Many tennis fans believe that their sport has to be the craziest and most poorly run of all. Why else would we have all of these dynamic young athletes from around the world, yet still labor in the shadows of provincial team sports, not to mention that walking and tapping game known as golf? Whether it’s the schedule or the marketing, we must be doing something wrong. ITF, ATP, WTA, IMG, EPA, APB, Grand Slam committee: Nothing logical can possibly come out of that alphabet soup. Is there anyone in the world who fully understands the game’s ranking system?
But while team sports, from baseball and basketball in the U.S. to cricket in India to soccer everywhere, do have more fanatical followings in their own countries, it isn’t because they’re run any more logically. The game with the most passionate following in the United States is college football. How does it decide a champion? By polling writers and coaches, rather than holding a definitive tournament. Of course, the definitive NCAA tournament held each year in college basketball is probably an even less accurate way of determining who the best team in the country is for that season—it simply determines who won the NCAA tournament. The NBA puts it players through 82 very physical games, only to put them through 25 more in a second season popularly known as the playoffs. Soccer matches are decided by penalty kicks. Compared to all of that, tennis’s system for crowning a year-end No. 1, while admittedly incomprehensible and utterly lacking in drama, is a model of fairness and good sense.
As far as greed-driven absurdity goes, though, it’s hard to top major league baseball. Here you have a season that lasts 162 games, long enough that the vast majority of those games, taken individually, feel irrelevant as they're being played. Then, the eight teams that survive that death march must turn around and play three out of five to move on in the playoffs—three out of five, after 162. Only when you get to the crapshoot known as the playoffs do you see the sense in having an extended baseball season in the first place. From game to game, there are few sports that are harder to predict. The world’s most dangerous lineup can be silenced by a hot pitcher, and even the game's best hitters fail two-thirds of the time. You need a lot of games to level out the random quality of the sport and separate good teams from bad.
But once the good have separated themselves over the long haul, they’re immediately thrown back into the lottery of three out of five. Starting in the early 1990s, the Atlanta Braves won their division 14 straight times; during that time, they won exactly one World Series. Not that I cared or gave it a second thought at the time; I never liked the Braves. In fact, I thought it was funny. Now, however, the tables have turned: Tonight, my team, the Philadelphia Phillies, find themselves in a Brave-like position. They dominated their division and finished with a major-league best 102 wins over the course of the regular season. But they’re tied 2-2 with the St. Louis Cardinals in their best-of-five first-rounder. A loss tonight and those 102 wins will mean nothing. That would, needless to say, be tough to swallow.
It would ne even tougher if the Phillies hadn’t ended a long drought by winning the World Series in 2008—there’s always that moment to savor and keep in mind for perspective’s sake. Just like when your favorite tennis player finally wins a major or completes a career Slam, I thought I would never worry about what the Phillies did after 2008—it was all gravy. As any self-respecting fan knows, that’s not how it works. You want your favorites to win everything. Deep down, you want them to do the impossible and prove to the world that they can’t be beaten. As that all-time winner Michael Jordan told us, there’s always something to prove, every loss hurts, and it’s just a rationalization to claim that it doesn’t. Who knows where this fan's drive comes from, but like any drive, it’s insatiable and has never heard of that weak-kneed word "perspective."
What would I mourn from a Phillies playoff loss? The 2011 season itself, as it was played and watched and cheered and booed at Citizen’s Bank Park—terrible name, great place—in South Philly. I made it down for three or four games this summer, and the place was always packed and chaotically energizing. The old Philly sports gloom, which once bordered on violence, had lifted. Each game felt like an outdoor summer concert. Granted, it was a concert with an orchestra of boo-birds dressed in replica Phillies jerseys and flip-flops, eating cheese fries and downing Bud Light because the $7 microbrew was way too expensive. But it made beautiful music on the nights I was there.
It was a summer of masterful pitching, of endless lines for the crab fries—not sure what those are, the line was always too long—and the “Bull’s BBQ,” a food stand named after well-fed Phillie legend Greg “The Bull” Luzinski. Of silent couples leaning into each other as they watched from the standing-room-only areas, the guy in a Halladay jersey, the girl with “Utley” printed across her back, each looking as if they’d seen every pitch of the season. Of loud, careening, laughing young people who were either tipsy or teenage, or maybe both. Of knowledgeable, civilized fans trying hard to remember all the bad years, so they could enjoy this one as much as possible. Of raspy young men informing an opponent, “You stink, Berkman, and you’ll always stink,” as if they were simply stating the obvious. The park was a suburban democracy, and, as the Phillies win total grew, there couldn’t have been a bad seat in the house. The vibes were too good all around.
I went to a game right before the U.S. Open, and when I got to Flushing there was no way not to revel in the contrast between the crowds. It was Manhattan yuppie vs. South Jersey high school kid, with all the differences in taste that that entails—though there were a lot of otherwise stylish tennis fans with their own version of a team jersey, the RF baseball cap, milling around the grounds in New York. But the tennis audience, in its own pricier way, was just as enthusiastic as the Phanatics; they badly wanted to see great tennis. It made me think that the sport really had missed the boat when World Team Tennis came and went in the 1970s. Billie Jean King wanted to make the sport into baseball, to take it to the boo-bird masses. But the audience at the Open would have taken tennis as it was, if it could have been reconfigured as a team game—their team game, with $7 microbrews and no Bud Light in sight. Instead, tennis is like a circus for the upscale. It comes around once a year, and you go see the athletic freaks on display. For the English, tennis is Wimbledon and nothing else. For New Yorkers, it’s two weeks of night matches at the Open.
Anyway, the summer of the Phillies could come to an end in front of their fans tonight. If so, the season might all feel like a waste—a waste of hope. If they do lose, I’ll try to remember the beery, upbeat, hand-holding crowds at the park, curse the playoff system, and move on. Nothing else could possibly be that absurd, right? I mean, there’s always the Eagles. Oh, God...