Kramer: Tennis Slump in U.S. Won’t Change Unless Players Do

If the United States is to end its tennis slump, junior players must change their style.

So says Jack Kramer, the former Wimbledon and U.S. champion, who points to Sweden and West Germany, which are are producing the new generation of champions thanks to programs for top young players.

Kramer fears Jimmy Arias and Aaron Krickstein are the first of many American players who will be best remembered as teen-age wonders.

“They don’t have the mechanics to stand up to a player like Boris Becker,” he says. “It’s as simple as that. Becker has the good mechanics and so does Ivan Lendl.”

Kramer, touring the country to promote a new line of tennis rackets, says young American players are developing bad habits.

“When the kids get to a certain age, their parents have to sit down with them and their coaches and explain: ‘If you want to become really skilled, if you ever want to play like Becker or Lendl, you’ll have to change,” he said.

“They must be told, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to get rid of your two-handed backhand in this (mid-court) area, because you can’t approach with it. And your serve doesn’t have enough snap in it with that grip.’

“What you’re saying to the kid is: ‘You’ll have to throw away your winning game to play a really good game.’ If they don’t do it, we’ll have a lot of kids like Arias or Krickstein.

“Jimmy Arias is changing his game now and he may be trading a lot of income. Maybe he won’t be able to make the transition and in the end he won’t have his old game and his new game won’t be any good. I’ve seen that happen with golfers.

“I think it’s unfair that it came to Jimmy so late because by this time he is set in concrete mentally. It’s brutal to tell a guy not to hold the racket this way or that way, but he just can’t defend on a hard-court surface, and neither can Aaron. They’ve got to change.”

Kramer attributes burnout among top young players to their inability to handle defeat.

“Look at the kids that win until they are 16 or so and then quit at 17 or 18,” he says. “They’ve been winners for six years and they quit because they can’t cope with the losing they run into, and that goes back to the way they learned to play the game.

“Look at the top players now: Stefan Edberg, Becker and Lendl, and Pat Cash is coming along. They are all one-handed players. And Martina (Navratilova), Hana (Mandlikova), who grew up in Czechoslovakia and Steffi Graf from West Germany. Those countries have the edge on us because they have the good programs that change these kids’ styles early.”

Unlike the United States, most countries have few popular professional sports. So each time a countryman wins a major title, it produces a boom in that sport.

“Becker will do wonders in Germany because he’s just going to attract all the good kid athletes,” Kramer says. “For years tennis attracted the great athletes in Australia. Bjorn Borg’s popularity had a lot to do with those good six players Sweden has developed.

“The team sports will always dominate in America, but in Czechoslovakia and Sweden, they’ve had these great champions so all the great athletes in those countries went for tennis and the federal government stepped in to help.

“It’s exciting to have those fellows now who are so young and so good. Becker, Edberg and Cash are really just babies. And here they are, already so good. Cash hasn’t got up there in the rankings yet, but he will. They will all provide a lot of good tennis and they will bring in a lot of people who will copy their style, which is what I’m interested in.”