An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Here is a great trivia question to spark conversation and, more importantly – potentially win a bar bet. If you ask a person what year the US Open tennis tournament was first held, they are likely to come up with a date in the 1880s. It is a trick question. The US Open wasn’t played until the start of the Open Era, which was 1968. Before that year, the US Open wasn’t “Open.” That may prompt the question of what came before.
The US Open is played at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Throughout her playing career, Billie Jean King was in frequent conflict with the USLTA (later USTA) and one of its most outspoken and colorful critics. As an organization, the USTA has a long history of an extremely insular culture that ostracizes dissenters. That makes the decision to say “Thank You” to Billie Jean by naming the National Tennis Center in her honor all the more momentous. That recognition of her enormous contributions to the sport was an act that was entirely out of character for the USTA.
Following her loss to Naomi Osaka in the 2018 US Open Finals, Serena Williams had a lot of soul searching to do. The emotional processing following that match included her own behavior, the code violations, and ultimately the reactions of the fans. In Serena’s own words, “Finally I realized that there was only one way for me to move forward. It was time for me to apologize to the person who deserved it the most.”
Yesterday I described a twitter firestorm that erupted following disclosure that Serena Williams had constructed a Laykold tennis court at her residence prior to the 2020 US Open. Some fans felt that the USTA was providing Serena with an unfair advantage. Others speculated that the organization was trying to make amends for “stealing” the US Open Finals from her in 2018. In the aftermath of that match, the USTA started an initiative to better educate tennis fans on the rules of the sport. Based on that twitter thread, it might not be working.
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.