No Tennis, Anyone?

Now that I've explained in exhaustive detail my "history," such as it is, of me being a sports writer, I will now explore the natural follow-up question¹: Why not my favorite sport?

The obvious answer is one of accessibility. While basketball is far from America's favorite sport, it has a massive following and has a team what seems like every five miles across the country. During the season, there are games every night. Anyone with a decent cable or satellite package is likely to find five or more games on TV a night. There is no shortage of basketball, which means there is a need to provide coverage of it².

My position is kind of unique; everyone wants to cover UNC. Few people want to cover the MAC, but there is a decent amount of people that follow it. Being one of those people that actually want to cover it, I found a niche. No such niche exists in tennis.

While college basketball is probably not even in the top five most popular sports in America, it is still far, far ahead of tennis. Only professional tennis matters; nobody cares about college or the minor leagues³. And, in case you didn't know, professional tennis tours. It moves. I can find MAC games within a few hours' drive 2-4 times a week; Cincinnati has a one-week tournament, Indianapolis is the same, and that's it. The next closest tournament is the US Open in New York, and a couple other tournaments of significance are sprinkled around the country. However, the majority of the tour happens beyond my reach and means.

I suppose I could follow the tour on TV and write about that⁴, but what is the point of that? While I know more about tennis than most and probably could lend some insight into what is going on, it's not going to be enough to be worthwhile. This dovetails into a couple more important points. The first is that tennis is a simply awful sport for television, perhaps the worst. Tennis loses everything in translation on television, and I mean everything. You don't get any sense of the speed, the athleticism, the spin on the ball. I'm the biggest fan of tennis that you know, but even I have a hard time watching it on television. In person? Riveting. I can't take my eyes away.

Basketball, on the other hand, translates excellently to television. Not as well as football⁵, but very well. I love watching in person, but I can tune in and lose very little, perhaps even gain a little; it's easier to take the court as a whole on the screen than in person. I'm not getting to every MAC game, but I am watching it on TV and listening to it on the radio, and it gives me enough that I can use to write about. Not so for tennis.

The other point is that tennis, frankly, sucks to write about.

John McEnroe wrote in his autobiography that tennis is "poetry written on water." It is beautiful, but once it's over, you can't recapture it. The sport is by nature somewhat ethereal; the written word can't really capture it. This is why so little actual tennis writing actually has to do with the matches themselves. Instead, writers look more for what is happening around the game. Occasionally, they try to play psychologist and figure out what is going on in a player's head, a fruitless exercise.

Also, there is no way to statistically quantify tennis. There's that etherealness again. Sometimes, the player that wins the most points loses the match. It's goofy. We don't really try, either. Look at the stat set for a match sometime. It ain't telling you much.

I know some sports reporters grow to hate the sports they cover for a living. However, I think I could deal with seeing the world and meeting all sorts of people for a while. Plus, I'd be intimately involved with my favorite sport.

Heck, I can't be worse at it than Peter Bodo. Maybe I should give it a shot.

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1It's natural to me, at least. Then again, I've been known to put myself through the Socratic method with me.

2Ever notice how my paragraphs tend to be short? Telltale sign of a newspaper writer.

3The Challenger and Futures circuits, FYI.

4I actually did try this for a while. I did not enjoy it.

5We're actually at the point where it's better to watch football on television than in person. This is part of the reason football is the top sport in the country. It's also part of why tennis will never be more than a niche sport in the United States.