Back to the future
IN 2003 JOHN MCENROE WON the ATP Champions Tour, the senior event, held on this occasion at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The stars of the seventies and eighties played a classical game and if they no longer played at the pace they had once commanded they nevertheless showed flashes of the old brilliance. More surprisingly, Ilie Nastase, now a little portly, tried valiantly to reprise his role as Mr Nasty, while from John McEnroe, lean as ever but with much less hair, was heard every so often the cry: ‘You cannot be serious.’ But no one was shocked any more. The audience merely laughed. And somehow at that moment the spectacle became a little sad, McEnroe momentarily an old lion in the circus, twitching his tail and tickled into a half-hearted growl at the crack of the whip. What had once expressed passion and outrage was now ‘entertainment’.
Sports stars are ephemeral. Lenglen, Tilden and Cramm are forgotten outside the tennis world. Once McEnroe has departed from the commentary box he too will pass into oblivion. For unlike Napoleon or Julius Caesar, or even Greta Garbo or Marilyn Monroe, sports stars are replaceable. The fiery years when McEnroe and Nastase had dominated were a distant memory. Their style of tennis had gone out of fashion. The tennis boom was long since over. The game had changed.
The world of tennis is a microcosm of the wider world. In the twenty-first century the turbo expansion of capitalism is faltering. Now it was not just Marxists who were predicting the collapse of capitalism, but economists at the heart of the enterprise. Stephen King, for example, chief economist at HSBC banking, foresaw a dystopian future in which ‘nations recoil from globalisation and fight over resources, populations lose their faith in governments and in money that has been debased by attempts to revive growth’.1
Yet the search for growth continues, because no politician can contemplate an alternative.
Tennis like all sports is fully committed to and dependent on the growth scenario. In the words of Neil Harman, it is ‘imperative . . . that the sport looks further afield, secures its markets . . . preparing for the rainy day that is bound to come’.2
The big stars and the big matches continue to draw huge crowds. The slams are sell-outs. The US Open, reported Harman, was ‘New York’s largest and most valued annual public sporting event, generating $756 million in “economic impact”’. It was the highest-attended annual sporting event in the world. Television audiences for tennis generally are enormous. Eighty-five million viewers watched the 2012 US Open in the US alone and it was broadcast to 188 countries.
Yet by the end of the first millennial decade it was clear, in spite of the boosterist PR rhetoric, that the ATP tour had problems. The sport generated huge TV audiences, but the numbers of active players at the grassroots was in decline. An attempt to streamline the revised calendar for the ATP tour, in place since 2008, had not resolved a number of player grievances.
In 2011 anger peaked at the US Open. A record number of players withdrew with injuries. Torrential rain exposed problems in the court surface. The order of play was wrecked and this caused complaints about the crammed schedule and more generally that players were expected to appear at too many events. Flushing Meadow had always controversially insisted that both men’s semi-finals be played on the Saturday, with the final the following day. This was clearly unfair to the second semi-finalist, but suited the television companies and their schedules. After five consecutive years in which rain continually interrupted play, the tournament organisers finally conceded that in 2013 the final was to be played on Monday, although this was not an ideal solution either, Monday being a working day with the consequent risk of smaller audiences.
Steve Tignor reported that ‘players were so fed up with the way the game was run and the lack of revenue that was coming back to [most of] them that they talked openly of boycotting events and forming their own union’. The sport was ‘divided and chaotic’.
Top players threatened strike action. The two Andys, Roddick and Murray, were particularly vocal. Nadal meanwhile criticised Roger Federer for not doing enough (as President of the Player Council) and eventually resigned from his role as Vice-President of the Council. He had wanted the rankings of top players to be protected for two years (as in golf) in cases of injury or illness. This would clearly have benefitted him and his chronic knee problems, but Federer opposed it as being unfair to lower-ranked players. A bigger problem was the unremitting length of the tournament calendar, giving players barely four weeks of rest at the end of the year and even less if they played in the Davis Cup – which was itself in trouble, ‘on life support’, McEnroe thought.
Negotiations led to the length of the tour being curtailed by one week; and from 2015 Wimbledon was to be put back by one week in order to give players more time to accustom themselves to grass (a need felt even more urgently after the record number of slips, falls and injuries during the 2013 Wimbledon).
