“Tennis doesn’t belong in the Olympics.” This phrase was uttered often enough during the 1980s, when the sport was making its return to the Games after six decades away, that it began to be regarded as a given, even among tennis fans. Yes, Steffi Graf was obviously thrilled to play for her country in 1988, and yes, she reveled in her Golden Slam of that year. But the anti-Games argument seemed valid at the time. Tennis players were pros, rich and famous pros who already had four of their own Olympian two-week gatherings each year. The Games, ideally, were still about unknown, maniacally dedicated amateurs doing it for love of competition and country.
The Olympics went pro in 1992, with the admission of the NBA’s Dream Team. With Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson around, Graf and Boris Becker and their colleagues no longer loomed as large, or loomed at all. By the start of the next decade, a new generation of tennis stars led by Roger Federer and Venus and Serena Williams were fully invested in the Olympic dream. Yet the feeling that tennis didn’t belong persisted right up until the eve of the 2008 Olympics. It likely persists today, but to me Beijing was a watershed. Today's tennis players were still rich and famous and individualistic, but they showed in China that going for gold meant something special to them.
It’s only fitting, because tennis and the Olympics have much in common. The sport was one of the original nine in the 1896 Games in Athens, and over the years the ITF, tennis’s ruling body, and the IOC each waged long-standing and ultimately losing battles to keep professionals out of their competitions. In fact, tennis was dropped from the Games after 1924 because the two bodies couldn’t agree on what it meant to be an amateur.
Tennis and the Olympics were each a product of Victorian values. Tennis obviously began in England, and its competitions were reserved for the upper class—all 22 participants in the the first Wimbledon identified themselves as “gentlemen,” and the winner, Spencer Gore, was an Old Harrovian (i.e., a graduate of the Harrow School, where squash was invented). The modern Olympics were the brainchild of a French nobleman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who was devoted to the ideals of the most famous Victorian schoolmaster, Thomas Arnold of the Rugby School. De Coubertin admired how English public schools incorporated athletics and sportsmanship into their (boys') education, something that was foreign to French schools at the time. He tried to import those concepts, and ended up reviving the Olympics along the way.
As the 20th century progressed, tennis and the Olympics were among the last bastions of amateurism. Each held out against the professionalization—i.e., Americanization—of sports for longer than seems possible now. I like to think of the All England Club’s 42 acres as the last, tiny fortress of the British Empire, which was finally overrun when the Club admitted professionals—as well as the U.S. talent agency IMG—in 1968. Three months after they walked through the gates, the Olympics weathered its own American revolt when sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their famous Black Power salute on the medal stand. While the IOC held off the pros for another quarter century, the heavily sponsored Games are now highly commercialized, and American-centric. Beach volleyball, rather than squash, is an Olympic sport.
(Aside: It’s interesting that “professional” used to be a dirty word in sports circles. Now the term, in all walks of life, is one of the highest compliments you can pay someone. Of course, this doesn’t mean that either pro or amateur sports—i.e., college football—is any less corrupt or dollar-driven than the other.)
Tennis and the Olympics are still not a perfect fit with the pros—imagine LeBron James bunking in a single bed in the Olympic Village and you get the idea. The old-guard, nationalistic ITF and IOC still run the shows, and this year the ITF irritated two of the Olympics’ biggest fans, Federer and Serena Williams, by forcing them to play its team events, Davis Cup and Fed Cup, at least once each year to qualify in 2016. (Federer and Serena are right; the rule should be dropped. No one is served by forcing them to play something they don’t want to play.)
And yet, to my mind, the Olympic tennis event as it's now constituted is as close to an ideal tournament as we’re going to get in the pro age. You have everyone there. You have everyone playing both for themselves and for something greater than themselves. And you have them playing doubles and mixed doubles. In that sense, the Olympics, despite its rampant commercialization, is reminiscent of an amateur era Grand Slam. For once, we get to watch doubles with the same fervor we watch singles. For once, we get to care about the whole of tennis, the team side of tennis, rather than just its individualistic side.
Still, it's the stars that shine. In 2008, we saw Rafa flat out collapse after winning the singles; Federer do his voodoo spell over Stan Wawrinka after their doubles gold; Dementieva shriek with joy; and the Williams sisters smile broadly and proudly on the medal stand as "The Star-Spangled Banner" played. We’ll see some version of those special moments (minus, sadly, Rafa's presence) on Centre Court next week. Tennis may or may not be good for the Olympics—the Games, from a U.S. point of view, are still about track, swimming, gymnastics, and basketball. But the Olympics, in the way that it showcases all of the sport, is good for tennis.