Ian Warden | Take tennis out of the hands of the powerful and give it to the elves

What changes would you make to the rules or conventions of the already perfection-approaching game of tennis to enable it to soar to utter perfection?

Readers who think they are not interested in tennis should stay tuned to today's column, to this hot topic (hot because this weekend's publication of this column coincides with this weekend's playing of the Open's singles finals) since of course tennis is so much more than just a game.

And so one's ideas about possible improvements of tennis overlap with one's attitudes towards life itself, towards society, with one's beliefs about right and wrong, about beauty and truth and justice.

Before nominating my own one chosen, perfection-seeking change of the game, a word of praise of something excellent already achieved by tennis-as-it-is.

I love the way, in defiance of a world increasingly tuned to teeny-weeny, social-media-shrivelled attention spans, some tennis matches last for hours and hours and hours.

Of course the longest match at this Open won by Sir Andy Murray (the designated 'Greatest Living Scotsman') took a freakishly sustained five hours and 45 minutes. But even the average match played between men at this Open has taken 172.9 minutes and the average match of the Open's warrior princesses (how thrilling their war cries as they play!) has taken 98.2 minutes.

Because I am always arguing is tennis is not so much a sport as a profound and dramatic art form it pleases me enormously when tennis matches take at least long as my favourite operas, ballets and Shakespeare plays.

At 172 minutes the average men's match at this Open is taking longer than a performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest (and, uncannily, almost exactly the length of a performance of Bizet's opera Carmen).

A slightly-longer-than-average men's match at this Open has taken about the same time taken by an average performance of Shakespeare' harrowing, corpse-strewn play Macbeth.

One would have liked to have made a closer comparison of Macbeth (the Scottish play) with Scotsman Sir Andy Murray's long, long match but at five hours and 45 minutes his epic lasted vastly longer even than the approximately four hours of Hamlet, Shakespeare's most sustained drama.

And yet of course, while we are stressing the theatricality of tennis, Sir Andy's tortured, ever-grimacing, woe-is-me, miserabilist demeanour on the tennis court is exactly what great actors strive for when they are portraying the haunted, agonising Danish prince Hamlet.

Almost everything worthwhile in life (including the paying of rapt attention to big books, to big operas, to big plays and to big, big tennis matches) requires big investments of time. And so it is wonderful to have tennis on the side of serious things and helping resist the forces of instantly gratifying/instantly forgotten froth and bubble.

But, given the divine power to tinker with something so almost perfect as tennis I would amend rules and scoring systems so as to take advantages away from the game's big-hitting brutes (the Goliaths and Amazons) and to give more rewards to the games elfin artistes.

The tennis strokes that take brains and flair and artistry (including and especially lobs and drop shots) give all of us far more joy, more reason to gasp and go "Gosh!" than is given by the piledriving shots of the bodybuilt Goliaths.

Let the Goliaths go and play their biffing, bruising, brainless body contact sports. Tennis is to be played by thinkers, conjurers, artists and elves.

The accursed ace, the serve so piledrivingly fast that an opponent can't get a racquet to it, is literally a spoilsport. It was intended by the sport's inspired inventors to be just a polite and gentlemanly way of starting play - that is why it is called a serve.

But a tennis ace doesn't serve something. It is as if one has served a guest a cup of coffee by angrily flinging the cup at her head.

The way in which an ace makes an ensuing rally impossible (and rallies are what tennis fans want to see) is suggestive of ways in which ugly regimes' bans and censorships stamp out all possibilities of healthy conversation and the free flow of ideas. The serving of an ace is a nasty, didactic affront to civilisation. It resembles the burning of a book.

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One suggested way (endorsed by this writer) to limit brutes' aces is to give every server just one serve (no other sport allows anything like tennis's two serves) so that the brute has to take every care to pitch that one ball into play, no longer daring to make it a daring, risky, crash-through-or-crash cannonball.

Meanwhile a guileful player's crowd-delightingly deft, subtle, magical, philosophical, elfin shots should be rewarded (and will be, when I come to power) by an extra point or at least .5 of a point.

One of the tragedies of tennis, especially of men's tennis (although women's tennis, too, has its piledriving brutes) is that so many of the brutes are quite capable of playing elfin shots (they play them only very occasionally, unforgettably).

Alas, though, they spend most of their Macbeth-length matches unattractively blasting, hammering and piledriving because with the existing rules it is the pragmatic way to hunt and gather for victory. Three or four times a match even the robotically brutish Djokovic forgets himself and plays an exquisite drop-volley or lob.

"Wow!" the spellbound people gasp.

It is time, for art's sake, in the name of beauty and truth, to give tennis (and so much of everything in public life) back to the philosophers and the elves.