A Sad Tennis Commentary: the TV Voices Tell the Flaws

Oh my, was that really Dick Enberg, the same man who still describes Wimbledon as the “cathedral,” the voice of calm and reason, trashing tennis on the telephone from London the other day?

Oh no, could that really have been Bud Collins, the bard of the fuzzy-ball set, the fellow who once wore strawberry-adorned cream-colored slacks while conducting player interviews in full view of the royal box, also making disparaging remarks about the sport he’ll be covering with Enberg this weekend? You bet your tea and crumpets it was.

This week, two of the game’s more respected commentators expressed serious concerns about the sport they’ve covered for so long and so well, focusing on some of the spoiled brats, their suffocating agents and a style of play--serve and volley--almost guaranteed to produce dull tennis and flat ratings.

The fortnight at Wimbledon comes to a close with NBC’s three-day annual blitz starting Friday.

NBC can’t be particularly pleased with the ratings on the first weekend: They are exactly the same as a year ago. Still, last year there was live tennis on Sunday, usually the traditional day off. Because of rain delays last year, Wimbledon was forced to play on Sunday. This year, viewers got videotaped matches, features and interviews instead.

“I’ve always believed ratings are a fraud anyway,” Collins, a longtime newspaper columnist for the Boston Globe, said in a conference call earlier this week. “I still believe a lot of people are watching. Maybe the boom has gone off in the U.S., but not anywhere else. I do think, except for the major events, no one has come up with cogent programming to showcase the game.

“The circuit is so spread out, people can’t get a real sense of it. No one knows what counts in terms of what’s on the level and what’s not. You can follow the PGA Tour, baseball or basketball, but until you can follow tennis like that, you’ll have a problem with the ratings.”

Added Enberg: “The tennis community has not been cooperative in the building of the sport. They’re so uncooperative when it comes to building an image, a likability. The tennis animal is the most difficult to know. You can sit down with them for an hour and ask them to tell you what’s going on in their lives and it’s tough to get anything. They just have not gone out of their way to popularize their sport the way Barkley, Magic and Jordan have done with the NBA.”

Enberg recalled an incident at the French Open last month when defending champion Jim Courier steadfastly refused to attend the champion’s dinner. It was held on a Tuesday night. Courier had played matches Monday and Tuesday but was not scheduled again until Thursday. “They were going to pick him up in a limo and they promised they’d have him back no later than 9:15 p.m. He snubs them. It’s things like that that make you very disappointed.”

It was not always so. Collins recalled when he first started covering the sport for TV in the 1960s “you went and talked to them and they were so glad to talk to you. I know there are more demands on them now and you can understand they’re besieged a little. But it’s money in their pockets.”

The game has changed in other ways, and that’s also not necessarily good for TV. Racket technology--oversized heads and space-age metallurgy--has put a premium on a big serve. It’s made long-rallying, strategic baseliners--particularly in the men’s game--a dying breed.

Everyone at NBC had been pulling for Andre Agassi to make it to weekend play, both for his drawing power as a heartthrob and the rallying style of his game.

“If we had a rooting interest, it was to get Agassi and Courier into the finals,” Enberg said the day before Agassi lost in the quarterfinals to big-hitter Pete Sampras. “At least it wouldn’t be slam, bam and point over. We’d get rallies. After a while, great volleys all start to look the same.”

Collins places much of the blame for the problems of the men’s game squarely on the Assn. of Tennis Professionals, the governing arm of the sport.

“They’re afraid to guide the players,” he said. “They’re afraid the top guys will just go off and form their own group. The ATP was founded by principled guys: Ashe, Emerson, Smith. It was a true player’s union. It’s not any more. It’s run as a business, and the players have little to say. And they’re doing a bad job of PR.”

Still, despite their grumbling earlier this week, both announcers say they know better than to whine on the air, particularly about their problems in dealing with the new-age players.

“I guess in the back of our minds,” Enberg said, “we’re thinking if we talk (to reporters) about it, maybe the players will say, ‘Maybe we should do a better job in building up our sport.’ They still have agents; that’s part of the problem.”

So it will be mostly strawberries and sweet cream served up with the tennis on NBC this weekend, even if it’s not such a jolly good show these days.