Posted by Peter Bodo, TENNIS.com
At a time when U.S. tennis is suffering, with implications of a recession for the world tennis market (no matter how you cut it, the U.S. matters. A lot), you might think that perhaps everyone would be better off if the emerging superstar in men's tennis would be named, oh, Buzz Tyler, or D-wayne (is that variation of "Dwayne" taken yet?) Rodman, rather than Novak Djokovic.
But the Djoker, a 19-year-old Serb with ramrod-straight posture and the cleanest game this side of Pete Sampras, is the new barbarian at the gate. He proved that with the February he had, as he reached the two big Masters Series finals (he won the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami Monday). So one of the more interesting questions on the horizon is how well the U.S. audience, with all of its xenophobic baggage, will take to seeing his name up in lights, or even down in the ESPN Bottomline.
Is American Tennis Dead? That's an evergreen story. Surely you remember the last turn it took in the news cycle. With John McEnroe abdicating and nobody conspicuously poised to take his place, the Chicken Littles became as common as, well, little chickens at Easter. Then we woke up one morning in the midst of the debate to find Michael Chang, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi and Jim Courier staring at us from the front page of the sports section. Hello, sports fans!
This time, despite James Blake's great finish in 2006 and Andy Roddick's resurgence, the gloom-and-doom story may have legs. And maybe that's not a bad thing, because it's about time the U.S. audience got hip to the fact that tennis is a global game in the best sense. Except during Davis Cup, the game is about gifted, interesting and sometimes colorful individuals from all over the place (just like the U.S. population, right?). It's different from soccer with its tedious "My nation schooled your nation!" obsessions.
A number of circumstances suggest that the U.S. market is ripe for a global, individual sport like tennis, ranging from the nation's ever-increasing awareness of world culture and politics to the effective leadership role multilingual world citizen Roger Federer has taken in spreading the tennis gospel. Federer has had some trouble cracking the difficult, inward-looking U.S. market, but it is happening (a Federer Warrior Moment at the U.S. Open this September certainly would help the cause).
Rafael Nadal is a kid with universal appeal. Guns and Buns could be anyone's cute-but-annoying, scruffy, gym-rat kid brother, and American women know tasty when they see it. Throw Djokovic, with his clean-cut looks, soldierly demeanor and excellent English into the mix, and you've got something for everyone, everywhere -- including the U.S. And we've still got Roddick and Blake to make us feel good about our own place at the table.
Is American Tennis Dead? I don't know, but it seems to me that the question isn't important as it once was.
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