Fiend at Court Unplugged
I recently came across an intriguing editorial from Slate originally published in 2005 that focused on the complicated relationship between golf and tennis. It turned up in search results as I fruitlessly looked for comparative participation data between the two sports. I shamelessly reused the headline of that editorial for this post simply for the value as click-bait. While I don’t agree with many of the assertions raised by the author, it is an interesting backdrop for considering the state of tennis today.
In 2005, when the editorial was written, the US Open had just concluded with a yet-to-be-superstar Roger Federer winning his 5th Grand Slam title against Andre Agassi. The TV ratings for the previous year’s finals had clocked in at all time lows. While ratings data was not yet out when the Slate editorial was published, it came in ever so slightly higher. Still, tennis was arguably near a historic low point of public interest.
Just as the current Tennis Industry Association uses sales of tennis balls as a metric for measuring for consumer participation, television ratings are a somewhat reasonable gauge of overall interest in the sport. However, that assertion was probably more true in 2005 than today. To illustrate that point, here are a couple of tables of ratings data pulled from one of this sites posts last year, “Painting By Numbers: US Open TV Viewership.”
| 2020 | Naomi Osaka | Victoria Azarenka | 1.85 |
| 2019 | Bianca Andreescu | Serena Williams | 3.27 |
| 2018 | Naomi Osaka | Serena Williams | 3.15 |
| 2017 | Sloane Stephens | Madison Keys | 1.85 |
| 2016 | Angelique Kerber | Karolina Pliskova | 1.46 |
| 2015 | Flavia Pennetta | Roberta Vinci | 1.60 |
| 2020 | Dominic Thiem | Alexander Zverev | 1.48 |
| 2019 | Rafael Nadal | Daniil Medvedev | 2.81 |
| 2018 | Novak Djokovic | Juan Martin del Potro | 2.09 |
| 2017 | Rafael Nadal | Kevin Anderson | 1.48 |
| 2016 | Stan Wawrinka | Novak Djokovic | 1.67 |
| 2015 | Novak Djokovic | Roger Federer | 3.15 |
What those viewership numbers say to me is that, there is tremendous interest in Serena Williams and Roger Federer. The TV viewing audience in the United States has significantly lower interest level when anyone else is playing. That is a real problem for tennis because the current superstars of the game are going to retire. It is a minor miracle that they are still playing.
In 2005, the mood in the men’s locker room about the low interest in tennis was characterized as “bitter.” That attitude prevailed across the entire community, including the players, coaches, and administrators. The fundamental question that the Slate article was addressing is what went wrong for tennis. That question is still relevant in 2021.
Here was Field Maloney’s explanation in that 2005 editorial.
How did this come to pass? Every year brings a new crop of tennis-is-dying articles, with a familiar list of theories. Changes in racquet technology have made for a faster, duller game. Too few colorful personalities at the top of the game, and too few Americans. Poor TV coverage. These are more reductive than helpful.
The rise of golf and the decline of tennis can be explained by the changing popular perceptions of the games. In the ‘50s and early ‘60s, tennis and golf were aspirational sports, part of the American upper-middle-class package: If you wanted to join, you played. Tennis, as it outgrew its country-club demographic in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, gradually became more of a sport than a lifestyle. Most tennis was no longer part of a day at the club and all the upturned-collar conversation that entailed. It was simply a couple of hours of hitting a green ball back and forth over a net.
Field Maloney editorial in Slate, September 15, 2005.
There is a lot more to break down in that explanation than I have time and space to fully explore. I certainly don’t agree with all of points that were raised. When I initially read the editorial I scoffed at the notion that the concept of lifestyle has impacted public interest in tennis. However, the more I reflected on that idea, the more plausible it seemed. In some sense, lifestyle is really just another term for what I have previously been referring to as the tennis community.
The overall assertion in the slate editorial was that golf had “defeated” tennis because it remained positioned as a “lifestyle.” On the other hand, tennis simply became a sport. I completely disagree with any suggestion that as tennis became more diverse and inclusive that it lost its broad aspirational appeal. However, there is very little distance in my mind between “this isn’t right” to “but…what if it is?” We have to consider that it is a possibility.
As the tennis machine figures out how to market tennis and engage new participants in the sport, the concept of community cannot be ignored. It may very well be that lifestyle is the glue that holds the whole thing together. We can decide what we want that lifestyle to look like and it certainly should not be modeled on any elitist or exclusionary models from the past.
I am starting to think a lot about what a modern tennis lifestyle should look like.
- Golf vs. Tennis: How one country club sport defeated the other, Field Maloney, Slate, September 15, 2005.
- U.S. OPEN TENNIS 30 YEARS OF U.S. TV RATINGS, Nielson.com, September 4, 2018.
