On Monday the ratings came in for the Super Bowl. It had been assumed, with major markets like Boston’s and New York’s represented, and Madonna performing the halftime show, that the numbers would be big, and they were: 111 million people tuned in for America’s gaudiest sporting spectacle. It was, according to Nielsen, the most-watched TV show of any kind in the history of the United States.
It was also watched by approximately nine million fewer people than had tuned in for the 2011 French Open women’s final between Li Na and Francesca Schiavone.
You probably see where I’m going with this: Americans, mistaking our lost continent for the world at large, underestimate the reach of a global sport like tennis. That point, of course, can be overdrawn. The vast majority of people who watched last year's Roland Garros final were from China, and most of them won’t tune in again this year if Li loses earlier in the tournament. And in terms of prosperity and cultural influence, there’s no comparison between the NFL and any of tennis’s alphabet soup of ruling bodies. But the fact is that tennis, while it doesn’t have mass appeal in many places, does have some appeal virtually every place. And that can add up to a lot of humans.
A few hours after the Super Bowl’s rating were released, and a few days after the nominations for this year’s Oscars were announced, Novak Djokovic won the Laureus World Sport Award for sportsman of the year in London. This is the highest individual honor in what has been described as “the Oscars of international sports.” It’s one that men’s tennis has dominated in recent years—Roger Federer has won it four times, and Rafael Nadal was given the honor for his 2010 season.
As prestigious as it may be everywhere else, though, the award doesn’t register in the United States, at least if I’m any kind of an example of your typical American sports fan. For years, I thought the prize that Federer and Nadal and Djokovic have won was in a “best tennis player”-type category. How else could players from our niche sport keep winning it? Well, fellow Americans, it’s not tennis-specific; it’s for the top athlete in any sport anywhere in the world. Tennis fans here have been outraged in recent years when Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic have failed to be named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. You might say, with the Laureus, that these non-Yanks have bigger fish to fry.
Again, we can overdo these things. The Laureus Awards are all of 12 years old; the committee of 47 ex-jocks who hand out the sportsman of the year prize includes its fair share of former tennis players; and the world's most popular sport, soccer, is a team game—instead of Lionel Messi winning for his individual performance, his club, Barcelona, won the best-team award. But it’s safe to say that our niche sport has a bigger niche, and a higher profile, in other parts of the world than it does in the States.
Still, this year’s Australian Open made some inroads here. Media descriptions of the epic final went beyond, “what a great match that was,” to talk about how underappreciated the modern men’s game is. In an article entitled “Tennis’s Golden Age?” the New Yorker wondered whether the men’s game had become the “most entertaining sport.” SI asked whether tennis players were the best athletes of all. The Wall Street Journal didn’t need to ask. A columnist for the paper explained to us, “Why tennis rules the world.”
Amid all of the celebrating, former player representative Ivan Ljubicic poked his famous dome in yesterday with a more practical-minded Tweet. He asked, essentially, What are we doing to capitalize on this publicity? It was a sobering question. My first thought was that, tennis being tennis, we’re capitalizing on it by letting the two players who created that epic, Djokovic and Nadal, vanish for six weeks.
When the year started, I promised myself that I wouldn’t complain about the schedule, at least until the fall. So, as irritating as the black hole known as February is, I’m going to stick by that. Besides, this time it doesn’t feel like a lost opportunity. One reassuring aspect of the “golden age” is that the men’s game has become so stable that we know that we’re going to get our Djokovic-Nadal rematches at some point this season, even if they don’t happen this month. We know we’ll see Murray continue to climb the mountain for the first time. We know we’ll see Federer try to climb it for the 17th. This year, the Aussie Open’s terrific final weekend doesn’t feel lost in time, orphaned by the schedule; it feels like a mighty prelude.
The sportsman of the moment in the States is Eli Manning, not Novak Djokovic. But I’m going to go the glass-half-full route this time: The Laureus went to someone from our sport for the sixth time in eight years. I don’t know if tennis players are the best athletes, or whether it’s the most entertaining sport. All a fan of this niche game can ask is for a little respect now and then. At the moment, we’ve got it.