Wimbledon Sucks

[Desigol]

Just to let you guys know, I f**kin' hate Tennis. Anyone in agreement with me?

[Guest Can. in UK]

You must love Hen-mania. I know I do.

[sstackho]

I used to like tennis when I was younger. Then the men got too good, and serve-and-volley (and 5 set matches) were boring. For me, Sampras ruined the sport.

So tennis is probably the only sport in the world where I prefer the women's game to the men's game.

Even without Anna.

That being said, I don't watch very much of it.

[Jarrek]

I used to like tennis when I was younger as well. Football is just so much better.

[ted]

And here I was ready to go on a rant about MK FC and it's about tennis.

Ah well, I could watch athletic young women in short skirts for a while but frankly Beach Volleyball is more interesting (both sporting and viewing.)

[]

[Gian-Luca]

I remember the old days of Men's tennis when the players actually had some personality which you could love or hate. Guys like McEnroe, Connors, Borg, Natase, Gueralitis. When those guys retired so did my interest in tennis. Especially when they were replaced by the likes of Agassi, Courier, Sampras...... boring, dull, blah.

Women's tennis is more interesting now, though not so much for their personalities, I have to admit.

[sstackho]

Yup, that was the problem with Sampras. Awesome, and duller than a brick wall.

They can only show his girlfriend so many times.

I loved McEnroe. But not so much to tune him to hear him announce.

[Metro]

I use to follow tennis on a casual basis in my younger days, but ever since technology (read: better tennis rackets) overtook the game and made it boring, I don't follow it much at all anymore.

Whatever the case, the fact that there has never been any great Canadian players to root for has prevented me (and perhaps others) from becoming a hardcore fan.

[Danny Boy]

The only thing worse than watching Sampras play tennis is watching him puke on the sidelines....he's done that a few too many times.

[jonovision]

Wimbledon sucks? Maybe.

Sharapova is nice though.

[Guest Jeffery S.]

The reasons Metro has for not being too interested (no great Canucks, though the double has been doing better lately) is what got me interested again -following folks from Spain. That also means appreciating the clay game more. Of course for some it may seem boring to watch long rallies, but I prefer the physical effort involved to the big serving grass-court game. It means more comebacks and other factors coming into play beyond towering height bashing the ball in to never be broken.

Wimbledon is still great, one of the factors I think that has people not so hyped is that there are no real male stars in the Anglo-Saxon world, so the press is more subdued. But other nations have been very excited about what is happening in the sport (Argentina, the Swiss, Russians, Spain too), none of which are overly inspiring for the North American fan.

[canadiankick97]

Don't actually watch it much, but playing gives you a good work-out and is pretty fun.

[matthew]

Daniel Nestor over Stefan Edberg in Davis Cup 1992 — Fantastic.

Everything else — pretty crap.

Fun sport to play though.

cheers,

matthew

[Mimglow]

I love tennis. Women's tennis. And not for the skirts.

Since the graphite racket came into existence, the women's game is a lot more entertaining to watch.

I'd love to go into a long rant, but it's Canada Day and it's the busiest day of the year for me.

Women's tennis = Good

Men's Tennis = Bad

I think if McEnroe decided to pull a Navratilova, I'd watch the men.

[Mimglow]

Great article that addressed the problem with power-serves.

What's That Racket?

http://slate.msn.com/id/2103263/

This year's men's draw at Wimbledon is more a serving contest than a tennis tournament. Defending champion Roger Federer, who has won 106 of his last 107 service games at the All England Club, will likely face Andy Roddick and his 153 mph serve in Sunday's final. Expect a lot of short points.

Tennis players are better conditioned and far stronger than they were 20 or 30 years ago. But the athletes have changed far less than the racket technology. Compared to today's composite frames and Kevlar strings, rackets made of wood or the metal T2000 (popularized by Jimmy Connors) look like they should hang in a natural history museum. Modern rackets are significantly bigger and stronger than old models, yet weigh half as much. No wonder a former technical director of the International Tennis Federation has said that "we are approaching the limit on reaction time for the return of serve."

