THE BUSINESS OF TENNIS
Seiden, Melvin
Nothing in Antonioni's Blow-Up is as memorable as the tennis game played without a ball while Thomas, the hero of the film, looks on. The camera tracks the mimes who play their ghostly game...
...That, at any rate, is what the career of Yannik Noah, the only black African superstar, suggests...
...Thus it is inherent in the idea of deterrence through superior strength that the opponents keep leap-frogging...
...And when that romantic reactionary takes a good, hard, critical look at our technology, supermarkets, Hollywood, and military budgets, our armies of obese shoppers doing the shopping malls that our automobile culture created, he cannot refrain from asking the of course snobbish, Platonic, and elitist question: Is tennis next...
...If Portugal or Niger does not have its own up-to-date tennis racket, it soon will...
...And because more and better players keep coming up, more money gets poured in—from ticket sales, advertisers, TV, hackers who buy $200 rackets and sneakers that may cost more than a man spent for a decent wool suit not too many years back...
...Does the best player win...
...And if Bjorn Borg was ungracious enough to complain about having to play under lights at Flushing Meadow—night matches bring in more dollars—that just showed how effete he'd become...
...You claim, Harold said, that team-tennis fans are an ignorant lot...
...But let's not be snobs about this...
...Some of us feared that if it had succeeded in establishing itself, this inferior product, by a kind of Gresham's law, would drive out the genuine article...
...Is it a hollow paradox to make the claim that the best player doesn't always or necessarily win...
...The once socially upper-class Wimbledon remains then for the new aristocrats: the highly paid professionals who continue to play their tournament on these impractical and technologically primitive courts...
...in both, surely, money is magic...
...what we did was use our genius to invent a more powerful and successful way of playing the game...
...If the U.S.S.R...
...It has been Americanized...
...THE AMERICAN CITIZEN is a consumer who sometimes votes...
...England, like most Third World countries, is not rich enough or well equipped enough—it has virtually no indoor facilities—to be in the tennis business in a big way...
...The tennis player, however, soon discovers that he can't close the gap between his opponent and himself by technology...
...What's wrong with the shapely, comely, friendly wood racket...
...Those, Harold says, are the brute facts you dismiss so glibly...
...the tennis arms race flourishes more intensely among the Walter Mitty hackers than in the ranks of accomplished players...
...But fail it did and now, in retrospect, team-tennis seems as dumb an idea as the infamous Bobby Riggs-Margaret Court battle of the sexes...
...It is a position that holds fast to the conviction that ideas, values, and principles can never be permanently silenced by the brute facts of material and technological reality, not even in the realm of athletics...
...Undeniably, there is the enormous success of the automobile revolution...
...It no longer produces a crop of major players, only an occasional exception like Virginia Wade who defies the harsh rule that national wealth and power breed achievement...
...This argument comes out of the long, rich, fiercely intellectualist tradition of Plato and neo-Platonism...
...No self-respecting nation wishes to be without its own airline, the latest in lethal weapons, or the sophisticated tennis racket...
...The new tennis was a mass phenomenon and it began in America—in rich, powerful, arrogant and, as it then seemed in the '60s, omnicompetent America...
...The U.S.A., busy concocting "computer designed" rackets and new kinds of synthetic surfaces, cannot 488 afford grass courts...
...Consider then what is happening on the tennis courts of America...
...But now that tennis is a sport for the masses, we must have courts that can withstand the wear and tear of heavy traffic...
...The analogy is a compelling one...
...Not Antonioni tennis, not "you and I...
...Consider the changes that have transformed the familiar wood racket...
...Why not, Harold asked, let those types have the fun of supporting a tennis team...
...By changing the venue to Flushing Meadow the impresarios could accommodate larger audiences and build a complex that, in addition to having other modern features, would allow TV crews to get better pictures...
...Team-tennis, he argued, was a conceptual break490 through...
...Once a genteel pastime, it is now big business...
...Had he not been discovered, sponsored, and guided by Arthur Ashe, his fate might well have been that of any other mute Milton of the courts—promise unfulfilled and obscurity...
...Like any other human activity, tennis must be grounded in a material stratum...
...We rushed out to buy and to play...
...In fact it was a shoddy, debased, hermaphroditic thing and it flopped...
...All of us, however inept, could fantasize that we too might hit the ball with Connors's power and precision if we had that scientifically designed instrument in our hands...
...it's just a matter of time...
...There are purists, traditionalists, romantics, nay-sayers who look back wistfully to what might be called pretechnological days and ask: Is it really progress...
...In the world of tennis, giving the consumer what he wants means that you and I, social players inhabiting the great, bulging middle of the bell curve, must be made to believe that if we throw away our Victorian rackets and buy one that is aluminum, graphite, or fiberglass, we will become better players...
...Contemporary tennis and opera have certain features in common: in both, the technical achievements seem to become more dazzling with each new season...
...He cannot buy excellence 487 with better equipment...
...The other sports fill stadiums with great mobs of dumb—you'd probably say illiterate—fans...
