Say it’s March and you want to join in the madness that ensues in tennis and college basketball over the course of that month. It can be tricky enough to follow both at home, but what if you’re on the road and there’s no Tennis Channel to be found at your unenlightened hotel? In the old days—like, say, 2008—you would have been content to tune into the basketball and find out what happened in Indian Wells or Key Biscayne online. You might even have had to wait until the next day to read the scores, in tiny black and white type, buried at the bottom of the back page of your paper’s sports section.
I bring it up because I faced this dilemma this past weekend. I wanted to watch the NCAA Regional Finals, but there was also Miami, where, among other things, Djokovic was playing Baghdatis. Not a problem. I tuned to the basketball on TV and propped an IPad up right below it. There, on the TennisTV app, were the palm trees of South Florida. There were the flag-waving Argentine fans waiting in the Grandstand for Juan Martin del Potro. There were the players walking across the familiar grounds of Crandon Park for their match. I kept the sound on the TV, muted the IPad, and flicked my eyes up and down to watch both. I obviously had a case of March madness.
Just as tennis itself has evolved in the last decade, so has the way we watch and consume it. As the pros have gotten more powerful and more physical, they’ve also become a bigger part of our lives. I’ve written before about how, when the Tennis Channel first appeared in the far upper reaches of my cable lineup in 2004, it seemed miraculous that I could see the early rounds from tournaments like Monte Carlo. Now, a few short seasons later, as the Tennis Channel has expanded its coverage and web streaming channels like TennisTV have gone even deeper into the tours, I feel gypped if I can’t watch any match I want, from any tournament in the world. What was a miracle in 2004 is my God-given right today. Finding out last week that I couldn’t see Venus vs. Kvitova anywhere just seemed weird.
Is all of this exposure healthy? It has its drawbacks—I don’t really need to know what Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are doing every day. But the upside is greater. It’s hard to think of a sport that’s better suited to the far-flung community that the Internet can build. Internationally, interest in tennis is wide and thin—it’s followed in virtually every country, but it isn’t overwhelmingly popular in any of them. This means that being a tennis lover can get lonely; it can be hard to find a serious fan of the pro game even among your regular playing partners at your club. The web’s message boards, blog commenters, and relentlessly tweeting fans from Serbia to the Philippines let you know that people everywhere are watching.
What’s surprising to me is that all of this coverage, rather than feeling like overkill, has only become more addictive—it has made following tennis seem less like an escape from real life, and more like an essential, and fun, part of it. Take this past February. In the past, the quiet month between the Australian Open and the Indian Wells-Key Biscayne swing has been a black hole for tennis, a place where the excitement from Melbourne goes to die. That wasn’t the case in 2012. This time we had the U.S.’s stunning win over the Swiss in Davis Cup, Federer’s back-to-back titles in Rotterdam and Dubai, Victoria Azarenka’s continuing undefeated streak, and an upset win by Andy Murray over Novak Djokovic. In other years, all of those things might have happened, but without the Tennis Channel I would have seen little of it, and without the community of enthusiasts on Twitter and in the blogosphere, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it or thought about it as much if I had. Instead, I would have found the results in tiny type at the bottom of the back page of the sports section, and wondered again if I was crazy to care.
As a journalist, the new exposure also has its upsides and downsides. I’ve gotten to see each of them this past month in my coverage of Indian Wells and Key Biscayne. In Indian Wells, it could feel as if being at the event was almost a hindrance. If you went out to watch a match, you might miss a press conference, a press conference that would be available to the rest of the world by the time you got back to your desk, and which might include a good quote that would learn about over Twitter from someone sitting a thousand miles away. It feels like everyone is all-access.
Conversely, during Key Biscayne this week I’ve been able to sit at my desk at work, a thousand miles away from the tournament, tune into side courts on TennisTV, and hear conversations between coaches and players that I would never have heard if I had been sitting in the front row. This phenomenon—the best way see an event is not to be there—has been around since TV started broadcasting sports, but the Internet, with its views of multiple courts, its instant transcripts, its stats, and its stream of tweeted opinions and observations and insults, has accelerated it. Again, though, the upside is greater. More total information helps any sports writer do his or her job better—it forces you to try to do something original, or at least interesting, with that information more often.
As I said, the Internet has made me feel closer to the sport, and its fellow fans. It has made watching tennis, and everything that comes with that activity now—judging and enjoying the players’ performances, shots, behavior, clothes; seeing various exotic locations spread out in front of you; comparing your opinions with other obsessives'—seem like real life rather than an escape from real life, a world you can relate to and live in, rather than a secret passion.
This past weekend, watching basketball on TV and tennis on the IPad, I felt like maybe the Internet had even taken it step farther. My favorite part of the Key Biscayne broadcast that I saw didn’t involve any actual tennis. It came in the time between matches on the Grandstand, before del Potro and his opponent that day, Ivo Karlovic, got to the court. The TennisTV cameras didn’t cut to an ad or go to a different court; they just panned around the Grandstand, looking at the fans beginning to gather and chant, looking at the palm trees waving behind the court, looking off in the distance at a sunset over Miami. There was no commentary, so when I did turn the sound on, I could hear other fans chatting idly in the seats nearby. This, as much as seeing Novak Djokovic or Serena Williams play, was what I missed about not going to Miami. This was what a tennis tournament felt like. I was on the Internet far away, but it really did seem like I was there, part of the far-flung tennis world. It's a good time to be a fan.