2008 yearbook

 

ASHLEY HARKLEROAD: ‘TENNIS IS BORING’

“U.S. tennis is not doing well because people would rather watch football, basketball or baseball. Tennis is boring — no personalities anymore. Andy Roddick’s got personality, but that’s about it. They need to do something different. Something needs to happen.”

JOHN FEINSTEIN: PAYING THE PRICE FOR FOLLOWING THE MONEY PATH

“No sport has followed the money like tennis, and no sport has suffered more. During the sport’s heyday in the ‘80s, agents were allowed to run amok because there was no central power, no true commissioner who could stop them from ignoring all the rules that supposedly existed to keep the sport legitimate. Top players were paid under-the-table guarantees on a regular basis to the point where those allegedly running the sport threw up their hands and said, ‘We give up.’ Players became virtually inaccessible to the media. Tennis needs a commissioner. It needs a real schedule, not four different tournaments — all of them equally meaningless — being played every week. It needs a big tour, like the PGA Tour, and then AAA-, AA- and A-level tours. It needs far more tournaments in the U.S. and a meaningful TV contract that gets the sport in front of the public more often. No one watches the French Open because there are no Americans, or the Australian because it is in the middle of the night. It needs players on the big tour to face suspensions and huge fines if they are paid an appearance fee, and the suspension of any tournament director who offers one — for life — the second time it happens. It needs to look to golf to set up its rules on media access. In other words, create a relationship between the media — and thus the public — and the players. It needs to start all over again. Most of all, the people running the sport need to stop saying, ‘Everything’s okay, we’re still making money in Europe.’ Because Europe is starting to dry up, too.”

RICHARD WILLIAMS: LOOKING IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

“You can’t make tennis popular in America because it’s in white neighborhoods and needs to be in black ones. White Americans don’t want to play. If I had the money that I do now, I wouldn’t have had Venus and Serena play, either. We have the best tennis schools and teachers, but they look in the wrong neighborhoods — in Beverly Hills and Brentwood, where all they want to be is doctors and attorneys. You have to come to the ghetto, where I come from, and get someone who says, ‘I’m ready to go,’ just like the Third World countries are doing. The USTA doesn’t help black kids. How are you going to find kids in millionaire’s homes? It’s a joke, just like lawn tennis in England. They just built this big training center. It’s for the rich and famous, and I hang out with poor people. They need to go down to the 17th district and get someone who is hungry and in 10 years they will hit winner after winner. They should go to Nick Bollettieri and ask him how he did what he did. They have to step down from their pride.”

NICK BOLLETTIERI: WANT IT SO BAD IT BURNS

“The rest of the world has caught up with us, whether it’s basketball or swimming, a lot of other sports. If the USTA came to me and asked me what I would do, I would say give me two or three people and let’s go out through the U.S. and pick out in the 12-year-old area the best athletes and students. A lot of them are going to be from the inner city. A lot of them might have money. I want to go get the best athletes. Then I want to start them our way, providing a foundation, the techniques, an education. I want to deal with the athlete and teach all aspects of the game. I would then get experts in the areas of growing up — the physical part, the nutritional part, the education. I wouldn’t have one coach teach all aspects. I’d have one coach to work with the forehand. I’d get a one-handed, a two-handed backhand coach, a serve coach. Plus, Richard Williams had it all right. When Richard brought his girls over he said, ‘My girls are not going to play [the juniors].’ Everybody thought Richard was crazy. But along the way, the kids have to meet certain standards. It would take three to five years. Look at Serbia, a country of 10 million people. They have three great players. Those people found something within themselves. But they weren’t driven into five or six sports. We have cheerleading, football, basketball — everything. How do you teach a person to want it so bad it burns? You have to show them examples. I would take these kids to the children’s ward and let them see little boys and girls who’re dying. They have no chance. It’s a continued education. The USTA is on track, but it’s not going to happen overnight. The biggest thing today is knowing the needs of children, and that ain’t easy.”

ROBERT LANSDORP: HEY, GUYS, WHERE’RE THE FUNDAMENTALS AND DISCIPLINE

“The problem is that no time is spent anymore on the fundamentals. Plus, there’s a lack of discipline. If you don’t have discipline and fundamentals when you start, it’s never going to help you. You’ve got to do all this when you’re young. You start them at seven, eight, nine. You have to establish a fundamentally sound game. Nowadays everything is topspin. They’re completely wrong. When you look at the pros, they really drive the ball. There’s far more pace on the ball these days. But they all keep stressing topspin. It has its place the same way slice does, but that’s not how you develop. By the time the kid is 15, 16, they’re never going to drive the ball. When they’re young, make them drive the ball a foot and a half over the net. Make them do it over and over again. Of the players I’ve worked with, Davenport probably had the best strokes. That’s why she became No. 1. You have to instill discipline at a young age and let them know that there are consequences for things they don’t do. If they don’t feel like working hard, there are consequences. I make them understand, ‘If you don’t do this, either you get out of here or do 20 at the baseline, run corner to corner, run your butt off.’ It all starts at the beginning. Everybody’s playing points. There’s no more of this in-the-gutter kind of teaching — ball after ball after ball. Give me 50 kids and I’ll weed them out. I’ll find the kids who love to hit the ball, who are coachable, who love to work hard.”

