It's Not a Slam but the Olympics Are Major PARIS - Tennis returned to the Summer Olympics in 1988, in Seoul, South Korea, after a 64-year absence. In those days, the sport as an Olympic event was far less important on the calendar than it is now. Players here for the French Open have already altered their calendars and practice schedules to accommodate the Olympics this summer in London, held on the famous grass courts at Wimbledon, shortly after the Wimbledon tournament itself. There is an incentive to do well there, both for ranking points and national pride, and more incentive than in most Olympic years, except perhaps 2008. That was not so necessarily when Chris Evert played in the 1988 Olympics. The day before her first match, Evert said she walked around the Olympic Village, starstruck by Florence Griffith-Joyner and Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson. She watched the gymnasts. She felt like a fan; here were all these athletes she watched on television. "In the opening ceremonies, I felt very uncomfortable," Evert said on a recent ESPN conference call. "I almost felt like an imposter, because the other athletes were looking at the U.S. tennis players as if they were saying, "What are you doing here?" Because we have our Wimbledon and U.S. Open and French and Australian, and we had our million dollars. These were supposedly amateur athletes who only had one chance every four years. Evert, it can be noted, lost her first match, the low point, she said, of her experience in Korea. She said she has seen the interest from players grow every Olympic cycle since then. Tennis was dropped in 1984 and made two appearances a demonstration sport before it returned in 1988. In 2004, Olympic results began to count toward the ATP and WTA tour rankings. That helped. So did certain examples, such as when Roger Federer, in the middle of the busiest part of his season, put all his effort into winning a doubles gold medal for Switzerland at the Beijing Games in 2008. Soon after, he won the United States Open. Patrick McEnroe, who coached the U.S. men at the Athens Olympics in 2004, said other athletes took the Olympics even more seriously, such as those from China, for instance, or eastern Europe. "When tennis first came back into the Olympics it was a little bit of an afterthought, because the players who were playing in it didn't really grow up with tennis being part of it," McEnroe said. The current day players now really feel a connection to the Olympics that maybe people from our generation didn't, because tennis wasn't part of the Olympic Games for so long. The current players really know how special it is. Once every four years and all that. The Davis Cup and the Fed Cup are great, but because they're year after year, and it seems like it never ends, it doesn't have the same cachet that the Olympics has.