As a player, Jim Courier was famous for his dedication to the sport, and that hasn’t changed since he retired. Here the four-time Grand Slam champion has an e-mail exchange with TENNIS.com about the state of tennis today.
Is pro tennis healthier than it was a decade ago, when Sports Illustrated asked, IS TENNIS DYING? If so, what has improved?
This question must be answered in two parts; one for the rest of the world and one for the U.S. Globally, tennis is healthy today, as we see more countries producing champions. Large growth engines for the game like China and India are participating more and more on the professional stage. In the USA tennis faces stiff competition and must be proactive in reaching the masses. Tennis has never been ‘dying,’ but other sports have been, and remain, better organized and have prospered at tennis’ expense in the last 25 years.
Were the 1970s really a golden age for pro tennis, or is it just a case of misplaced nostalgia for the “good old days.” If it really was a golden age, what has been lost?
Every era seems to look better in the rear-view mirror than when it is in progress. That’s just human nature. The ’70s was a time when tennis enjoyed terrific popularity (and caught my attention as a child) with great rivalries, diversity of characters, and strong celebrity participation. People also aspired to live the “tennis lifestyle” with the clothes, bracelets, and shoes even if they didn’t play at all. Tennis was fashionable.
The ’90s offered a strong era of diverse champions and personalities, as does the current era, but getting the public to connect with them in the U.S. is challenging when the athletes don’t play here as often as they did in the ’70s. The game has gone global and that’s not always a good thing.
Another factor is the stiff competition for public attention that tennis (and all sports) faces now more than ever. Q ratings in the U.S. are very important and our top players have broken through to be among the highest-rated athletes recently (Venus, Serena, and Andre, with Maria growing rapidly), which is encouraging.
If you had to choose, do you enjoy watching today’s men’s game more or less than you did 25 years ago?
I enjoy the athletes more today. I enjoyed the rivalries more then. Tennis needs rivalries like we need oxygen.
What is the single biggest problem with the way the game is run or marketed today?
We don’t pool our collective TV rights. It’s time to take a page out of the NFL playbook and let one voice negotiate on tennis’ behalf. That’s a quick fix that would give us more leverage and inject more dollars into the sport overall. Having said that, it will be very difficult to get the powers that be to speak with one voice anytime soon.
What can the men’s tour do to make European stars like Federer, Safin, and Nadal interesting and attractive to American audiences when they’re not playing Andy Roddick?
It’s really a question of scheduling. If the top global stars played more often in the U.S. they would be more popular here. The global aspect of tennis is both a plus and minus. The plus is that players can play worldwide and spread the global popularity of the game with their occasional presence. The minus is we don’t have the bandwidth to dig deep into the public conscious in each market due to the infrequency of our time commitment there. The U.S. fans love the foreign golfers who grace their TV screens weekly, and NBA players from foreign shores are adored in the U.S. as well. Of course our fans do want to see homegrown stars as well. Having more of a televised North American season like the U.S. Open Series (but even longer and with all of the players) would certainly make the foreign players and the game more popular here.
Davis Cup and Fed Cup seem like two very underexposed and undervalued tennis entities. How would you change the handling of these events to give them more gravity on the sports fan’s calendar?
I think you start with the premise of making these competitions easier for the general sports fan to understand. I would keep Fed Cup and Davis Cup separate. I would start by holding the events every other year (steering clear of Olympic years) and having the first two rounds of competition remain in the same format (home and away ties) while bringing the final four teams (with the defending champion hosting the finals and receiving a bye to the final four) together for a 10-day extravaganza for the tennis (media) world to focus on. It’s currently a wonderful regional competition that could be a tremendous asset for global tennis popularity.
Are injuries reaching alarming rates these days, or is everyone overreacting to what they think is a huge problem in tennis?
Overreacting.
Two serious problems in tennis these days: Doping and gambling. What are your thoughts on these issues, and which is a bigger problem?
If great monetary rewards are available, people will cut corners. It always has been the case and always will be. The doping issue is one that tennis has been proactive in addressing, although not without difficulties. The gambling menace is a darker specter as players could fall under its influence and affect the outcome of matches in a manner that will be hard to police. It bears watching and I think gambling will be the bigger problem long-term.
Follow up: How come we only hear about this stuff from the men’s side?
Great question. Answer unknown.
What’s your favorite tournament to watch?
U.S. Open and Aussie Open. The center court becomes a stage with a bright spotlight on the night matches.
What do you think of the parity-vs.–dominant-stars debate? Which is better for tennis in the long run?
Rivalry is the answer. When the Lakers and Bulls dominated, basketball ratings soared. We need consistent match-ups in the finals of majors where fans are forced to choose a side between two diverse characters. Revenge for a recent major defeat is a healthy topic for the media to sell and the public to buy into. A rivalry with animosity is another healthy thing for the sport. While intense competition is a necessity, the big-picture answer is to be able to build and tell stories that grab the non-tennis fan’s attention. (Also, get tennis players on Page Six and in Us Weekly and People magazines. Tennis stars need publicists like Hollywood stars. This is entertainment and the sooner we face that fact, the better.)