Neil Harman mentioned the possibility that the grand slams might consider taking over the running of the game. In the meantime, in 2012 Brad Drewett was appointed head of the ATP. Steve Tignor had not had high hopes of Drewett, but before Drewett sadly and unexpectedly died of motor neurone-disease in 2013, he was able to negotiate a revised pay structure with the ‘big four’, the four top players. From 2013 this was to give at least some lower-ranked players better returns for their efforts.3 At Wimbledon, for example, ‘if Great Britain’s Davis Cup hero, Dan Evans, ranked 318 in the world, were to get a wild card into the main draw . . . and lost, he would go home with £23,000,’ explained Kevin Mitchell of the Guardian. He contrasted this with what Evans might normally expect on the Futures circuit, ‘where playing to near-empty stands . . . he might earn as little as $200 (£131) at best, $1,300.’ 4
The yawning gap between the fabulously rich (or ‘global properties’ as Andrew Castle described them) at the top of the rankings, and players such as Evans, accurately reproduced the general pattern of capitalist development and the gap between rich and poor that had widened all over the world since the 1980s. The situation of Johnny Marray, co-winner of the Wimbledon men’s doubles in 2012, baldly illustrated the difference. He lived from hand to mouth and at the age of nearly thirty, was renting a room in his sister’s house. As he told Dave Walsh of the Sunday Times:
Doubles money on the Challenger is pathetic . . . €650 for winning a tournament, but you’ve got your flight out of that and by the time you’ve paid for the new trainers you have to buy every three weeks and replaced the broken string on your racquet you’ll be left with maybe €150 or €200 for your week’s work.5
And this was not a regular income. You might not win another match, let alone a tournament, for some time. He acknowledged the help he obtained from the LTA but still knew he’d earn more as a barista. His joy at being a Wimbledon champion was ample reward for all the sacrifices, but few of those stuck on the Challenger circuit would ever win a Wimbledon, or possibly any title.
The economic inequalities within the game necessitated a frantic search for ranking points. Competition was ruthless. Hordes of agents prowled the increasingly ferocious junior circuit. In the absence of linespersons at junior events it was always a temptation to cheat, while at the lower echelons of the Futures and Challengers circuits match fixing was known to occur. As Tracy Austin had said, back in the 1980s, you had to be completely self centred and selfish to get to the top.
Tennis seemed to be at some sort of crossroads. The game was targeting the huge potential Chinese market. Chinese star, Li Na, women’s champion at Roland Garros in 2011, had a fan base of millions in her home country, but some believed that only a male Chinese champion would generate a quantum leap in interest. A discussion on the Guardian sports blog pointed out that the Shanghai Rolex Masters Tournament, an ATP 1000 event, held in October at a forbidding venue far outside the centre of the (huge) city, had yet to crack an audience. The big stars played (Federer possibly partly because of his sponsorship with Rolex) and the fans turned out for them, but this premier event was sometimes half empty during the early part of the week – part of the general effect of the huge celebrity of the top stars. When Serena Williams went out early at the 2013 Wimbledon, attendances dropped on the next day she had been expected to play. 6 It was noted, too, that at the July 2013 Hamburg tournament the arena was packed to the gills for Federer’s matches; when both he and ‘local boy’ Tommy Haas failed to win through to the final, the auditorium was only half full for what turned out to be a thrilling encounter between an Argentinian qualifier, Delbonis, and Fabio Fognini.
Many followers of tennis were knowledgeable and played club tennis themselves. They knew the early rounds of a tournament were essential – to prove the worth of the best players, to facilitate upsets and often to generate great tennis – but the dominance of television generated a mass audience more interested in the stars than in the game itself.
