A Sport With No League to Set the Schedule
In a league sport, one governing body controls the fixture list, and it can add rest weeks or move a competition because it owns every piece of the structure it is adjusting. Tennis has no equivalent authority. The men's and women's tours are separate organisations with separate memberships and separate commercial interests. The four majors are run by their own national federations rather than by either tour. National team competitions sit outside both. Independent tournament owners hold long-term rights to stage events in particular weeks, and those rights are contractual assets rather than favours.
Every one of those parties negotiates rather than instructs. A tour can restructure its own tier of tournaments, but it cannot compress a major or cancel a federation's team competition to create recovery weeks. What emerges is a calendar assembled by accretion, the sum of claims on individual weeks rather than a plan for a sustainable workload, and because no single body owns it, nobody is in a position to trade one interest away against another.
