Is the professional tennis season too long? Everyone in China this week seems to think so, and not without reason.

Things have gone so wrong at the yearend Masters Cup in Shanghai that organizers and the ATP, which runs the men’s tour, rang up world no. 14 Thomas Johansson at his Monte Carlo home and bought him a plane ticket, just in case another player withdraws with an injury. Of the men still playing in a tournament reserved for the world’s top eight players, only one, Roger Federer, is ranked inside the top five.No.3Andy Roddick, no. 10 Marat Safin, and no. 4 Lleyton Hewitt never even flew to China, and no. 2 Rafael Nadal and no. 5 Andre Agassi dealt the tournament a crippling blow when they withdrew on Monday.

Left standing are Federer, a formidable if unheralded opponent in Ivan Ljubicic, a workhorse of a player in Nikolay Davydenko, four Argentines (three of them clay-court specialists), and a Chilean. Five of the final eight are replacement players.

It’s no wonder, then, that the Chinese feel cheated, or at least supremely unlucky. As one Shanghai official put it, they thought they had purchased a Mercedes-Benz when they agreed to host the Masters Cup for the next three seasons, only to find that most of its parts were broken. Officials have singled out Agassi for scorn, still angry, it seems, about injuries he cited in pulling out of another Shanghai tournament in 2000 and the last Masters Cup held there in 2002, when Agassi dropped two matches and left with a hip injury. Agassi, who recently sprained his ankle playing racquetball, is 0-4 in Shanghai.

All this anger is understandable, and the criticism aimed at players is not unreasonable – even Federer said as much after his quarterfinal match with Ljubicic. But like most people caught in a moment of fury, the organizers of this tournament crave simple answers, not necessarily the best ones. First and foremost, they want the ATP and its new chairman, Etienne de Villiers, to take a long look at the “hectic” schedule spanning January to November (December, if one counts the Davis Cup), and includes nearly 70 tournaments.

The prevailing attitude in Shanghai seems to be that the season is just too long. In reality, the problem is more complex, and will not be solved by cutting tournaments here and there to give players four or five extra weeks of rest.

Yes, the off-season in tennis is to brief, leaving players little time to recover and then train for longevity. But many players – like all those ranked outside the top 10 – would protest the loss of tournaments, since they need more places to play to gather points and earn a living. It’s not for nothing that Davydenko, winner of one tournament this year, is ranked inside the top eight: He has played 82 matches so far in 30 tournaments, plus Davis Cup. At the other end of the spectrum are the top performers who choose to limit their schedules (Agassi qualified for the year-end tournament by playing only 49 matches, while Hewitt needed just 46).

The fact is, the length of the season may not be as serious a problem as the intensity of the tournaments themselves. Often at Masters Series events, players play grueling matches for three or four days in a row. At the U.S. Open, both the men and women are made to play semifinals and finals on consecutive days for the benefit of television broadcasters.

Playing day after day might have been acceptable in the era when John McEnroe waltzed through his early singles matches and felt strong enough to play doubles too, but not anymore. One need only listen to Agassi talk this week about the increasing strength of players and the violence, as he put it, inherent in sprinting and stopping and sprinting over and over again as players hit the ball harder and at more dramatic angles with ever-improving rackets.

Perhaps the tour needs to tinker with the ranking system, so those players who win tournaments are given a little more benefit – and a little more time to rest. Perhaps there should be more than a month between the French Open and Wimbledon. Perhaps the grass court season, with shorter points and less pounding, ought to be extended (much to the satisfaction of this columnist) and the clay-court season reduced (ditto). Perhaps the American hardcourt season is one tournament too long (sorry, Indianapolis).

The bottom line is that sacrifices are needed from all sides: “A short-term cost for a long-term gain,” as Agassi put it. So, who wants to volunteer to drop a tournament? Or, for players, a few hundred ranking points or a few hundred thousand dollars? What would the Shanghai organizers, or the organizers of other Masters Series events, say to spreading out their tournaments over 10 days rather than seven, which would spare players from playing every day? The same number of matches, the same number of tickets sold, but a higher cost for maintaining and operating the stadium, paying workers, advertising, security, player meals, doctors’ fees, and so on.

Would this help the players stay healthy? More so, one would think, than simply killing off tournaments, but it’s a devastating proposition for a business owner. What would the Grand Slams say to starting on a Saturday or a Sunday rather than a Monday? What would the U.S. Open say to giving the men and women a day off between the semifinals and finals, television be damned?

For the 2005 tennis season, only four days remain between the lines. Then the difficult work begins.