In the United States the San Jose tournament, which had lasted for a hundred years, closed down in 2012; the Pacific Southwestern tournament was long gone; the Los Angeles ATP tournament was sold and closed down; many other tournaments there and in Britain and Australia had disappeared. There was in 2013 no male American player in the top ten; aside from Andy Murray there was no British player inside the men’s top 200. However well Wimbledon was marketed, this did not staunch the decline of the sport at the club or local level.7 The gap between the television presence of a sport and active participants in the game widened in the nations – Australia, America, Britain – that were once its leaders. The number of active players in the UK, where the game was largely confined to private schools, halved in the first decade of the twenty-first century. During Wimbledon 2013 Judy Murray, Britain’s Fed Cup captain (the Fed Cup being the equivalent for women of the Davis Cup) voiced her disappointment at the failure of the LTA to develop more free courts or move tennis away from its middle-class, elitist image, while Baroness Billingham, a former player, president of the Oxford LTA and a member of the House of Lords Olympic Legacy committee, was scathing about the failures of the LTA under the leadership of Roger Draper and described herself as proud of the successful five-year campaign to oust him. In Spain, France, Germany and Eastern Europe participation was more widely dispersed.
Philippe Chatrier’s collegiate vision of tennis had produced a wonderful cohort of French players and although none had won a slam, they brought style, colour and glamour to a tour largely dominated by the monotone of angry power. Michael Llodra and Nicolas Mahut were Wimbledon doubles winners and looked in different ways like minor characters from a 1950s French thriller, each with strangely old-fashioned compelling looks. There was blond matinée idol, Julien Benneteau, who had been two points from beating Federer at Wimbledon in 2012; there was Jeremy Chardy, a combination of Heathcliff and Mr Darcy; and there was the rising star, Benoit Paire who looked like Jeremy Irons. And those weren’t even the top players. Gael Monfils had a face like a Benin bronze and an acrobat’s movements; Richard Gasquet had a fluid game of captivating beauty and flair; Jo-Wilfried Tsonga was the French Muhammad Ali; Gilles Simon had vampire eyes and the most radiant smile and could outlast almost anyone on a tennis court.
It was all the more disappointing that in 2012 these last two revived familiar controversies by heaping scorn on the women’s game. Simon argued that women shouldn’t be paid as much as men, merely repeating a widely held view, and again, a statistical, numbers-related way of looking at the game; that because women played fewer sets they deserved less money. Tsonga retreated into the nineteenth century, maintaining that women couldn’t play consistently on account of their hormones, deploying the hoary old argument of women’s biology as destiny.
Daily Telegraph journalist, Oliver Brown, argued (whether seriously or not) that the answer was not for women to be paid less, but for them to play the same number of sets as men. ‘Women’s grand slam tennis is a nineteenth-century throwback,’ he maintained, ‘pleading for acceptance on a joint footing with the men’s equivalent and yet recycling the original, outrageous myth that the ladies are too frail, too delicate to last five sets like the gentlemen.’ He pointed out that for thirteen years the WTA year-end finals had gone to five sets and that Steffi Graf and her colleagues had managed to cope. Whether, with the way the women’s game was currently played, there would be an audience for such matches was another matter.
From a feminist perspective Susan Ware questioned the priority given to certain specific qualities perceived as peculiarly manly. She challenged the way in which sports ‘are divided by gender rather than ability, size or other factors’. She felt it was wrong that sports privileged ‘male attributes of speed and strength rather than the endurance or agility more common to women’, but she suggested that in any case the differences in athletic abilities between the sexes were exaggerated and that there might be more similarities than differences. She argued that the sporting culture did everything it possibly could to reinforce differences between the sexes and the belief that men were inherently stronger and faster than women. It was never questioned that women were unable to compete with men on an equal basis. Billie Jean King had made the same point back in 1984.8
Sport was the world headquarters of gender conservatism, rivalled only by the extremist arms of world religions. The obstinate belief in women’s sporting inferiority and the unrelenting sexism of reportage was closely linked to the persistent fear of homosexuality that pervaded the sporting world. A handful of sportsmen had come out in recent years, but there were no out gays on the tennis circuit. The old ‘sissy’ slur might make it even more difficult than in other sports for a player to be open about his sexuality. But homosexuality in any sport runs up against the enduring image of the sporting hero.
Corporate conservatism supported and reinforced the dominant ideology of sport, yet the powers in tennis were more than ready to tinker with the game itself in the attempt to solve perceived problems. Laney had long ago warned that: ‘A game as stylised as tennis should be treated with great restraint. One of the things wrong with it may be that so many people keep trying to alter it to suit other people who do not really play it.’ 9 Conservatism in that sense was a force protective of the game and changes to the game might otherwise have been more drastic and more far reaching than had so far been the case. The brash event piloted in Houston had not won the day; but tennis had been coarsened.
