TENNIS:Jon Swift
The revival of tennis has proved in a sporting season just what this country is capable of. From a base of minus zero a short time ago, the game has regenerated and is on the path back.
The internal wranglings and factionalism — witness the unsavoury squabbles about the national manager at the Olympic games in Atlanta — may still exist in part under the surface but largely there is a feeling of buoyancy and optimism about what has to be done and how these aims are to be achieved.
The game was swept clean by the eminent legal and business brain of Mervyn King and his one-man commission into the ills of the game. The reins were handed over to first Terry Rosenberg and then Gordon Forbes. The administration was given the chance to redeem the sport, and they did it with speed, flair and panache.
In this regard, nothing better typifies the drive to revive a sport which had lost the credibility of the players and the public than the way a Davis Cup venue was carved out of the outfield of the club cricket oval at the Wanderers Club for the tie against Australia.
Nothing, it seems, was too much of a challenge. When insistent rain forced the final matches indoors and on to the less forgiving (for the South Africans at least) concrete surface at the Standard Bank Arena, there was a feeling that at last things were happening.
That we lost to the Italians on the clinging clay in Rome was a disappointment that was keenly felt countrywide. But it must be remembered that the enthusiasm which had bubbled briefly at the Wanderers was responsible in a major part for there being any real enthusiasm for the Italian tie in the first place.
Having lost the right to a world-ranked tournament when the previous maladministration sold off the family silver, the sport in this country did the logical thing and opted for employing the art of the possible.
This took the form of turning the country’s biggest kugel coffee shop at Sandton Square into a match venue for the golden oldies. The resultant publicity — helped in no small measure by the charismatic Yannick Noah defeating our own Johan Kriek in the final — lent a perhaps offbeat but nevertheless important impetus to what the game had been trying to achieve.
The Champions tournament was a sell-out and hugely popular with TV audiences. I was from this juncture that you really got the feeling that tennis was truly up and running again.
But more important in the long run has been the revival of the internal tour through the Satellite tournaments which have taken place. It is on just such a circuit that players like Kriek — and he remains our only Grand Slam victor — first emerged.
It is from here that young players like Jeff Coetzee are starting to learn their trade. Tennis has a way to go yet. But the feeling must be that it will get there.