Imagine if international tours like the ATP or PGA, sports with no collective bargaining agreements, had no ability to shape their own yearly calender, had serious detriments to signing major commercial interests, basically were beholden to the individual events?

A lawsuit in a Delaware court right now, one some lawyers think could be landmark, might make all of that a reality.

The ATP Tour stop in Hamburg is suing the tennis association in an anti-trust lawsuit, saying the sport unfairly swings players to events with big money. A successful suit would give Hamburg not just $77 million (or possibly more) but would destroy the Tour’s ability to organize a number of details it might have taken for granted for decades.

“I don’t think the players realize the seriousness of it,” Doubles star Bob Bryan told The New York Times. “Financially, it would be a killer. It could really cripple the ATP. Potentially it maybe could dissolve the ATP.”

This started a year ago, when the ATP Tour announced its “Brave New World” campaign (don’t laugh - they actually called it that) for it’s 2009 season. The Tour would change some of it’s “Masters Series” events - then the nine best tournaments outside the grand slams, ones guaranteed every big name player - by adding Shanghai and dropping Monte Carlo and Hamburg to part of the regular tour.

And the Hamburgers didn’t like it, basically calling the Tour a monopoly.

See what they did next, the threats by the ATP, and how this could change international sports forever after the jump.

The Tour wants to move Hamburg’s tournament from late May (shortly before the French Open) to late July, change the tournament’s status (thus losing the guarantee of getting the world’s best players) and stripping its Masters Series status. According to Hamburg’s case, the ATP Tour offered the tourney $4-8 million to take the demotion … but, the Hamburg attorneys says, that came only after Shanghai, the tournament that would move into a Masters Series slot, paid the tour $29 million.

And then you have the issue of IMG, a major sports management firm representing players like Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Three members of the company were set to testify at trial, but according to court records were told by Tour officials it would not be “in IMG’s interest for the ATP to lose the case” and an ATP official ““stated emphatically if IMG employees were to testify at the trial, the ATP would view IMG and the IMG employees as having taken Hamburg’s side against the ATP in the litigation.”

Big shock: IMG isn’t gonna testify, and it sounds like the judge won’t compel them.

The problem the ATP has is it can’t finalize the ‘09 schedule until this trial is finished, and even at that sponsors aren’t thrilled: Mercedez-Benz has already dropped out for next year, and if the Tour can’t even control where it’s tour stops are, how do you create a cohesive marketing plan?

“This case is going to tell us a lot about how powerful these individual tour sponsors are going to be in the future,” Geoffrey Rapp, an associate professor of sports law and antitrust at the University of Toledo, told the New York Times.

The trial is expected to wrap up sometime this week. A win and the ATP Tour moves forward with its Brave New World, and pushes Hamburg off the map. A loss? Big time problems for the Tour.

But maybe they have bigger ones: When questioning the 36 potential jurors about possible players testifying at the trial, lawyers mentioned the names Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, James Blake and Andy Roddick.

Only eight jurors had heard of any of them. Ouch.