The courts became slower and slower and this had to be defended by the creation of a myth: that in the 1990s men’s tennis had been completely locked into a serving contest in which rallies had virtually ceased to exist. This was the exaggeration of a real problem and only a partial truth. Agassi and Michael Chang, for example, had not played that style of game. In retrospect the myth took hold, as myths do, partly because a younger generation (both players and spectators) who had no memory of that time was continually told that the so-called ‘modern game’ – not that there was anything particularly modern about interminable baseline rallies – was far superior to the serving contests of the nineties.
The ‘modern game’ brought its own problems, however. Sets that had once taken thirty minutes had now lengthened to an hour or more. (In the Australian Open semi-final of 2005, between Federer and Marat Safin, 395 points were played in 268 minutes; in 2012, Djokovic and Nadal played 369 points in 353 minutes.) 10
However, instead of suggesting that a faster game might be at least part of the solution, further changes to the scoring system were suggested as ways of countering the problem resulting from the previous ‘solution’. Perhaps five-set matches should be abandoned even at the slams – they already had been from the latter stages of the World Tour finals and ATP 1000 finals; or the ‘let’ when serving should be abolished.
Audiences didn’t necessarily want to watch rallies that invariably went to twenty or thirty strokes (one point in the 2013 US Open final between Djokovic and Nadal lasted for fifty-four strokes) and contests that lasted five hours. These could be exciting at the very highest level – counter-punching building up like a house of cards – but could equally seem monotonous and repetitive. Frank Deford had once pointed out that in the 1920s ‘each player grew up with his own style’. He quoted the Spanish player Manuel Alonso, who said: ‘the beauty of that time was that each individual was a certain game . . . [whereas] these players today [the 1970s] all do the same thing against each other.’ Individuality and eccentricity had not been wholly purged from the game, but the uniformity of surfaces and coaching left less room for the development of personality – for a player’s style is his personality.
Although interminable matches caused problems for the TV schedules, no one seriously contemplated the reintroduction of faster courts. The French attempted it in 2010 at the winter indoor tournament at Bercy, Paris, and at Roland Garros (to a lesser extent) the following year, but in spite of the enthusiasm aroused, it was not repeated. There were powers behind the scenes determined to retain slow play.
It was a stunning irony that it was precisely this style of play for which women’s tennis had long been condemned. As far back as 1933 the sports writer John Tunis had complained of the lack of variety in women’s tennis. There was nothing but ‘slug, slug, slug’. Similar complaints had echoed down the years.
The difference in 2010 when most of the top men were playing attritional baseline tennis was that this could now be reinterpreted as a wonderful example of endurance and muscle power. What had been unimaginative and deadly boring when women played from the baseline, became a macho triumph in men’s singles.
Events leading up to Roland Garros and Wimbledon in 2013 suggested that players and spectators, commentators and officials, insiders and outsiders were longing for more variety. Commentators talked up a new generation of players who were trying to crack the dominance of those at the very top. They reported ecstatically at Wimbledon when a series of upsets by serve-and-volley players put out former champions: first the 2002 champion, Lleyton Hewitt was defeated by Dustin Brown, a startling all-court player with dreadlocks; Nadal was downed by Belgian Steve Darcis who camped at the net; and defending champion Federer fell to another serve volleyer, Sergiy Stakhovsky. Each of these giant killers lost in the next round, but there was unalloyed astonishment and delight that young players had found a way to transcend the technology that was supposed to have put an end forever to classic, old style net play. ‘Tennis as it should be played’ was the cry. That the tournament ended with the usual suspects squaring up didn’t detract from the excitement produced by daring new talents. Spectators remembered – or learned for the first time – that attacking grass-court tennis was a thing of beauty and thrills. And indeed it seemed that players were trying to volley a bit more, Djokovic and Nadal quite capable of finishing off a point at the net.
The average age of the male player was rising. Longevity – possibly due to the increased attention to diet and fitness – was, in theory at least, welcomed, but managers, promoters and the commentariat were desperate for exciting new players to supplant those at the top.
The Italian Fabio Fognini and Frenchman Benoit Paire were not afraid to play tennis in new, daring and more eccentric fashion. Latvian Ernst Gulbis was gifted with outstanding talent and aggression. Considered most promising of all, Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria was hailed as the next rising star, an all-court player with every shot in the book. None, however, could find sufficient consistency to get to the top.
