An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
In 2020 the USTA changed the the court surface used for the US Open from DecoTurf to Laykold. It marked the first time the manufacturer of the surface had changed for the tournament since 1978. As a new surface for that venue, the players really didn’t know what to expect with one exception. Serena Williams had the court at her home in Florida resurfaced with Laykold.
The 2020 Olympic tennis tournament didn’t turn out the way that most people expected. In recent history, the Olympic draws have been littered with breakout performances and unexpected results. As the tennis comes to a close at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, a sea of news articles and columns on stunning upsets in the draws is unleashed once again. It is only surprising that people are surprised.
Tennis was restored as an Olympic Medal Sport in 1988. The very fact that the word is “restored” rather than “added” reveals that tennis was a part of the Olympics in the past. That leads to the very obvious question of why tennis was excluded from the Olympic games in the first place.
With the medal rounds underway for Olympic tennis, and the games nearing a close you might be wondering exactly how much a Gold Medal is worth. Winning a gold medal is priceless of course, but the object itself has value. Additionally, many national Olympic committees pay their athletes a bonus for winning a medal. If Olympic glory is viewed as a purely financial transaction however, it is completely understandable why so many tennis players would elect to skip the event.
The Tokyo Olympics is the perfect illustration of one of the challenges that tennis has attracting television viewership in the United States. The daily order of play starts at 10pm ET and concludes about the time that most Americans are rolling out of bed the next morning. Casual fans aren’t likely to stumble across tennis matches during that hour. It’s a tough watch for even hard core tennis fans such as myself.
The Tokyo Olympic Tennis competition got underway yesterday evening and ran overnight. With the timezone differential, Olympic tennis will be played from 10pm through 6am Eastern Time during the early rounds. That is basically overnight, for the continental United States. Additionally, tennis matches will not be broadcast on the Tennis Channel as was the practice with previous Olympic competitions. The primary station in the United States will be the Olympics Channel.
As dominant as the United States women are in professional tennis at the moment, there is one country that is arguably just as strong: The Czech Republic. The small country currently boasts five players in the top 50 in the WTA singles rankings. Additionally, with six of the top 50 WTA doubles players including three in the top 10, the tiny country is a usually a prohibitive favorite to carry the Fed Cup doubles tie.
In the United States television broadcasts of the 2021 Roland Garros tournament (more popularly known as the French Open) was carried by a partnership between NBC and the Tennis Channel. For the first time in history, the addition of lights at Roland Garros enabled a night session at the tournament. The tournament organizers decided that the start of the night session would be 9pm time in Paris. From a media perspective, this should have created a viewing bonanza in the United States. Unfortunately, tennis fans will likely remember what happened this year as the Peacock disaster.
Last week the Umpire who Gave Birth to Me clipped out a column from my hometown newspaper titled “Where have you gone Conners, McEnroe, Agassi and Pete?” When exploring the fragmented nature of media coverage of professional tennis in the United States yesterday, I may have stumbled onto a possible answer to that question. The stars of American tennis didn’t leave the sport but rather the sport left the United States.
Televised tennis in the United States is not at all viewer friendly. Fragmented coverage is spread across whatever network happens to own the rights to the sport in any given week. It is a is a real problem for the overall tennis ecosystem. In order to increase participation in any sport, prospective players have to be exposed to it. Television broadcasts are an effective way to raise awareness and attract participation. All sports are filled with stories of how a player watched it in their youth that sparked their dreams to play at the highest level.