Just like us...
I was thinking the other day that one of the things that has changed massively in the tennis world in the last decade or two is the loss of identification with the players. When I was first watching tennis, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I realized that the reason I so strongly preferred women's tennis was that I identified more with the players: not that I ever really thought I could be Evert or any of the others, but most of their bodies *looked* sort of like mine (and Evert and Navratilova are only a couple-three years younger than I am). The men seemed distant. It's only really since 1997 that I started getting interested in men's tennis -- Kuerten I think was the first male player I really enjoyed watching, and Federer is the first I've loved to watch. (Remember, I wasn't watching tennis when McEnroe was in his heyday.)
But it's also true that the women are far more distant from me now, and the tours are now, from my pov, more comparable. The women are more heavily muscled, and of course the age gap between me and them has grown a lot. There are hardly any players over 30 now, and even if they are, they're 20 years younger than I am, not two. Karatancheva, at 16 and doping-or-pregnant-or-noneoftheabove, is younger even than my friends' kids.
In the January 9 New Yorker, which I read this morning, a Talk of the Town piece by Roger Angell talks about this very phenomenon in relation to baseball. For so long, he writes, you could sit in the stands and imagine that with a little luck you could have been one of them. Their bodies, their salaries, their lifestyles were like yours only a bit better. Now, of course, all gone: the huge, muscle-bound millionaires have taken the intimacy of the game with them as they bulked up their muscles and their contracts.
Tennis is always gazing at its navel trying to figure out why it isn't more loved, and I think this is at the heart of the problem. McEnroe and Connors were excoriated by the tennis establishment, but they packed in the fans curious to see what unpredictable thing they might do next; and they *did* come across as the hothead next door. Certainly people respond to the Williams sisters, the Belgians, the Russians...but the more they become celebrities (which the game promotes) the less they are like us, and the more the game loses its intimacy.
Writing all that makes me realize that Wimbledon, which has always tried to create the effect that you are watching tennis in "an English garden", may be making a mistake by putting in a roof. Yes, it will mean there's some live play for the TV audience and on-site ticketholders to watch. How professional. How 21st century. But at the cost of a little more of that intimacy.
wg