Mornin', Tribe. As we all look forward to the weekend, keep in mind that TennisWorld will hold its first (annual?) New York social next Tuesday, April 24th, 6:30-9 PM, at The Telephone Bar in Manhattan's East Village. We have their back room reserved, and you'll be able to order drinks and food at your leisure. If you plan to attend and have not RSVP's, please do so to me or Steggy . It's not mandatory but it would be nice for us to have a rough head count. I'm hoping El Jon Wertheim will join us, and have invited a few other special guests as well.
A few weeks ago, I was hurrying through the 42nd St. Subway station and I passed one of the officially (NYC) endorsed buskers/performers, a trio comprised of three elderly African-American gents playing some very cool (and distinctly non-urban) bluegrass music (featuring banjo, bass, fiddle). They were the Ebony Hillbillies, and after pausing to listen for a few moments, I went on my way. Twenty minutes later, I was kicking myself for not throwing a few bucks into the open bass case, or ponying up the $10 and buying one of the CD's.
Well, yesterday the Ebony Hillbillies were back on the job, in the antiseptic hallway leading from the uptown No. 1 train to the R and W lines. I jumped on the chance and am now the proud owner of my first EH CD, Sabrina's Holiday. A little later today, we're launching a new TennisWorld feature that will probably become a weekly staple, Tennis by the Letters. It's a slight variation on the very popular "By the Numbers. . ." feature that so many magazines and websites run these days. It should be up later this afternoon, about the time we're in the car and heading for the farm in game-rich Andes.
Tomorrow is Arbor Day in a neighboring town, Walton. The local Soil and Agriculture District office will be selling various seedlings and shrubs, some of which are great forage for wildlife, potential Christmas trees (although I could never whack a tree I planted myself), windbreaks, or merely decorative plants. By Saturday evening, my back will be aching, I'm sure.
A few follow-up thoughts on recent posts:
TW's good friend Bonnie DeSimone, is down in Delray Beach, covering Fed Cup for ESPN. I neglected to check the site before I wrote yesterday's Fed Cup post, and for some reason she wasn't linked by Bob Larson's Tennis News or at Court Coverage. Here's a link to her story. BTW, she will be there for the tie, and she'll have a wrap-up on Monday. looking for the skinny to supplement your viewing, she'll have it.
Now. . .
There is no successful sport that is run by the athletes who play it. This is something to keep in mind when contemplating the friction between players and the ATP, WTA, or the ITF. The current ATP model may come as close, as it is a partnership between the players and tournaments; in most other major sports, there is an official establishment that runs the game, and a player's association that represents its partners, the athletes.
The recent controversy over the Masters Series status of certain events (Monte Carlo and Hamburg) and the overall, widely acknowledged challenges faced by the ATP underscore some of the pitfalls of having the players take too leading a role in administering and, basically, promoting the game. One obvious one is that players are creatures of the era in which they play, and they are creatures of habit (like the rest of us); they cannot and perhaps should not be expected to transcend their of-the-moment prejudices Another problem is the mixed signals sent when the players get into a conflict with the executive, administrative arm of the game. A person who understand how the game is organized has every right to ask: What on earth is wrong when the players are criticizing or bucking the policies and decisions made by an entity they own and run (albeit in a partnership)?
Remember, this isn't like a player's union resisting the policy of the league in which it functions. This is essentially the players criticizing themselves, or those whom they delegated to make decisions. Once again, the game ends up looking fractured and crippled by disagreement and dissent. Forget who is right or wrong for moment; the signal is not a good one. It suggests that the model is flawed. Add the challenges the game has faced in its attempt to grow (and playing musical chairs with events and grabbing at any purse-string dangled in front them is no model for, to use the mot de jour, "sustainable" growth) and it's easy to get the impression that tennis is not institutionally and organizationally as competitive as it needs to be in the intensely competitive sports market.
Arlen Kantarian, the Chief Executive of Professional Tennis for the USTA, made this point for me in a recent conversation in a different context. He laid out the reality: television drives the success of sports today, like it or not. And tennis has never been able to offer television networks the level of continuity and uniformity which the nets deem necessary to fully get behind and promote a pro sport. Some of this is real nuts and bolts stuff: If you can't offer a viewer a reasonable number of tournaments, in a clear sequence, over an adequate period of time, you're at a competitive disadvantage.
Consider the numbers Kantarian produced for me, keeping in mind that the most continuity tennis offered last year was the 8 weeks of the U.S. Open Series (an entity that, bafflingly, is dismissed by some readers here as some kind of publicity stunt). But okay. Eight weeks, right? Now, compare:
National Football League: 27 weeks
National Basketball Association: 36 weeks
Major League Baseball: 35 weeks
National Hockey League: 36 weeks
Major League Soccer: 32 weeks
Any questions? I am going out on a limb here to suggest that this situation is not just comparable, but identical, in Europe (weigh-in, if you have the data, one way or the other).
Alright, now, tennis is an international game. That means all kinds of complex business problems, not to mention the broadcaster's bane: time zones. But let's start small. I remember that the BBC used to broadcast a soccer match-of-the-week, every week (for all I know, it still does). So why not have a Match of the Week? in tennis - even if it is a Thursday or Friday, to steer clear of the crowded weekend sports buffet?
Couldn't ESPN2 or The Tennis Channel (once it reached a respectable number of homes) come up with a Match of the Week, in the specific time slot every week (even if it is tape delayed), through an enterprising joint-venture between broadcasters, tournaments, and the ATP and WTA? Almost every marquee match is broadcast by someone these days; how hard can it be for ESPN to negotiate to get a U.S. feed for the most appealing, Thursday quarterfinal at, say Monte Carlo, on a one-off basis, even if it meant shoving Pat McEnroe and Cliff Drysdale into a bunker in leafy Connecticut to do virtual commentary?
This, also, is where a concept like the U.S. Open Series, or the Roland Garros Series (which doesn't really know it is a Series, but never mind), is a critically valuable idea. The high-point for television tennis in my time was the great series of PBS Monday night broadcasts, circa 1977, that brought us the finals of the U.S. summer circuit events in an orderly, weekly string (just to show how times have changed, most of those events were on clay; the only flaw was that some people got mighty sick of watching Guillermo Vilas grind one opponent after another into dust). And the Virginia Slims series of tournaments were a close second, in terms of providing continuity.
Looking at the bigger picture, one way to resurrect and/or provide that level of continuity would be for the tours to adopt a regional approach based on three or more distinct "circuits" - a year-opening Pacific/Asia/U.S. circuit, culminating with the Miami; a spring, European clay-court circuit, followed by a break for an annual summer tennis festival culminating with Wimbledon; a summer, U.S. hard court circuit, culminating the U.S. Open. You could also add a fall/winter indoor circuit. The only under-represented region is, obviously, Central/South American. But that region has been able to stage so few quality events, despite the proliferation of players it produces, that it could probably be folded into the first, winter/spring leg - these days, clay and hard are not different, at least speed-wise.
I know we're all tapped out on discussing the geopolitics of tennis, so feel free to talk amongst yourselves, about anything. And have a great weekend, everyone!
