This past weekend, I received some awesome news. In my email inbox, from the long arm of the ESPN PR machine, was a release stating that the Abierto Mexicano Telcel Open would air on ESPN Deportes from February 25 to the final on March 1. It read, in part, “Beginning February 25, viewers will have access to 64 of the best international players as they compete in the last of four clay tournaments held in Latin America.”
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. While I originally subscribed to Deportes for soccer, the ESPN gods decided to throw this tennis fan a bone. I jumped from my computer chair, fired up the DVR, and scheduled recordings of every single showing of Acapulco.
Yes, I’m genuinely excited to catch every shot of David Nalbandian, Luis Horna, Nicolas Massu, and defending champion Juan Ignacio Chela. Not because I’m a big fan of anyone in the event—though I do have a soft spot for Nalbandian, who has a pretty big soft spot of his own these days—but because it’s the only tennis I’ll probably get to watch on TV at home between the Australian Open and Roland Garros. That’s a four-month black hole. You see, I’m one of the many victims of cable company Cablevision. And I’m unable to get DirecTV because of a country club which adjoins my property. This bastion of elitism refuses to groom its trees to provide me with a clear satellite signal. The nerve.
But even if you don’t live under the repressive Cablevision regime (or one like it), have you noticed the sad state of tennis on TV lately? After the Australian Open, the sport has virtually fallen off the boob tube, leaving you to catch lo-res clips on YouTube. This year, the Tennis Channel (excuse me, Tennis Channel) has dropped its coverage of Adelaide in January, the South American clay-court swing in February, San Jose, and the early rounds of Indian Wells and Miami.
The Tennis Channel’s decision to eliminate Pac Life and the Ericsson Open from its line-up has much to do with the fact that ESPN2 axed its coverage of those events. The two networks were joined at the hip last year, sharing coverage, with ESPN2 handling all of the marquee matches. Now ESPN2 is putting most of its emphasis on the majors, and so is the Tennis Channel.
Eric Abner, who does PR for the Tennis Channel, told me that the network is overall offering much more Grand Slam coverage, but because of that they’re having to nix broadcasting some of the week-in, week-out events to keep budgets in line. While ESPN’s focus on the majors is understandable, if short-sighted, isn’t the Tennis Channel supposed to be the one outlet where fans can watch the smaller events and feel plugged into the professional tours throughout the year?
The network’s Grand Slam focus is potentially disastrous for our sport. It causes huge blackouts, where tennis falls off the map and out of the minds of fans.
On Pac Life and the Sony Ericsson Open, ESPN has said it doesn’t make enough dough during the early rounds to justify the coverage, especially during college basketball’s March Madness. But Indian Wells and Miami are the two biggest events on American soil outside of the U.S. Open, so it’s unfortunate to see the disinterest on ESPN’s part. (Full disclosure: The Tennis Company, which is owned in part by the same folks that run Tennis Magazine, has an ownership stake in Indian Wells.)
There is some good news. Fox Sports Net has picked up Pac Life and the Ericsson Open, and will be airing plenty of action from start to finish, so I’m told. Unfortunately FSN doesn’t reach as large an audience as ESPN. Cablevision, for one, doesn’t carry FSN in my neck of the woods. Luckily, in lieu of tennis, I’ll be able to watch plenty of SoapNet, Kung Fu HD, and Monster HD, and I can avail myself of a pay-per-view menu chock-a-block with offerings from Jerry Springer and Howard Stern. Ah, if only those two guys played tennis, then I’d be in business.
Sure, there will be the odd match that will overflow onto other channels. I was grateful, for example, when I learned that the last week’s San Jose semifinals, which originally aired on FSN, would be replayed on the Comcast-owned Mets cable channel, SNY, on the Monday after the tournament ended. The final? Wanting to keep fans in suspense, it was shown three days after the final was actually played.
There’s no question fans have long been frustrated with tennis on TV, whether it’s lack of coverage, dumb match selections, or terrible commentating, but it seems that just when there’s positive momentum, such as ESPN2’s superb coverage of the Australian Open, everything falls to pieces faster than Marat Safin on a side court.
Coverage will pick up with the resumption of the Grand Slam season, with ESPN at Roland Garros and Wimbledon plus the U.S. Open Series, before CBS and USA Network handle the U.S. Open. But if tennis as a sport wants to become relevant outside of the majors (the answer to that question, of course, depends on who you ask), there must be more television coverage overall. Simple. Well, not really.
Arlen Kantarian, the USTA’s chief executive of professional tennis, deserves credit for putting together the U.S. Open Series. It’s brought structure and better television coverage to summer events that otherwise might go unnoticed by casual tennis fans. There’s even talk that the USTA would like to develop a spring series that leads into Indian Wells and Miami, which is also a good idea.
That said, all of this has got me to thinking about Kantarian’s mantra about “appointment TV”—the notion that tennis should be on at a certain time and network every weekend, like golf, so people know when to tune in. It’s a great way to attract casual fans, but I’m not sure I buy the overall importance of “appointment TV,” not when all indications in media (and new media) point to the fact that people want their sports, entertainment, and news on their terms. We’re living in an on-demand culture—good for viewers, bad for advertisers—with the number of DVRs in households rapidly approaching 35 percent. That number will only skyrocket in the coming years.
In this context, tennis fans will become hunters-and-gatherers, taping the matches they want to watch. This works for European soccer, which is spread out on all sorts of channels. Fans can get virtually every match with little effort.
Obviously, this is all an over-simplification of the problem of tennis on TV, and I appreciate that the big push among the powers-that-be is to attract the much-coveted casual tennis fan. But we should also be seriously concerned that too many tournaments are failing to find a broadcast home among the seemingly million useless channels out there.
Forget “appointment TV.” We just need to get more tennis on TV.