Tennis: A Sport Apart in a Fractured World
What does the term ‘football’ mean to you?
If you hail from much of Ireland it refers to Gaelic Football while to those that call the USA home it denotes ‘American Football’ (the ‘foot’ syllable as redundant as the asinine war-paint the players insist on). Things are just as blurred Down-Under, Rugby League being synonymous with the term in NSW and Queensland while the rest of the country reserve it for the more obviously antipodean Australian Rules Football. Most ubiquitous of all, across vast swathes of the globe it refers to the game known in the relevant vernacular as futbal. Or calcio. Or, of course, soccer.
Evidently, while we are quick to drown in Sky Sports Super Sunday or the almost hypnotic ESPN Sports Centre, the global sporting landscape is extremely fractured. Ironically, the sports themselves are slowest to admit this.
Most are eager to argue that theirs is the world’s pre-eminent pursuit, not merely the preserve of the football fanatics in the favellas or the basketball buffs of Boston. Such claims are particularly common at World Cups. Soccer makes a better case than most, 8 different nations having triumphed at that grandest of stages while the Cricket World Cup has known 6 champions. Neither Roll of Honour suggests an entire globe enraptured by corner kicks or leg spinners although the argument of other sports is assuredly more patchy. Of the 15 iterations of the Rugby League World Cup, 11 have been won by Australia and Major League Baseball remains in its own division of delusion, referring to finals of the USA’s domestic professional league as the ‘World Series’.
However, when such claims are made by tennis acolytes, they deserve more attention than the errant imagination of a FIFA executive or NFL commissioner. It is a sport of many virtues, and its genuine global appeal and competitiveness is prime among them. From countries as disparate as Serbia and Australia, tennis courts are as common as tributes to Tito (yes, everywhere) in the former and questionable abbreviations in the later. And it’s an impression that statistics support.
A glance at the Male ATP rankings is instructive. At time of writing, every continent that constitutes more than a frozen desert is represented in the top 100 on the men’s tour, and the feat is achieved within the top 50 on the female tour. Asia is yet to triumph at the Davis Cup (although Japan and India have finished runner-up) but each other continent has known glory on that stage too.
And it’s not just the winners of those competitions, but their locations that illustrate the point. Tennis’ four Grand Slams drag eyeballs far and wide while the same can hardly be said of golf’s Majors nor the principle crucibles of most other major sports.
Owing to its remarkably global appeal – tennis is perceived very differently depending on the corner of the world in which it is being contested. At Wimbledon and Roland Garros, although particularly the former, it remains a a pursuit of the well heeled as Hollywood A-Listers and the Royals brush shoulders and indulge in clichés as readily as Nadal wipes his brow or Djokovic creates enemies. The Royal Box. Strawberries and Cream. Murray Mountain. Each are sickeningly omnipresent in both folklore and fact while festooned with that intrinsically English element of pomp and ceremony that the British execute so expertly.
Such clientele however, is not conducive to a raucous atmosphere. Woody Harrelson is hardly disposed to ripping off his shirt and hurling abuse at a line judge, and while Matthew McConaughey can be relied on for much, leading a Viking Thunder Clap at Centre Court is not yet in his armoury. It follows that the atmosphere at SW-19 is relatively subdued. The soundtrack of middle-class prattle is punctuated by little more than prosecco pouring and polite applause while cans of beer are as welcome as a garish get-up would be on the Centre Court which commands the crowds attention. However, that is not to say garishness has no home among the Grand Slams. The US Open is happy to oblige.
In the USA tennis falls foul to that most weighty and arrogant of toxins. Commerce. Just as the NFL manoeuvre franchises at will to manufacture demand (are there even any rams in LA?), tennis at Flushing Meadows is so money-orientated that the Chairman of the Fed would be a more appropriate umpire on the final weekend than anyone else. In his essay “Democracy and Commerce at the US Open”, the redoubtable David Foster Wallace points out that, as far back as 1995 “The Open has an official sponsor not just for the tournament but for each of the tournament’s various individual events: Infinity sponsors the Men’s Singles, Redbook the Women’s Singles, MassMutual the Junior Boys, and so on.” As he remarks in his distinctly dismissive style, US Open tennis would more accurately be described as a “multinational sport” rather than an international sport.
Casting our attention Down Under, the Australian Open too is very much its own Grand Slam. Even in a country that enjoys such an eclectic taste in sports, tennis makes a decent appeal as one of its most popular. The Australian Open is the centre-piece for the argument. And it is a riot.
The Australian Open, (or ‘AO’, please keep up) exhumes an aura invariably alien to tennis itself. Over 800,000 people attended in 2020, making it the Slam with the largest attendance, with over 300,000 more people filtering through its gates than did so at the most recent Roland Garros. However, such demand is hardly driven by a tremendous thirst for tennis on the banks of the Yarra river. Australians don’t wile away hours discussing the intricacies of Djokovic’s return of serve, nor is the Parliament of Australia currently divided with a ‘Pro-Serena’ faction on one side and an ‘Pro Venus’ posse across the Chamber.
It’s everything else. Because just as ‘Starbucks Coffee’ have pivoted their brand to simply ‘Starbucks’ as they seek to broaden their product offering, in labeling the event ‘AO’, here is an event with a name sufficiently vague to allow it to become anything. Maybe even everything.
During AO, Melbourne Park sparks with excitement, it heaves and ho’s and, for those two weeks each January, it is the most glorious menagerie of hedonists on earth, each corner of the roaming campus dedicated to sybaritic and exultant indulgences it is as if were the brainchild of Jay Gatsby himself.
Indeed, the tennis often feels like a side-show. The Live Stage featured Bastille, Billy Idol and Fat Boy Slim in 2020, while every day of the frenetic fortnight sees the bars and restaurants that dot the campus crammed. Some may well have taken time earlier in the day to see Novak Djokovic dismantle Diego Schwartzman. But more still would have reclined at the Live Stage or made the Aperol Spritz bar home for the day. What’s sure is that they all came for far more than tennis and the AO will reliably serve that up. As the noise drops on Rod Laver Arena for the start of play, beats drop at the Live Arena and all manner of social decorum drops yet further in the Grand Slam Oval.
As alluded to above, the global appeal of tennis is a virtue the sport is right to hold dear. However, it does make organising a Grand Slam in a pandemic ravaged world particularly cumbersome. The wily administrators of the US Open deserve endless praise for managing the feat and while a January start date affords the AO some advantage, its geography does not. The 2020 iteration spread joy and rancor just as the coronavirus concurrently spread through China but the 2021 event will be hampered by what the virus has done since.
Victoria has been in lockdown for much of the succeeding year and the AO will need to swap capacity crowds for social distance and social lubricant for hand sanitiser. Players the world over will be asked to cross the globe and quarantine Down Under while the importance of appreciating what a 1.5m distance looks like is added to the required competencies of ball-boys and girls alike. All changed. Changed utterly.
Following a year that saw the postponement of myriad sporting events including the T20 Cricket World Cup and of course the Olympics, it would be somewhat fitting that the sport most global of all is able to salvage a calendar of even moderate normalcy.
