Men’s tennis is in a mess. This year’s Wimbledon was a bore, with one of the worst finals yet, and the Australian and French Opens were also numbingly mediocre. The ATP, the men’s ruling body, is this week desperately trying to convince everybody in New York who cares to listen that the game has turned the corner, but you wouldn’t trust Mark Miles, its chief executive, to recognise the corner of a tennis court. If only Tiger Woods had been given a racquet to eat his rusks off, or Oracene Williams had given birth to Scott and Mars.
The women’s game, with Venus and Serena at the fore, has zoomed past the men in the television ratings, while golf won the TV battle with men’s tennis more than five years ago.
To be sure, Woods is not the most animated or stunningly interesting of men. But, like Michael Schumacher, he has achieved a level of brilliance in his sport that has left a multitude of sponsors salivating at his feet.
This year’s United States Open at Flushing Meadows began on Monday to the mournful newspaper cries of ”men’s game in need of a boost” and ”men’s game longs for rivalry”. Now this might simply be interpreted as nothing more than a local realisation that Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, with 20 major titles between them, are all but washed up in terms of grand-slam tennis — or any tennis in Sampras’s case. All would change if Andy Roddick or James Blake win a week on Sunday, but with only six minor titles, all in the US, in the port- folio of these two American youngsters, anticipation of success is not high.
The New York Daily News US Open pull-out would doubtless have sold a few more copies if its ”Queens of the Court” headline had referred to the men’s draw rather than the Williams sisters’ rivalry. And this is the strange thing about men’s tennis — the more rollickingly bad mannered and boorish it becomes, the better is it remembered.
Make a lewd gesture with the butt of the racket between your legs like Jimmy Connors, or rant and rave at the umpire like John McEnroe or Ilie Nastase, and the crowds love it, as does television. Smash a few racquets, or guillotine the potted flowers, and it only gets better. OK, McEnroe ultimately became a tirading bore, but at least he was seen to care, and his battles with the iceman Bjorn Borg were all the more electric. So bring back the rude boys.
But petrified of being unable to cope with such iconoclastic behaviour, the ATP instituted a level of fines and penalties that have ripped the guts out of the sport. They may have pleased those backwoodsmen who still believe the game should be played in all white and complete silence, but they have left the marketing men in despair. The ”New Balls” campaign, featuring up-and-comers looking mean, has been a flop, compounded by the fact that the ATP’s 10-year $1,2-billion deal with ISL went belly up with the demise of the Swiss marketing company.
Remarkably Miles has kept his job, although nearly a fifth of the ATP workforce was axed. The ATP top brass are wonderfully adept at ignoring their own inadequacies, while being seemingly incapable of halting the downward spiral in marketing and public interest in the men’s game, excluding the four grand-slam events, which are run independently.
The Tennis Masters Series, a disparate collection of the so-called ”top” nine tournaments outside the four slam events, has not worked as a unit, with only five having title sponsors, and the annual race remains a non-runner. Men’s tennis desperately needs better leadership, a leadership more concerned with the well-being and promotion of the game and less wrapped up with bland, ineffectual marketing. The popularity of sport may be cyclical, and dependent on great players, but this does not excuse the ATP’s inertia and lack of cohesive policy. To the public it looks like the blind leading the bland. —