The old normal isn’t coming back any time soon: how tennis moves ahead

We all want to think positively about the immediate future. We all want the lockdowns to end and the coronavirus to disappear. We all want our lives back. So on one level it’s understandable that sports leagues—which are, let’s face it, a big part of many of our lives—continue to act as if normality is just around the corner.

In the U.S., the NFL has released its full 2020 schedule, which is still set to begin in early September. The NBA and Major League Baseball keep churning out (mostly implausible) schemes for truncated seasons. In tennis, the US Open is still scheduled to begin in August, despite the fact that all gatherings in New York City are currently canceled, and the National Tennis Center is serving as a temporary hospital for COVID patients. Roland Garros recently caved in and changed its new September dates—by a week.

When each of these plans has been announced, I’ve asked myself the same question: Why do we think we’re going to be safer in the fall, when the virus is still here and a vaccine isn’t? The rate of new cases in the U.S. has leveled off, but it hasn’t declined much. It seems as if Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal have been having similar thoughts. Murray said recently, “Let’s try and get things back to normal first, and then we can think about playing sport again.” Last week Nadal admitted that he had all but given up on the 2020 season, and started to look forward to 2021.

These sounded like reasonable words from thoughtful athletes. New year, new beginnings, right? Not so fast, said Craig Tiley. This past week, the tournament director at the Australian Open came along to give us a preview of what he had in mind for the first Grand Slam of 2021. It was a cold bath of real talk.

Craig Tiley, at the 2020 Australian Open. (Getty Images)

Australia has had as much success at containing the virus as any country in the world. But according to Tiley, its national tournament will still be significantly compromised—it’s a just a question of how much. In an interview with the Australian AP, he said the Aussie Open is considering four contingency plans.

“Worst-case scenario, there is no AO,” Tiley said. “Our best-case scenario at this point is having an AO with players that we can get in here with quarantining techniques and Australian-only fans.”

That was the best-case scenario? No fans from outside Australia, and only international players who had been quarantined, presumably for two weeks? This obviously wasn’t what any of us wanted to hear. Which is exactly why we needed to hear it.

We needed to hear it because we need to get past the idea that everything is going to go back to normal at a certain magical date in the near future. It’s probably not going to happen this fall, and it’s probably not going to happen when the calendar says a new tennis season is supposed to start. It may not happen for years. The sooner we understand that and internalize it, the better. Only then can get down to the business of figuring out what actually is possible and building from there.

The tennis world may gradually be coming to that realization. Along with the recent comments from Murray, Nadal and Tiley, the sport has been experimenting with no-spectator exhibitions, first in Germany, and this weekend in Florida. A single private court in Florida, with no bleachers, no handshakes, and lots of disinfectant, is a far cry from Wimbledon, but it’s a start. There’s also talk of holding national championships and single-nation tours, in countries like Australia that have the virus under control.

Many of us were ready to watch any kind of pro tennis this weekend, and we didn’t particularly care what the atmosphere was like. So the hunger is obviously out there, and we’ll need to keep thinking of safe ways to feed it, if we’re ever going to find something approaching a new normal for tennis. We’ll only be motivated to do that if we know the old normal isn’t coming back anytime soon.