The tennis establishment criticised the rising cohort as insufficiently serious and dedicated. They clowned about, threw tantrums or played to the crowd. Erroll Flynn lookalike, Fognini, was an ‘actor’; Dimitrov was too lightweight and better known for his romances with Sharapova and (possibly) Serena Williams than for winning titles. Gulbis was said to spend too much time in nightclubs instead of training in a boot camp. They earned too much money; ranked twenty-four in the world (and later inside the top twenty), Fognini had already earned three million dollars before he won a tournament.
To berate young players only just out of their teens for laziness, complacency and a failure to adhere to the Calvinist work ethic was completely to ignore the way in which once the sheen of celebrity had touched a player, it was bound, combined with the tantalising promise of so much gold at the end of the rainbow, to create a mirage world wholly at odds with the underlying reality: that the price for ultimate success was the renunciation of any sort of normal life.
The continual fight for survival on the circuit could also kill the joy of tennis. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga said: ‘For me it’s not just the top four [who have no personality]. It’s all the players. But it’s how the world goes now. Today you just go to the tournament and play. You share nothing.’ He played without a coach for two years in order to reconnect with his love of the game and rather wistfully he recalled a Challenger tournament in Surbiton, where he won in 2007. There it was all so simple and unpretentious. He stayed in a small hotel and celebrated the win with a beer.
Now it seemed that the next generation simply baulked at the tour treadmill and the middle management pall that had seemed to have settled like frozen lava over the game. The surface was beginning to crack, like the courts at Flushing Meadow.
This was not a rebellion confined exclusively to tennis. In 2012 the Ukrainian male lead ballet star, Polunin, abruptly quit the Royal Ballet in London, claiming that he could no longer stand the unrelenting dedication required. He opened a tattooing parlour instead (but later did return to dancing with another company). An older colleague commented that Polunin might be doing ‘too much too young’ and that dancers were under greater pressure than in her youth.
All physical performers have to train; to excel in such fields does require dedication. But in the twenty-first century, in every field of endeavour – the professions, office work, call centres and the service sector – a long-hours culture demands an unrelenting commitment to work at all costs. Humankind is imprisoned in a science fiction future in which not to work was to become to all intents and purposes an enemy of the state. All must conform to a Gradgrind conception of hard work and making money as the chief purpose and virtue of life, work configured as the grim treadmill portrayed in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In tennis, every time a player comes onto court the amount of money he has earned is displayed. When Andy Murray won the US Open the headline in the Evening Standard was not ‘Murray is Champion’ or similar, but ‘Grand Slam Murray set to make £100M mint’.
The players at the top of the game no doubt enjoy their wealth, but they sometimes appear like King Midas. Everything Midas touched turned to gold – but eventually, of course, he starved because his food, too, was converted into metal.
At the beginning of the French Open, Gulbis complained of the blandness of tennis and its personalities in an interview for the French sports magazine, L’Équipe. He blamed Roger Federer for being the ‘perfect Swiss gentleman’ – but it had all started long before Federer; when the promoters and sponsors had decided to clamp down on ‘bad behaviour’. The threat of losing their clothing deals and other sponsorships kept the players in line. At the end of the twentieth century there certainly was a feeling that those who ran tennis required no controversy of any kind and the Tiger Woods debacle of 2009 made them even more hostile to the slightest whiff of deviant behaviour. Djokovic had reined in his ‘clowning’ and Andy Murray admitted that his press interviews were boring and dull because he was anxious to avoid saying anything at all controversial, while at the time of the strike threats in 2011 Federer had said he preferred not to discuss the issues in public, because it could lead to negative press. Gulbis was correct about the boredom, but possibly wrong in blaming, effectively, the messenger, when, to paraphrase Gloria Swanson in a different context, ‘it was the game that got dull’.
Effectively the management wanted the impossible. They wanted a mass, popular, ‘red blooded’ sport, but they also wanted bland good behaviour. An example of how po-faced tennis had become was provided when Dimitrov beat Djokovic in Madrid. The crowd rooted noisily for the underdog, the Bulgarian, chanting his name and cheering him on. Commentator Mark Petchey prissily complained that they were showing insufficient ‘respect’ to the ‘World Number One’ as though Djokovic were the Pope or Nelson Mandela; a pompous attitude not even consistent with the description of sport as ‘entertainment’.