...If Elizabethan England was a "nest of singing birds," there was a causal connection between that literary flowering and the nation's naval, military, and economic power...
...And now that England is a poor, shabby, industrially second-rate power, we can see that it may have begun to lose its importance in tennis when it lost its empire...
...It looks like progress: from the $500 boron rackets ("strings and taxes extra") to the rules, just about everything in tennis is being subjected to improvement...
...We didn't invent tennis...
...The simulacrum of tennis mimed in Blow-Up cannot be the real thing...
...For him, this democratization is better described as the triumph of the crowd...
...The idea was bound to occur to somebody that the tennis lover too deserves to have a collective body, an abstraction upon which to lavish his love and not just individual favorites, a Rod Laver here, a Billy Jean King there...
...Competition is the engine that drives the juggernaut in both races...
...But all you have to do is look at the score...
...Has it already leaped over maturity and landed in decadence...
...but then there are the toll of the dead on the highways, the dead and dying cities...
...The United States may be in the process of losing its industrial preeminence...
...Tennis, one might say, was subjected to technical redesign and the result was the aggressive, serve-and-volley machinegun style...
...Maybe so...
...That tells the story...
...If these are African blacks, they will do well to get themselves to the United States, where affluence makes the competition more competitive, coaching and training are more sophisticated, tournaments more numerous, and where, in short, the tennis-technology-business trinity operates with budgets that would be the envy of most African governments...
...These inconveniences are the price of progress—progress that generates purses and perks of Hollywood di489 mensions, virtually year-round professional play on the four continents rather than the short season of the past, and of course "free" TV viewing for the fans at home...
...The camera tracks the mimes who play their ghostly game and when Thomas retrieves the imaginary ball that has gone out of court and throws it back to the players, we are delighted by the wit of the gesture...
...In the '70s promoters gave us another innovation: team-tennis...
...AND YET...
...Though we hear the boast too often, it remains a truth: there is undoubtedly an American genius for doing things better than others have done them before...
...And what characterizes real, quotidian, big-time tennis is its materialism...
...The difficult Socratic lesson is this: if we did not have an image, however faint, of essential and ideal tennis fixed in our minds, we would not only be unable to understand the mimes' dance...
...Its failure was in the box office and far from inevitable...
...Until, that is, they take the next step...
...If bigleague tennis is not yet an equal-opportunity employer, the earnings-and-prestige gap between men and women is getting narrower each year...
...Yet this ballet of tennis can never be tennis if it lacks a ball to be served, stroked, smashed, or hit out of court...
...The inventors were on to a good thing but the world wasn't ready for it...
...it's me against you, me with my antique number and you with your oversized job that cost you twice what I paid for mine and that, it is devoutly to be wished, will give you shots commensurately better and stronger and more accurate than mine...
...The purist's rejection of Harold's easy tolerance expresses a way of looking at tennis (and the world) that takes us back again to Antonioni's solemn and funny scene in Blow-Up, this time to teach the doctrine of the primacy of the archetypal image...
...Because there is lots of money in tennis, more and better players are being produced each year...
...At any rate, tennis rackets, along with computers, jeans, rock and roll, and the dazzling special effects of such films as E.T., are on that long shopping list of items that demonstrate the capacity of the American economy to offer products that consumers are eager to buy...
...Which is why many of its contemporary features are distasteful to the romantic reactionary...
...Undeniably, there is the enormous success of the tennis revolution...
...The tennis player can buy education, as it were, through lessons, drill, and coaching...
...And that, say the boosters, is good for everybody—for weekenders, college players, professionals, and most notably, women: tots, girls, teen-agers, undergraduate team players, pros, housewives...
...Recapitulating in a small way the history of the automobile, the new tennis has diffused itself across social, economic, and international boundaries...
...Like the great arms race, this one is expensive, ever escalating, and ubiquitous...
...but this is a matter of perfected skills...
...Regularly and maddeningly, however, planes from two airports fly over Louis Armstrong stadium...
...Not even Casper Weinberger, I believe, says that the Russians have better or more ingenious weapons than we have...
...Along with the tennis at green and frumpy Wimbledon, then, a spectator can enjoy some piquant cultural ironies: players with rackets of odd sizes and curious shapes and made of materials developed in the labs of the NASA space program competing on 19th-century courts lovingly tended by groundkeepers who, one surmises, would never do anything so cheeky as to ask for a union or a raise, while platoons of TV technicians are filming matches that will be beamed via satellite to stations throughout the world...
...In the Depression of the 1930s it was prizefighting, and now young blacks might be sizing up tennis as an avenue to fame and fortune...
...we would not be able to differentiate degrees of skill in performance when these manifest themselves in nonsymbolic, phenomenal, real tennis...
...In a few good years world-class players become teen-age millionaires...
...Box-office revenues (either directly or indirectly related to the prize money) are greater than they were in Forest Hills...
...After decades of more or less stasis, it succumbed to evolution...
...Is this so-called improvement a case of innovation for its own sake...