In the same vein, do we need rivalries for pro tennis to be exciting? Or is it just as exciting when a nonpareil genius like Federer comes along and creates buzz for the sport simply because he’s head and shoulders above everyone else (as Tiger Woods has done in golf)?
Federer is essential viewing solely for his incredible repertoire, in my view, but he needs to be pushed for the public to attach themselves to him. We need to see his emotions come out at crunch time. We need to see him falter, struggle, and overcome to connect with him. If he is cruising at 30,000 feet while everyone one else grinds through speed bumps, it’s not that compelling for the fan. He must be human even though his tennis skills are seemingly something else altogether.
If you were given the chance to construct a yearlong tennis calendar, how would compose the season?
Start in February and end by the 1st of November. Make the spread between Roland Garros and Wimbledon three weeks instead of two. Have logical seasons leading to the majors, à la the U.S. Open series. End the season with the tour championships followed by a team competition that ends around November 1. Have a three-month off-season from competition.
Just as golf has a European and, essentially, an American tour, with players primarily devoted to one, does pro tennis need to do that to make the sport more popular in this country? Additionally, would that also cut down on the immense time, cost, and physical demands of non-stop travel that lead to burn-out and injury?
This answer may ruffle feathers, but it’s what I think the global sports fans want, based on my observations in soccer and golf in various global markets as well as the U.S. market.
If separate tours were to happen, we would be best served by implementing a protectionist system whereby a percentage (say 50 percent) of the entry spots on the European Tour would be for European players exclusively and the remaining spots would be open to the best of the rest of the world, and likewise for an American Tour. In the ’70s and ’80s U.S. tennis players were the dominant nation on both the men’s and women’s tours and more events were U.S.-based than now. The U.S. players no longer dominate depth-wise, and one result of that in my opinion is that many U.S. tournaments have gone abroad. (Cause or effect? Another debate.) Continental tours may be a viable solution someday but we’re nowhere near attempting this experiment now.
The qualifications and demands on tennis coaches in European countries are far more rigorous than in America. And, in fact, in the U.S. anyone can call himself a teaching pro and teach. Does there need to be a more standardized method for teaching the game and higher standards for becoming a teaching professional, like golf, where the teaching pros have to be scratch golfers? Would this help develop better tennis players in this country?
Better coaching in the U.S. would certainly be a plus (although let’s start with better schoolteachers and work from there, priority-wise) but it’s not inhibiting our future champions. Parental involvement or a “father figure” is the common element I most often see when I look down the ranking list of both tours. Of course, exposing more athletes at an early age to tennis with proper basic instruction is crucial to growing more future champions and programs, like First Serve is doing around this country.
Enough about who’d win in a match. Will Federer meet or surpass any of Sampras’ records? (286 weeks at No. 1, six straight No. 1 finishes, 14 Grand Slams . . .)
I am going to enjoy watching the chase over the years to come. Pete has set an incredibly high bar but Roger has the potential to reach it. Many factors will make it very, very difficult to do so.
Tennis is a sport rich in tradition, and resistant to change, while other pro sports (most notably the NHL this year) have been more willing to modify their rules in the hopes of making the product more pleasing to spectators. In this regard, what changes could pro tennis adopt to grab more eyeballs in this country?
Tennis has to be aware of public taste and tendencies. Attention spans in the U.S. have changed. People want their entertainment in no more than three-hour windows and they want a barrage of information coming at them. Multitasking is our way. Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world are individually different as well. It’s a real challenge for tennis to respond to the various market conditions. If we make an adjustment to the length of matches in the U.S. to format better for our fans, it may not be well received in other countries who are watching on TV. I do believe we must be bold if we want to effect change.
The ATP has its season-ending bash in China, and the women in this year have moved the Championships to Madrid. Is this a good idea? Or will it only serve to diminish the status of the game in the U.S., which is considered the most important market in the world of tennis?
These events will obviously benefit the markets they will be played in. Conversely, having both Championships in NYC back in the day was a terrific way to keep tennis in the U.S. media and marketing eye, so it’s an obvious negative for U.S. tennis popularity. Very few U.S. journalists will be in China and Madrid next year. I hope you enjoy getting your Championships news via the wire services and Internet, as your local tennis columnist will probably not be filing reports.
Finally, where do you hope pro tennis will be 10 years from now? And where, realistically, do you think the game will actually be?
The hope here is that this questionnaire in 10 years will be what I imagine a similar “State of the Union” questionnaire for NASCAR and the NFL would look like today. I believe you would entitle it: “How Did You Do It?”The reality is that tennis has a lot going for it and with the right stewardship there’s a lot of room for growth, innovation and improvement. The athletes are incredible and the competition is as compelling as ever when you see today’s matches. Tennis’ biggest obstacle is to ensure that we compete as a whole against other entertainment options and less against ourselves.