Gulbis – supported predictably by McEnroe – wanted more controversy and revived the comparison with boxing, not the play itself, but the exchange of insults, the pre-match dramas and stand-offs. Honest antagonism might well be a welcome change from the clichés about how much the top players respect one another and how they are wonderful ‘ambassadors’ for the game. A game doesn’t need ambassadors – another example of the pomposity of sport and its evangelists. Nations have ambassadors. No one discusses ‘ambassadors’ for the theatre or cinema. Ambassador in the context of tennis is a euphemism for PR, with stars essentially door-to-door salesmen, spreading the popularity of tennis. In itself that is a reasonable goal, but the language is absurdly pretentious.
Just as the grotesque financial inequalities in the game mimicked the inequalities of global capitalism, so Gulbis and his generation resembled youthful protesters throughout the world. From Egypt to Brazil they protested against the sclerosis of neo-liberal capitalism, the regime of middle-management politicians scurrying around at the behest of the IMF, and a repressive, conservative culture. It was particularly telling that street protests in Brazil were aimed at the vast sums to be spent on the 2016 Olympics when the populace believed that that money should have gone to improve welfare, housing and jobs. What the protestors lacked was an organised campaign and concentration of purpose. Meanwhile in tennis, the race for rankings, money and the exhaustion generated by moving from one tournament to the next made coherent demands for change difficult to even imagine, let alone carry out. So protest usually remained unorganised and fizzled out.
Gulbis evidently hit a nerve because his interview provoked much discussion. Many fans would prefer a game in which a one-sided insistence on fitness, endurance and the defensive game did not produce over-long matches consisting in interminable ground-stroke rallies. Personalities are not ultimately the issue; it is the personality of the game itself that television and corporate culture had flattened and subjected to ‘McDonaldization’.
A critique of corporate culture and its philosophy of profit at all costs is not a nostalgic lament for the artless amateur tournaments of another time, of which Surbiton seemed like an echo. In tennis, as in everything else, change is continuous and inevitable, but it is legitimate to question its direction and extent. It is to be hoped, and must be assumed, that those involved in tennis and in positions of power in its running love the game, are protective of it and wish it to prosper, that they are not just killing the goose that laid the golden egg. There will always be some fans and players who prefer one type of tennis, and others who prefer the opposite. Ironically, what has been lost to tennis is variety – because if there was one thing that consumer society boasts it can produce it is precisely that: consumer choice, a cornucopia of different delights.
Money doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t follow from a sell-out slam that those who bought tickets liked what they got. They lived in hope and memory and were often disappointed. Yet there are fashions in tennis as in everything else. Serve and volley went out of fashion, but sooner or later a different style from the so-called ‘modern game’ will emerge. Tennis will continue to evolve.
Indeed, lo and behold, at the start of 2014 came rumours that the courts at the Australian Open were faster – although the head groundsman denied this – and the balls a little lighter. Pat Cash, Wimbledon winner in 1987, thought the baseliners might not be happy to find the court surfaces at Melbourne Park ‘quicker than they have been for many years. Attacking play will be rewarded, which I hope will revive something that’s almost died in the modern game – variety’. He suggested that a decade ago some European players had threatened a boycott because of the extreme speed of the then popular surface, Rebound Ace, hence the turn to courts that became slower and slower. Now he was hoping for a change of direction. That Djokovic took on Boris Becker as his coach was seen as a move towards a more attacking game and a move away from those five-hour finals that, wrote Kevin Mitchell, might be fascinating to players and spectators who had known nothing else, but were ‘anathema to romantics’. By romantic he may have implied that it is mere nostalgia to long for the all-court game, but a return to an airier and less muscle-bound tennis rather than a looking backwards, could herald a new dawn. Then tennis might cease to be the poor relation of boxing and recover its true self as that mixture of chess and dance, of intellectual geometry and aesthetic joy. Not for nothing was it known as the most glamorous of sports. ‘Glamour’ derives from an old word for witchcraft, so may tennis soon once more cast its spell as the magical points come one after another, like poetry on water, yet recurring over and over again.