...Here they can find the college scholarships, private sponsors, and whatever else it takes—that is, costs—to nurture talent...
...It is less significant that the steel racket was invented by the oldtime French player Henri Lacoste than that it was in the U.S.A...
...Teamtennis made its appearance with the inevitability of a natural phenomenon...
...Now, almost 20 years later, the tennis revolution looks like an example of technological and economic progress...
...The Reagan administration claims that the Soviets have more—more nuclear warheads, more megatons of power, more tanks, more soldiers, more of their GNP budgeted for military purposes...
...What England mainly has to show for its days of past dominance are the grass courts of Wimbledon...
...True, there are a few private clubs that still hang on to grass courts that require constant and costly maintenance...
...in both, since the physical and emotional demands are so great, careers tend to be as short-lived as they have been flamboyant...
...Tennis observed as a purely visual phenomenon becomes a geometry of motion, an aesthetic experience...
...It has undergone a liberating, democratizing revolution...
...Satchmo himself, with his seraphic horn and jackhammer notes, might have had trouble making himself heard against the din of the jets...
...and if a country lacks the wherewithal to produce its own, it must import the latest model from one of the more prosperous countries...
...He is appalled by the bad manners, obscene sums of money, hype, contempt for sportsmanship, an incipient and sometimes overt violence and, above all, by that American addiction to overkill, the gross too-muchness that characterizes some of the most distinctively American aspects of American life and now makes its presence felt in the culture of tennis...
...is always trying to match our power, we must catch up with their quantitative superiority...
...IN THE UNITED STATES, HOWEVER, tennis, technology, and business are symmetrically mated...
...If, however, one examines tennis as a social phenomenon—its professional flowering in the United States and internationally, its ever growing popularity with recreational players and spectators— one comes to the very different conclusion that throwing money at a sport certainly can't hurt it...
...But the purist, keeper of the flame, insists that if team-tennis were to come back, even take over, this lamentable state of affairs would not obscure the truth, which is that old-style individual tennis is the real thing, the unadulterated product, the only way the game should be played...
...Though tennis has fewer black players than most other sports, it is in the United States that one finds the greatest number of up-and-coming black (and white) players...
...Not unless they're foolish enough to try to bite the hand that feeds, they don't...
...The scoreboard is the final arbiter and beyond that, the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) computer rankings...
...What makes tennis tennis, even when played by untalented weekenders, is the physical reality of racket, net, and ball...
...It is the pervasive vulgarization of tennis as a whole...
...that the invention achieved its popularity, becoming the emblematic weapon of Jimmy Connors and of the new tennis...
...What we have on the courts is a tennis arms race...
...It isn't the silliness of team-tennis that most disturbs him...
...It is a dance that symbolizes the sport in the way in which love-making in once reticent movies used to imitate sexual intercourse...
...there are many other businesses, trades, services and professions that, like so many pilot fish, co-exist in pleasant and profitable symbiosis with the great shark of tennis...
...Open Tournament was removed from the courts of Forest Hills because this 1920s facility was thought to be old-fashioned and inadequate...
...The same Faustian technological drive that has revolutionized the ways in which tennis is played and merchandised is behind it...
...does the score tell the whole story...
...Businesses batten on tennis as the great corporations of the militaryindustrial complex cohabit with the game that prefers to be called "Defense...
...There is no wordless poetry and there is no spiritual tennis...
...The rebuilt Louis Armstrong stadium, where the main matches are played, is huge...
...Women, who, it is widely acknowledged, are beginning to come into their own...
...A renaissance—in the arts, in science, learning, or in styles of diversion—is almost always grounded in material prosperity...
...Team-tennis didn't make it, Harold said, because it was ahead of its time...
...Even a rich professional soon realizes that there's no point in wasting money on gadgetry...
...Is it a delusion— this unverifiable feeling, this aesthetic intuition...
...Why is it that knowledgeable players and critics do from time to time have the feeling that a player in a particular match has on the whole played better—with more imagination, style, courage, grace, intelligence—than his opponent and yet not been able to win...
...It is hoped that when the billions of dollars of the defense budget mutate into hardware, this country will be more secure than our presumed or potential enemies...
...THE CHANGES THAT HAVE REVOLUTIONIZED tennis and continue to alter many of its features do not please everyone...
...but it continues to dominate in many fields of science and technology, in computers, conventional and nuclear arms, countless other enterprises, and indubitably in tennis...
...If Harold is right, team-tennis will make a comeback...
...When I said something of the sort to my friend Harold, he said: Wait a minute...
...If the United States has more and possibly better first-class players than any other country, that is because we have used money and know-how to manufacture tennis players as efficiently as we used to produce automobiles...
...Do our nocturnal baseball players bitch about their topsy-turvy lives as swing-shift sportsworkers, so to speak...
...Producing, advertising, and selling the equipment and clothing used on the courts—these represent obvious commercial exploitation...
...A few years ago, the U.S...
Vol. 31 • September 1984 • No. 4
