After two months of grinding claycourt tennis, the grass-court season has begun – and nearly ended.

Once the sport’s dominant surface, grass has long since been put out to pasture. This week, the world’s best players took their first tentative steps on it in Germany and England, where Roger Federer and Andy Roddick won Wimbledon tune-ups yesterday for the third consecutive year. Most of the best men will rest this week, while a few will play tournaments in the Netherlands and Nottingham, England. Then it’s off to Wimbledon next week, only to move on to either small clay tournaments or the American hard courts, unless one wants to stop off at the Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., for a final week on the lawn (it’s a wonderful tournament, but top players rarely enter it).

The demise of grass began in 1975, when the U.S. Open, then played at Forest Hills, switched from grass to clay. Twelve years later, the Australian Open traded its grass for hard courts. Down to one Grand Slam from three, grass had become a novelty.

Even with those changes, though, top pros still benefited from fine-tuning their volleys and reflexes to grass as recently as the early 1990s, when many of the season’s early tournaments were played on “carpet,” a surface made from either a rubber mat or synthetic turf.

On carpet, like grass, tennis balls skid quickly and stay low, favoring skilled servers and accomplished volleyers. John McEnroe spent much of his career on the surface. In 1984, when he won 82 matches against just three losses, McEnroe won five carpet tournaments from January to April, played two clay warm-up events before the French Open (he lost in the final to Ivan Lendl), and then went on to win Queen’s Club, Wimbledon, and later, the U.S. Open.

The men’s circuit still features six carpet tournaments, but five are lumped together in October – after the year’s Slams are through and when most players need time to recover, especially those who have designs on the year-end Tennis Masters Cup. After the Australian Open, players can choose among hard courts or clay, followed by two prestigious hard-court tournaments in the U.S. Pros the caliber of Federer, Roddick, and Marat Safin generally play just two carpet tournaments a year.

The recent quality of tennis on grass has not helped the surface’s cause either. Grass matches have often been criticized as serving contests, the most boring brand of tennis known to man. The examples are numerous, with Roddick’s 7-6(7), 7-6(4) win yesterday over Croatia’s Ivo Karlovic at Queen’s Club being the most recent. Over an hour and 20 minutes, neither player had to execute precise shots to win points. Karlovic has nothing other than his serve to rely upon, thereby leaving Roddick little to do except serve, lunge for returns, and wait for mistakes.

In 2001, former British Davis Cup captain David Lloyd said Wimbledon ought to let go of the past and follow the lead of the other Grand Slams. It was time, he said, to rip up its lawns, ending what he described as 15 years of dull tennis. That debate still exists today.

“There are people who think we should abolish the grass-court season,” Mary Carillo, a former top player and now a frequent television commentator, said in a recent interview. “I think there should be more of one. It’s the biggest reason why we have so much baseline tennis today. If there were more grass courts, people would resign themselves to learning how to play the entire keyboard.”

And so we have, roughly, the chicken-or-the-egg argument that confronts grass courts: Either tennis has changed into a sport that grass can no longer accommodate, or lack of play on grass has transformed tennis into a sport that does not play well on grass.

Whatever the answer, the good news is that some of the best and most popular players on the tour – namely, Federer, Roddick, and French Open champion Rafael Nadal – would like to stop the lawns from wilting.

“There’s a Grand Slam on the surface and, you know, there’s only a couple tournaments besides that,” Roddick said after his semifinal win at Queen’s Club this weekend. “That seems a little out of place for me, that there’s not even a Masters Series or something else like that.”

But the bad news is that things are not about to change. As Roddick put it, “It’s never really been taken too seriously, I don’t think, which is unfortunate.”

All sports are resistant to revision, and tennis would have to undergo a brief but painful surgery to return grass to its glory days. Either Wimbledon would have to begin at least two weeks later, or the French two weeks earlier, or some suitable combination.

Either way, the clay-court season or the hard-court season would lose a little time, and some venue a chunk of money. Adding even one Masters event – essentially, one more week – to the grass season would likely do the game a lot of good, but the will is not there yet. Roddick wants it, Federer would love it, and Nadal seems happy no matter what the surface. Even Safin, a notorious grass-hater, is warming to the lawn, perhaps encouraged by his 6-4, 6-7(6), 6-4 defeat yesterday at the hands of Federer, who has won 29 straight grass matches. Now is the time to convince the rest of the locker room to come along.