Day 6 of the Australian Open, 2014. Not even halfway through the tournament, and there is one U.S. man left standing in the Men’s Singles draw: Donald Young. He has a 3rd round match later today. Regardless of how that turns out, it has to beg (and beg and beg) the question: what is the problem right now for American’s in the sport of tennis?
Some of you know my history with tennis. I never came close to achieving what these athletes have. I was 99% better than most of my foes, but not 99.9% better like these guys are. Tennis players, and these athletes, are other-worldly in terms of what they do on the court and the condition they’re in. So this is not a rag on tennis. But it’s a somewhat-rag on American Men’s tennis. And when you consider tennis overall, were it not for Serena Williams, would there really be any discussion at all in this country about it?
I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s. What I considered (and still consider) the glory days of US tennis with many Americans competing for Grand Slam titles as well as several willing protagonists from foreign countries who you loved or loved to hate. It all made great theater and the sport itself was promising. It was liked. It was respected. It was despised by some, which didn’t make it any less compelling.
As a kid, clinics were closed except for the very best players. Participation in the game wasn’t “high”, but it was selectively high. Not elitist, because if you were talented you could thrive. But it was selective. The sport itself, the game, the rigor, the discipline, is not for everyone. Junior tournaments were open to a certain number of players that met certain ranking requirements. There were not fields of 256. Expenses have always been just that: very expensive. But my folks built me a wooden backboard in our driveway that I used (rather than a garage door, thanks Pop) with an old Donnay racquet and dead tennis balls.
It was during this time that the barriers and means towards being great at the sport were what made the sport great.
Read that statement one more time. The very barriers that our tennis governing bodies have sought to break down in recent years were in fact one of the things that made our players truly great. It was not a spirit of inclusion; and that fact didn’t mean it excluded those with lesser means. It simply meant: “prove yourself, if you’re good, you can play.” If you weren’t good enough, you were told you weren’t good enough and it left you two options: 1) try and want and plead to prove those people wrong or 2) quit and do something else.
And really, what is wrong with that? If you didn’t fit into category #1, guess what? Tennis wasn’t the sport for you anyway.
More efforts at general participation did not mean more success at high levels as a nation years ago. In fact, less was more. I can remember being spurned by many a governing body in tennis which made me upset. And more motivated. Like it did many of my competitors who have told me the very same thing.
I competed heavily, mainly in the 90’s in college and ATP low-levels. Not a bad decade for US Men’s tennis then. Fast-forward to the 00’s, and the early part of that decade was hardly half-bad either. Thank you Pete, Andre, Andy, James and many more.
We knew something was potentially horribly wrong in the last five or so years. We saw tennis executives scrambling to hold onto once-promising young talents in their teens and early 20’s and promote them again. I see you, Donald Young, you’ve gotten more ESPN airtime in the last 24 hours than you have the last 24 months. To try and breathe life back into those initially forgotten. Scrambling for youth tennis initiatives and trying to convince us that littler courts, lighter tennis balls and smaller racquets would heal our collective wounds or provide at least more interest and participation in our sport. Davis Cup stadiums less than half-full now? For those of you in Hartford, CT decades ago, watching McEnroe/Becker, you’re shaking your head.
How did it come to this?
Don’t blame new media or social media. Don’t blame people’s attention spans. Don’t blame that the sport is expensive. Don’t believe what you hear about kids who don’t want to work hard anymore. The answer is in how you motivate kids, and no one I can see (at least in the public eye) is remotely coming close to doing that; and in fact they’re doing the opposite.
Think of it this way: the harder one has to work for something, the more enriching the journey and the outcome is, and the motivation to get there is greater. If you land on third base and think you hit a triple, it’s different than actually hitting a double and stretching it into a triple.
In college tennis, an area I’m very attuned to, we have executives recently who have tried to make the sport “better for TV”. Shortening already-shortened matches (after they had been shortened in 1992), playing “let’s” on serves, and submitting a parody of real tennis to the American public. Shorten the matches, more people will watch, it will be more exciting, and the sport will be alive again. It will attract more viewers, more attention, and maybe we’ll stumble on someone people really like. That’s what I believe the thinking to be at least.
Except, in the entire history of the sport, the individuals – the players – are the ones who make the sport compelling and always will. And we all forget that. Not the venues, not the quirks, not the short-cuts, not changes to the rules.
I’ve gone back and forth on who is right and who is wrong related to US Men’s tennis. Or Women’s tennis for that matter. Sans Serena, is that working? Well, what I do know is our country thrives on stars, and star power. Looks are important. Personality is important. Success is super-important, at least initially. And I find from a distance that the very people in charge of tennis, because of the need to find that beacon, that star, are willing to marginalize the game to find that one shining light when they should be doing the opposite. All the actions taken by tennis “upper-level management” have been akin to putting band-aids on more-serious diseases rather than coming to grips with the disease and finding the real ailment.
Which is that you’re going to have to alienate some people, and piss some people off, if you really want to find your next motivated champion at the very highest levels.
I say this, again, from afar. But I’m not unengaged by any means, nor uninterested nor uneducated.
In almost every walk of life, when you water-down or make too easy the means with which one has to earn success, then the success one usually ends up finding resembles that of a rickety bathroom faucet and not an ocean as previously thought.
Which turns to player development, and our youth.
The US players in the top 50, top 100, top 250 in the world should be proud of what they’ve accomplished, make no mistake about that.
But, really, what the public has been told about our efforts to make the US, a once-great tennis nation for men, great again is pretty far afoul from what it should be doing logically or based on data no matter how that data is painted. As if often the case in so many things, the data can always tell the story the storyteller wants it to.
I’m looking at the data, and the data I see shows a shell of a tennis-playing country with relatively little motivation for the very inhabitants to endure the rigors of the sport anymore. And that starts young, folks. The data also tells me that more doesn’t mean more. For every QuickStart program, there are more and more kids involved in tennis and sticking with tennis for as long as their busy extracurricular schedules allow. There are also more and more kids who are not representing us at the highest professional levels or showing a path to the upper echelons of the sport. These aren’t mindless assertions. Look it up, folks.
So which is better? More involvement and know-how for our sport-of-a-lifetime? Or being a world under-power in a kingdom we once held the keys to?
Justifiable questions. I know for sure that the sport is based on success, individual star power, ego, work ethic, and about 5 other characteristics. And when you find a star, or stars like we had in the Sampras, Courier, Agassi, Chang, Martin, etc. era, followed by Andy, James and more, more and more people want to play the sport. Just like I did. And not because the nets were lower for me as a kid or because other people were worried I would lose confidence from going 0-18 in national competitions (like I did as a junior) before becoming the #1 doubles player in the US as an under-18 year old and an accomplished college player.
Yet, our collective answer has been to homogenize the sport in our country in hopes that more participants means more chances to find the next great player and to groom our next champion, rather than the exact opposite approach. Shooting fish in a barrel.
Less is more, folks. Put away your tricks and psychological experiments to engage kids, and you’ll find your next great set of American men. Make it tougher, not easier. You’ll leave some kids out, but they probably would have found Lacrosse, football, golf or baseball anyway. It doesn’t mean they won’t watch tennis or buy tickets to an event in later years, and in fact, the opposite might be true: they’ll know how insanely hard the sport is and have that much more appreciation for it.
Good luck to the US competitors this entire year. I’ll be rooting for you, and the next great American Men’s players (and women’s players too, but Serena has it pretty well in hand for a while). I just have a feeling for the men, it may take a while.