Why tennis is in the doldrums

The 2008 tennis season certainly didn’t lack for highlights.

On the men’s side, there was: the one-for-the-ages Wimbledon final between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer; Nadal taking over the number-one ranking after Federer’s record, 237-week run at the top that approached five years; and Federer’s U.S. Open triumph that brought him within one of Pete Sampras’ record 14 Grand Slam titles.

On the women’s side, there were five different women ranked number one and four different Grand Slam winners, including a Venus Williams redux at Wimbledon.

Yet all the highlights couldn’t cloak a host of disturbing signs. A strong whiff of a gambling scandal, the early retirement/burnout of another woman star, Justine Henin, the diminished fan interest in much of the tennis calendar (including the once-fabled Davis Cup) and the struggle to maintain sponsorships all combined to give the sport a sense of faded or, at best, fading glory.

And it certainly didn’t bolster any sense of well-being when a former Italian mob boss told Agence France Press recently that tennis is the most inviting sports target for organized crime corruption.

Still, it’s hard to imagine any better balm than this week’s Australian Open, the Grand Slam event that annually launches the new tennis season. What’s not to like about perpetual sunshine, boisterous and knowledgeable crowds and predictably unpredictable competition?

Yet while the tournament in Melbourne still sparkles, Australian tennis stands as the most conspicuous example of that aforementioned faded glory. This is the nation that for years ruled the roost, winning 28 Davis Cups and producing a succession of illustrious champions including Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson, Margaret Court Smith, John Newcombe and Evonne Goolagong Cawley. Back in a time when it was not necessarily regarded as unpatriotic to root for players from other countries, I and other young fans worshiped the genial and stylish Australians, particularly in contrast to the American stars with their scream-and-whine approach.

But this year Australia tennis enters its own Open in an enfeebled condition.

In the current world rankings, there is just a single Australian man in the top 100 — Leyton Hewitt, a fading front-liner who has plunged to number 70. And while there are three Australian women in the top 100, tops is Samantha Stosur at an also-ran 46. It is a strange state of affairs on this sports-obsessed island and it comes at a time when the nation’s athletes in most other sports are flourishing. Australian golfers now claim four of the top 50 spots in the men’s world rankings, the Australian men’s soccer team appears headed for its second successive World Cup and its Olympians remain at or near the top in any measure of medals per population.

One can’t lament the decline of the Australian game without noting that the American tennis landscape is not much better.

While there are seven American men ranked in the top 100, all seven have combined for just one Grand Slam title and several — Robert Kendrick, Bobby Reynolds — come with virtually zero name recognition. After Serena and Venus Williams on the women’s side, there are just the anonymous: Bethanie Mattek who is ranked 37 and Jill Craybas at 65. And that’s a problem given that American sports fans are frontrunners and the most parochial fans in the world to boot.

Of course, it was much easier for the traditional tennis powers to dominate back when most of the world couldn’t compete at what was still a country club game.

Today, tennis has become a hard-scrabble sport, akin perhaps to boxing, where the best, young players are usually the hungriest from the poorer nations, willing, even eager, to spend their childhood in a singular pursuit in academies far from home. It is an approach that produces talent, but not necessarily personalities.

Indeed it may be antithetical to that. And with a relentless tournament schedule that grinds these kids up, personalties seldom get a chance to flower. Burnout, particularly on the women’s side, is epidemic. The woman’s game has too often settled for selling sexuality instead.

It is hard to imagine how tennis can reverse course.

It’s a shame that doubles was long ago relegated to sideshow status. It had the virtue of partnership interplay, allowing personalities to emerge naturally. Which is why Federer may never have been quite as charming as he was this past summer when, after being upset in the Olympics singles competition in Beijing, he carried his no-name Swiss partner to the doubles gold. But the Federer era is fading. Much of the sport’s hope now lies with Nadal, who is red-hot to Federer’s Swiss cool.

Can one smoldering, sexy and immensely talented man command the world stage and single-handedly revive a sport?

It seems very unlikely. But then again who could have imagined the impact of one Eldrick “Tiger” Woods?