compliant per se, he found. And since the lawn was already laid and rust and moss were easy to hide, he declared himself willing to compensate for the lack of audience revenue. And already the Austrian organizer Edwin Weindorfer organized a two-part invitation tournament with 200,000 euros in prize money: until this Wednesday in Grunewald, from Friday to Sunday in a hangar of the decommissioned Tempelhof airport. A maximum of eight hundred visitors are allowed to spend 120 to 150 euros on entry to the facility, in the hangar it will be even more exclusive. No more than three hundred guests are allowed in there.
On the first day, however, two of them showed up in the stands. “I’m not disappointed. For me, this is life in the new reality, ”says Weindorfer. “I think people are afraid to go to sporting events.” In normal times, entrance fees add up to a quarter to the budget. Five weeks ago, before the Berlin Senate signaled that something could be done with a proper hygiene concept, he calculated with zero ticketing and zero catering. Now he is calling up admission prices that seem inspired by the evil word by the writer Christopher Isherwood that Grunewald is a slum of millionaires.
Whether high admission prices or low: In the new reality, the bill doesn’t work. “I want to show the flag,” says Weindorfer. “After the disaster of the Adriatic tour, we want to prove that it is possible to organize an event with spectators that is safe.” That is why there are safety measures and personnel like never before at Hundehehlesee. Distance, disinfection and humility shape the new era. Such an effort cannot be refinanced, says the organizer from Stuttgart, Vienna and Palma de Mallorca, but: “You can’t put your head in the sand now.”
On the contrary. As soon as normal times prevail, the emergency tournament should turn into an urban tennis event at changing locations. And, of course, the Steffi Graf Stadium should be played according to the game.
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