Tennis Hottest Sport this Summer

Posted by T. A. Niles Aug 9, 2008

Tennis is as good as it has been since I began watching the game in the 1960’s. The seventies and eighties with Connors, McEnroe, Borg, etc. have been considered the boom years of tennis, but as has been documented elsewhere, tennis is one of the few growing sports in our sports-crazed culture.

And if you love the game as I do and watched the tremendous tennis that has been displayed this year, not just by the top players, but by ATP players like Feliciano Lopez, Rainer Schuettler, and Marat Safin, then you're in heaven. WTA players have also brought mucho game to the courts this year. Henin might be gone, but the splendor of Venus Williams, the emergence of Dinara Safina, and the Serbian struggle for No.1 have all spiced up the flavor of the WTA Tour.

Given Roger Federer’s lengthy reign atop the ATP rankings, it is no surprise that Rafael Nadal’s breaking of the strangle hold Roger has had on the No.1 position has injected a jolt of media juice into the game. Between ESPN2 and Tennis Channel, both ATP’s Roger’s Cup and the WTA’s East West Classic received as much coverage as grand Slams. That much coverage for non-Grand Slam events may be unprecedented.

Some fans are complaining about slower surfaces, but if you don’t like a 31-shot rally, which includes shot-making that forces both players to cover every inch of court surface before the point is won, how much can you love this game? You know tennis is hot when Gilles Simon and Nicolas Kiefer can keep me up until 3:00 A.M.!

If you haven’t already caught the bug, then you never will. Look for the US Open Series events and the US Open to set records for attendance and viewership, even in our struggling economy.