JIMMY CONNORS: ‘COME TALK TO ME OR LEAVE ME ALONE’

“Someone is going to have to sharpen up somewhere. The U.S. better be happy they have Andy, Blake, Fish and Ginepri around or we would be in dire straights. A lot of other countries are shoving out really talented kids. I know a few things that are necessary to bring kids into the game and improve tennis, but they have to come to talk to me or just leave me alone.”

JOHN MCENROE: BIG COURTS, FEW VOLLEYS, TIMID JUNIORS

“I wonder what can be done about the fact that you’re not seeing many kids learning how to volley. The ball is being hit with more pace than ever, and the spin is greater than ever because of the strings and the rackets and the strength of the players, so the volley is a dying shot. Part of the problem is that the court is pretty big. Pick any sport — soccer, football, baseball basketball — when kids start playing, they play on a much smaller court. Tennis is the only one where you really see the court the same size, even when you’re starting. I’d like to see kids start on a court two-thirds or three-quarters the size. You could get more courts at a school. That way people wouldn’t be as afraid. Kids are little. They worry about kids lobbing over their heads. They get discouraged about going to net. Plus, there’s this inclination of the top juniors is to avoid each other. I also disagree with this idea of allowing kids to play the juniors even though they’ve already turned pro. It doesn’t give them any reason not to turn pro.”

LUKE JENSEN: NO GOING HOME TO DADDY

“Our country has to be defined by something. When I say Russian tennis, Spanish tennis, you think of a style of play. You have a definition of work ethic, sacrifice, style of play. The U.S. used to have that. There was a big style, a Kramer style, which is big serve, volley. And it continued through till the ‘90s. Now when I talk to the top players in our country, I ask, ‘How many days a week do you practice?’ ‘What are your ambitions?’ These are the elite players, but they’re not getting to the peak of Mount Everest. They’re just getting to base camp. They’re in college tennis because they don’t think they can make it [in the pros]. We’re not defined by a work ethic, or by a style of play. We’re doing this because that’s what the Russians do. The reason I’m at Syracuse is to get an American champion winning a Grand Slam. I’m not freezing my tail off, I’m not out there at 6:30 in the morning watching girls’ tennis because I really enjoy it. It comes down to work ethic. Go to the practice courts — when do the Americans show up? When do the Russians show up? The Russians are the first ones and last ones there. No Russians are looking for autographs, or take pictures of stars. They’re there to win. This Y generation, or what we call E generation — the entitled generation — ‘I’m going to play soccer and I’ll lifeguard in the summer and, if things don’t work out, I’m just going to go home to dad.’ The Russians can’t go home. There’s 30 percent unemployment. South America, Argentina, there’s no economy, no future. You’ve got to make it. You don’t have a choice. You have to succeed. There is no going home.”

ARLEN KANTARIAN: ‘IF WE STARTED FROM SCRATCH’

“We have to come up with a plan that allows us to control our own destiny. We’re the only sport whose tours are governed worldwide, as opposed to by region. We want to take the U.S. Open Series approach and apply it throughout the tournaments in the U.S., but we can only do that if we have a five- to 10-year defined calendar so we can go to TV with a consistent game plan. We want to shake it up a little, come to TV with combined events. If we started from scratch, we would identify the best cities, venues, stadiums, just like every other sport is doing. We want to take that team sport approach, where you have a regular season leading up to the U.S. Open like the Super Bowl. Our hope is that we have a much stronger American part of our circuit in conjunction with the tours, where the USTA can add value to the Open, to its financial resources and to TV deals through sponsorships. But we must have a stronger American circuit. But the tours have moved into a follow-the-money tour as opposed to follow the logical circuit. Both year-end championships used to be in the U.S. We’d love to develop a model that would be good for the U.S. and have mini-tours that all come together at a bigger event. Plus, we have to identify the best young athletes and convince them to play tennis. Talent identification is significant.”

PATRICK MCENROE: NO BOSS

“There are great personalities, maybe the greatest player ever in Federer, a great challenger in Nadal. Roddick and Blake are two dramatic guys. The Slams are bigger than ever, but still there is no central authority that governs the sport. If you look at other sports, they’ve been controlled by a central authority, even golf, where the players have to play by the PGA rules. But in tennis, agents have too much power and the Slams are separate from the rest of tour. The ATP’s hands are tied because the Slams control the sport. It’s a positive that the USTA created the U.S. Open Series and marketed the tournaments as a group.”

