As is almost always the case, there are interesting dimensions to the apparent demise of Australia as a great tennis power, but not a single one is touched on here.
It always seemed to me that Australia's leap into post-modernism - the perfect symbol of which was the shift of venue for the Australian Open from Kooyong to what was officially called (and, tellingly, no longer is) the National Tennis Center.
In fact, I spent a fair amount of time at Melbourne Park last week trying to figure out of the NTC had officially changed or dropped its name (Google it and you'll see plenty of refrences), for which I earned a good number of those Get a Life, Dude looks. In fact, the majority of people I spoke with had no idea what the NTC is, or was. Clearly, we have moved into the new, Vodafone Arena era.
In my book, The Courts of Babylon (as well as other places), I have often doted on the fact that when the NTC opened for business in 1988, the hallways of what is now Rod Laver Arena were lined with pictures of rock stars, not tennis players (the stadium was a multi-purpose venue, but wasn't tennis the raison d'etre?), and you could comb the entire grounds at Flinders (now Melbourne) Park and find not a trace of the Aussie tennis heritage.
I took that as an ominous sign - a striking, almost willful repudiation of a grand and glorious tradition. But it also signaled a shift that was global in nature- the trend away from athletics with an active emphasis on tradition and participation, toward presenting tennis as spectacle and entertainment with a rapidly changing and largely meaningless cast of characters. I think Men Without Hats might have performed there, but I can't be sure. And there is a great difference between things that are entertaining and entertainers. Watching a Koala scarfing down eucalyptus leaves is certainly entertaining, but that doesn't define the fuzzy little guy as an entertainer. He's just going about his business in a way that appeals to us, much like Roger Federer.
Worse yet, the logic - such as it is - at the heart of this editorial linked above is laughable. If Aussies have truly evolved from large-wristed, barefooted sportsmen into shop clerks and layabouts, how do you account for Australian swimmers, or cricketers? It may be an inconvenient truth, but it seems to me that Australian sports in general are chugging along quite nicely. That tennis for a period was the victim of neglect (yes, I'm well aware of Tennis Australia's various development programs), and the geniuses at TA seemed to flee from, rather than toward, their great tradition, is the more compelling issue. And, of course, it has certainly provided at least one cynic with an opportunity to revel in Australia's woes.
Okay, done with that rant, let's move on:
In my ESPN blog today, I hit on a topic that came at me out of the blue - the fact that in Roger Federer and Serena Williams, we have the two most viable candidates for completing a Grand Slam since Pete Sampras and Martina Hingis in 1997 (that year, Sampras was defending a Roland Garros semifinal; Hingis would fall one match short of a Slam when she was upset in the French Open final by Eva Majoli). I predicted that either Federer or Serena (or both) would either achieve a Grand Slam this year, or go into the U.S. Open with a shot at doing it.
I'm sticking to that call. I think they call it going out on a limb. Saw away!
