Does anyone remember ... tennis?

ESPN's Bill Simmons, whom I used to like back when he was the Boston Sports Guy with his own site but now has gotten incredibly annoying, nonetheless can still have the occasional flash of insight. Recently he wrote an interesting column in
ESPN The Magazine concerning the demise of tennis as a popular TV sport. I'm not that much older than Bill so we do have sort of the same points of reference, and with Wimbledon currently going on a lot of what he said made sense.

Tennis was never on a par with baseball or football, but when I was growing up it was considered an important sport. It was groundbreaking in a lot of ways as well--I was six when Billie Jean King played the famous match against Bobby Riggs and beat him at a time when women's rights were very much in the forefront of the American consciousness, and Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson broke the color barrier. It was a sport of finesse, the great players being able to drop the ball precisely where it needed to go. It was a primarily English/American/Australian sport, but then the Iron Curtain parted to let through Martina Navratilova and Ilie Nastase. Martina definitely paved the way for players like the Williams sisters--she didn't finesse the ball so much as pounded it at her opponent. She and Chris Evert fought it out on numerous occasions, and there was a definite changing of the guard once Martina got in stride. Nastase was nicknamed Nasty for good reason--he had a devastating serve (once clocked at the fastest in the Guinness Book of World Records in the seventies) and a vicious temper. Then came Bjorn Borg, the expressionless Swede who dominated tennis in the late seventies and early eighties.

Two of the best sporting events I ever saw were the Wimbledon finals between Borg and John McEnroe in 1980 and 1981. NBC, who broadcast Wimbledon at the time, always had "Breakfast at Wimbledon" where coverage would start at six in the morning with Dick Enberg doing the play-by-play. My brother and I would set ourselves up in front of the TV with cereal and toast and watch tennis. The first final was epic, going five sets with a 20 minute fourth-set tiebreaker that had my brother and I yelling at the TV so loudly (we were both rooting for McEnroe) that we woke my father up. Borg ended up winning but not before leaving everything on the court. The next year's was just as epic, with McEnroe winning and dropping to his knees exhausted afterwards. You see that frequently now, but McEnroe was really the first to bring that sort of emotion to the court.

Today, tennis is no longer a game of finesse. With monstrous graphite rackets and players much bigger, stronger and faster (come on, Venus Williams is 6'2" and probably goes about 170, she could kick McEnroe's ass without breaking a sweat), it's turned into a smashfest. You rarely see volleys or touch plays or matches lasting more than two hours. It doesn't help that the current king of men's tennis, Roger Federer, has about as much personality as grass and Maria Sharapova, while good, gets more press for her outfits and model looks than for her tennis. It's also turned into a young person's sport, where players frequently retire in their early twenties. You won't see another player like Jimmy Connors making it into the semis at a Grand Slam event in his late thirties. Now you burn out and fade away and take your millions with you when you're barely old enough to drink.