Now that was a masterwork of English comment Keith. I could even hear the accent. Bravo!
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2012 4:07 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Reviving a boring game 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 <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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