Now that Wimbledon is upon us, I fell to thinking this morning about
the future of tennis. At the consumer-supply end, the imminent future
is obvious. More and more ambitious parents will exploit their
children at younger and younger ages by sending them to tennis
academies. Tournament players will get taller and taller. Serves will
get faster and faster. The skill differences between the top 100
seeds of both ladies' and men's tennis will become more and more
wafer-thin. The repertoire of shots, already barely half-a-dozen of
them will be increasingly occupied by brute-force forehand and
backhand shots played from the baseline, so rallies will get longer
and longer. The games will get longer and longer.
At the consumer-demand end, games will thus become more and more
boring. And the professionals involved -- the players with their
necessary teams of coaches, managers, physiotherapists,
psychologists, travel assistants, investment advisors, etc -- will be
such a heavy burden on the game that the whole sector will become
financially crippled and will have to contract. It'll be rather like
the fate of symphony orchestras and the classical music scene of the
last century. Attendances at the big events will no doubt continue
for a long time yet, but increasingly for reasons of social status
rather than content -- to be seen and, later, to be able to say that
one has been there.
Tennis is, of course, a thoroughly enjoyable game and will no doubt
persist at the amateur level. Hopefully, anyway. But, as a spectator
sport with monstrous ticket prices (and, at Wimbledon, those of the
obligatory strawberries and cream), it seriously needs re-jigging in
some way. Presumably, it could be done. It was achieved in the case
of the King Of All Sports, cricket, with the institution of the
50-over game. Boy, aren't they fun? This has so much revived the game
that even attendances at the more sophisticated four-innings,
multi-day matches are now jam-packed. I can think of a way that
soccer, increasingly delivering boring drawn games and more fouling,
can be revived. Reduce team sizes to 10 or even 9 or 8 players. It
needs experimenting with. One of these ought to give more
entertaining scope for the rare outstanding talent such as Messi,
Ronaldo and Rooney and more exciting scores as well as reducing
opportunities for fouls.
As for tennis, I cannot say. I've scarcely played the game since
adolescence and know little about it. But if I were a greybeard, high
up in the Lawn Tennis Association or the International Tennis
Federation, I would be very worried.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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