One Match Dispels Myth That Tennis Is Dying

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Every year at Wimbledon, I stay with old friends, an American couple who live and work in London. They have attended Wimbledon several times and have enjoyed it, but they are not, by any means, tennis lovers. They don’t pay tennis much mind before and after its annual visit to the All England Club, nor do they know all the rules of the game or spend hours debating the subtleties of forehands and backhands and volleys. They are casual fans, just the type that tennis for years has tried to win over in its never-ending, and seemingly never successful, battle to be seen as something other than a dying sport.

Last weekend, tennis finally won a round. When I returned from last Sunday’s spectacular men’s final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, my friend Alice, who had purchased a ticket with another friend through Wimbledon’s nightly online lottery at Ticketmaster, told me, “That was the best seven hours of my life.” Tennis did that? Amazing. Tennis did a lot more this past week. It graced the cover of Sports Illustrated for the first time since a 17-year-old Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon in 2004. It appeared on the front page of newspapers nationwide, on television news programs, and on radio broadcasts. It even elicited a classy apology from Bill Simmons, the ESPN columnist who last month wrote that tennis mattered so little these days that if two men played the best match in history, no one would watch.

“Three weeks later Federer and Nadal played the greatest tennis match of all time and a lot of people watched it,” Simmons said on his podcast last week, moments before he introduced James Blake as his guest. “It went from being one of the top 10 worst columns I ever wrote to top three, possibly top one.”

People are talking about tennis again. Television ratings are up. Formerly hostile sports columnists have been converted. Pundits are billing Federer and Nadal as the best rivalry in sports. What next? Regular highlights and updates on SportsCenter? Tennis played in prime time outside the U.S. Open? A Wheaties box featuring Nadal? Forgive longtime fans for not knowing how to react. It’s been so very long since things were this good.

One match, of course, can’t cure a sport that has been starved and abused for years. Tennis, like baseball, football, basketball, and so on, will continue to have its share of boring contests and highly anticipated meetings that don’t live up to expectations. But this match between Federer and Nadal ought to do a lot to dispel many myths about tennis that have persisted for years, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Here are four that ought to be consigned to the dustbin of history:

1. Tennis is a boring baseline game. The modern game is played mostly from the baseline, and that’s not going to change. But this isn’t baseline tennis like it was when Ivan Lendl and Mats Wilander batted the ball around for five hours in the 1988 U.S. Open final (that classic match contained one rally of 52 strokes, and several others of 20, 30, and 40). The rally, as it were, is dead — if a point lasts 20 or 30 shots today, it’s because players are retrieving would-be winners much better than in years past. In place of the rally, we now have the angle and the passing shot. As Federer and Nadal showed us last week, a winner can appear at any moment in tennis these days, from any place on the court. It’s exhilarating to watch, especially when done at its absolute best.

2. Tennis players can’t volley. It’s true that few players, and no premier players, serve and volley these days, largely because everyone returns the ball so well, and with so much spin, that volleying is far riskier than it once was. But many of the best can volley. Are they Stefan Edberg? Well, no. But Edberg couldn’t hit a forehand, and I don’t remember anyone complaining about that back when he was the best player in the world. Nadal played one serve-and-volley point in the Wimbledon final, but consider when he did it: In the last game of the match after he had lost the first point on his serve. He hit a winning volley on the next point, too, and won other points at the net throughout the match with difficult overheads and well-placed volleys. Everyone knew Federer could volley and he approached the net more in this match than he had in his previous two finals against Nadal. But Nadal’s volleys are underrated. He has played a lot of doubles over the years and improved them to the point that I would say I can’t recall another player, perhaps with the exception of Edberg, whose backhand overhead — one of the most difficult shots in the game — was superior. Serve-and-volley tennis might be gone for good, but transition tennis — that is, transitioning from the baseline to the forecourt — is alive and well.

3. Tennis needs temper tantrums to get attention. Federer and Nadal treat each other with respect and talk in the locker room as tournaments progress. Neither throws his rackets or kicks chairs. Neither swears at chair umpires or complains bitterly about questionable calls. Neither tries to intimidate opponents with trash talk or antics. They are the best role models tennis has had and prove that being a top tennis player and being a jerk do not go hand in hand.

4. Modern rackets have ruined the sport. If anything, the opposite is true: Rackets have helped the sport by giving men who don’t hit murderous serves — men such as Nadal — a fighting chance. Racket technology has aided ground strokes and service returns much more than serves (here’s the short explanation: better stability, larger head sizes, and advances in strings are better for off-center hits, but aren’t as useful on serves, where one hits a ball out of one’s hand and doesn’t have to worry about the vagaries of topspin, bad bounces, and speed). Modern rackets have furthered the need for defense and speed in tennis, so better athletes are favored. Rackets also give players the courage to swing harder and attempt once-impossible angles and passing shots, yet play high-percentage tennis (aggression is great, but no one wants to watch a match where most points end in an error).

All of this was so before Federer and Nadal played themselves into the history books last week. Thanks to them, though, there’s no longer any excuse to ignore the truth.

Mr. Perrotta is a senior editor at Tennis magazine. He can be reached at tperrotta@ tennismagazine.com.


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