Men's tennis offers a cautionary tale for other sports. An absence of racket regulations has allowed the game to be transformed by technology. At this point, turning back the clock will be exceedingly difficult. Any fundamental changes to the game would lead to carping about the loss of tradition and resistance from players who've crafted a style of play for the game as it was presented to them.

The game's amped-up power and speed present a kind of Goldilocks challenge. If points are too long, spectators yawn; if they're too short, the sport loses its sweaty elegance. The problem with finding a balance between these extremes is that playing surface fundamentally changes tactics, style, and results. Fixing the game on grass could ruin it on clay, where big servers don't have nearly as big an advantage. So, how can you recalibrate men's tennis so it's not simply a test of who can hit the ball the hardest?

Change the balls: In the late 1990s, the International Tennis Federation introduced two new balls, one to speed up play on slow surfaces, another to slow play on fast surfaces. The "slow ball," which weighs the same as a standard ball but is 6 percent larger (extra surface creates more wind resistance, decreasing velocity), can offer up to 5 percent more time to read a serve. But players hated the new balls, fearing they would cause more injuries. Tournament directors sided with the players, and manufacturers stopped making the balls. That's probably a good thing. What happens when players start hitting the big ball as fast as a standard one? Soon, they'd be slugging those giant tennis balls that kids dangle out of the stands for autographs.

Raise the net: A higher net would keep servers from pounding down on the ball—less force means less speed. The problem is that every other shot would have to be altered as well. What's more, raising the net would launch a technological arms race. Michael Chang compensated for his short stature by using a longer tennis racket—it effectively made him taller. Raise the net, and players will push to lengthen their rackets.

Change the dimensions of the court: Tennis courts were drawn up when rackets were made of wood and strings were made of sheepskin. In professional golf, where players with modern equipment now hit the ball distances unforeseen years ago, courses have been altered to make them "play longer." But this approach wouldn't work for tennis. There are between 750,000 and 1 million courts around the world, all of which would have to be relined. Think of the poor groundskeepers. What's more, this is only a temporary fix—what happens when technology catches up to the new court sizes?

Regulate racket power: John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova have called for the game to go back to wooden rackets. This kind of Luddism is too drastic—players would revolt and the fans would fancy the lords of tennis a bunch of reactionaries.

Still, fixing the rackets seems like the only sensible solution. While the sport's governing bodies obsessively regulate court, net, and ball specifications, they've only just started paying attention to racket technology. In the early 1980s, the ITF started imposing size restrictions on racket heads, but 20 years later they've yet to limit what rackets can be made from.

Top-of-the-line rackets are now fashioned from titanium, carbon fibers, glass fibers, thermoplastic filaments like nylon, metal alloys, and epoxy resin. One popular racket, the Head Liquidmetal, was developed at Caltech and supposedly offers more power than titanium because of its amorphous (or "liquid") atomic structure. I'm no molecular physicist, but it seems like these tennis scientists could stumble onto the cure for cancer while developing next year's model.

The ITF claims that it's exploring some new guidelines to limit the power-generating capacity of rackets. But any such ideas are in the early stages, and there's definitely no concrete plan at this point. Banning a particular material would almost certainly be futile. Keeping a lid on racket tech is like trying to stop athletes from using performance enhancing drugs—by the time regulators find out about the newest innovation, something better will already be in the pipeline.

Rather than micromanage the legality of space-age materials, perhaps there should just be a speed limit. The ITF now has a ball-whacking machine at its Technical Centre that can wield rackets and hit serves in excess of 150 mph. This kind of legislation has worked for golf—in recent years the USGA banned "trampoline" driver faces that gave golfers an extra kick to those already monstrous drives. Manufacturers will surely complain that they'll be forced to spend on research and development without knowing whether their rackets will be legal. But this may be the only way to keep the latest technology in the game without turning rackets into lethal weapons.

It's likely that restricting rackets would even make the game more popular. Tennis-elbow-addled fans admired stars like Borg and McEnroe because they knew how tough it was to hit accurate, firm strokes with wooden rackets with tiny sweet spots. Taming the equipment will reign in firepower—and allow fans to marvel at the pros' artistry. When players like Federer and Roddick wield their mighty clubs, it's all too easy to forget they're incredibly skillful tennis players, not just ball-spewing cannons.