JAMES BLAKE: DAMN THAT SWISS GUY

“We’ve got a long way to go to appease the public’s idea of what it takes to have a good American tennis scene. Tennis in America is doing great. It was one of those coincidences or bad-luck incidents when we had everything go wrong at the French Open. I just hope that doesn’t happen again for a long time. Having two pretty big stars in the sport from any one country is a big deal with how globalized it’s become. There aren’t many countries that can say they have two top-20 players. It seems like it’s happening in every sport. Things are changing. In baseball, there are so many Latin players. It becomes tough for any one country to dominate. In generations past, to have Sampras, Agassi, Chang, Courier, it was so dominant that every American tennis fan would just turn on the TV during the second weekend of a Grand Slam and they’re going to see at least one of them. You can’t do that anymore. Just about the only person you can be pretty sure of seeing is that Swiss guy. It’s pretty tough unless you’re from Switzerland to say you have a star that’s guaranteed to be there every second week.”

ANDY RODDICK: ‘HOW DO YOU DEFINE POPULARITY?’

“The thing we have to focus on is getting tennis more popular here with the youth. It’s not the second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, or 10th-biggest sport here. [Still] we’re going to bigger stadiums, we’re selling out in a lot of places. You’re getting over the best generation ever from one country. Before that, you probably had the second-best generation. It’s cyclical. Outside of Federer, who else is regularly winning Slams? It’s all relative. We continually have guys pushing at the top. James [Blake] had a good year last year. The re-emergence of Venus and Serena is a good thing. You look at the ratings for the U.S. Open last year, we’re up. It depends on how you define popularity.”

TRACY AUSTIN: KIDS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

“It starts from the ground up. We need to start building youngsters. Tennis is more international and those kids are hungrier. You have to start at the grassroots. My kids play baseball, and I can see in all-star games a kid who pitches a little better and digs deeper. Those kids are the kind you want. Baseball and soccer are more organized. You sign them up and for the next nine weeks, if the kids show up, they play. There’s not that kind of organization in tennis, and you have to have very proactive parents and kids. Tennis is tough to start and tough to get good at. Just to get to the point of rallying is difficult. Then, once you get good, you have to travel. My friend’s kid signed up to play a tournament in West Virginia, which was a seven-hour drive away, and then he lost and had to drive back another seven hours. In contrast, in baseball, you get on the bus for two hours with the rest of your team. Which of these is more fun? It’s a monstrous commitment. Plus, my kids have a nice life. I didn’t have as many choices as my kids do. There’s more hunger in Serbia.”

MARY CARILLO: A HIGHER PROFILE

“Europeans are much more fluid in changing surfaces. They seem to be able to play on a hard court, a clay court, on grass. They seem better coached. They seem better prepared to play high-level tennis at a younger age. They have more game, more skills. In a lot of countries, like Spain or France, a lot of former champions want to hang around and teach more than anything. If America embraced tennis the way it did in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the sport could grow to where kids want to be tennis players. Tennis enjoys a much higher profile in a lot of European and South American countries.”

DMITRY TURSUNOV: ‘DON’T BEAT YOUR CHEST AND SCREAM [BUT...]’

“They have to promote tennis more on TV. You have poker 24 hours a day and rock-paper-scissors competitions. People want to see that more than they want to see tennis. Players [need to] put forth a little more effort to promote it any way they can. You don’t have to walk out there and beat your chest and scream, ‘Tennis is the best sport ever.’ But you could be more friendly with the fans and do a more to make the fans want to come back.”

BILLIE JEAN KING: A FIRE IN THE BELLY

“We’ve got to get the best athletes. It’s all about recruiting. I’d go right to the guys who can figure out who’s talented. [Nick] Bollettieri, [Robert] Lansdorp, [Rick] Macci. They’re the guys. They’ve been doing it for years. The ones who want to compete, who have a fire in their belly. Lansdorp always said, ‘Give me the 100 best athletes and I’ll produce two champions for you.’ Let’s let him do it.”

JIM COURIER: A VERY COMPLICATED QUESTION

“If you want to expose the best athletes to tennis, it has to come through the school system, because people don’t always have rackets lying around the house. A lot of our best athletes don’t come from means.”

TODD MARTIN: ‘IN AN A-B-C, 2X2 TYPE OF WAY’

“We don’t have an accepted teaching philosophy, that’s a big issue. It’s not about homogenizing American tennis, but if more kids could learn the fundamentals in an A-B-C type of way, and then learn the multiplication tables in a 2x2 type of way, then in tennis we surely should be able to build a matriculation for these kids to go through the system, whether they’re kids from Rochester or Chicago, they’ve learned certain things about the game so at 15, when they’ve got opportunities to be exposed to the best coaches in the country, those coaches aren’t having to educate them on the fundamentals. We need to be better at passing our talent on to those who can help those players. We need the USTA to work with the USPTA and the PTR. We need the whole gang to go out of its way to work at adopting a teaching philosophy.”

MARY JOE FERNANDEZ: ‘YOU NEED TO COMPETE EARLY’

“When I first started, half of the top 100 women were American. Now there’s only a few. But that just shows you how globalized our sport’s becoming. We have much more to compete against. Tennis in Europe is usually No. 2 behind soccer. What is it here — No. 18? It’s a tough obstacle, but we’re doing okay. Believe it or not, we’ve never had a down patch. We’ve always had Americans at the top on both the men’s and women’s side. To say now, ‘We can’t see the next female star,’ that’s not so bad. We’ve got a good record. It’s cyclical.”

 

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