TENNIS Magazine's November/December issue features a special report on the state of American tennis. Former top pros Jim Courier, Pam Shriver, and Eliot Teltscher, who was also head of the USTA’s junior development program until this fall, discuss the current U.S. tennis scene.
- After U.S. players went down early at Wimbledon this year, there was a lot of talk about what’s wrong with American tennis. Was its an overreaction, or is there reason to be concerned right now?
Shriver: I think there was a reason. You look at our top players, and their results, and their age, and their injuries, and you look at what other countries, other players are doing, and I think there’s a reason to talk about it.
Look at the global nature of tennis: How many other countries have come a long way and are producing stars? It’s not two or three reasons. I feel like there are many, many reasons. And looking at other sports, I think the U.S. is going through a slump in other aspects of sports as well.
Certainly these things can go in cycles. I think we’re seeing a cyclical downturn coincide with a global upturn in many countries. In many countries production of great tennis players, whether you take Belgium or Russia or Spain or China on the women’s side, and you see the players coming out of there. I mean even Serbia and Montenegro, who’s now separate again and is Serbia and a second country, Montenegro, there’s just a lot of talent there. And we in the U.S. have always had a pipeline and the pipeline is struggling at the moment.
I think as a society we have to look at our youth and think, Are they motivated? Are they doing things physically at a young age to develop the skills that it takes to be a great sports person?
Courier: We have an audience that’s grown accustomed to having American Slam winners annually on both tours. That will become increasingly more rare as the global dispersion of tennis continues. I find the ‘patriotism’ angle humorous actually since our fans tend to cheer more for underdogs than nationalities. I can’t recall how many times I was cheered against on these shores when I played a foreigner, but suffice it to say it was higher than I like to count.
Teltscher: I thought there was a little bit of an overreaction. We should take it seriously and not make excuses—it was a bad French Open and a bad Wimbledon. But we also shouldn’t panic. Everyone needs to take a step back and see that we have two guys in the Top 10 and still have a lot of good women in the game.
- Is the quality of the U.S. game still a cyclical thing, or do you think we’ve begun to lose some ground to the rest of the world?
Courier: It’s a numbers game. A bigger global pool of talent that is ambitious, informed and ready to find a better life through tennis…just like I was. Get used to it. Read Tom Friedman’s book “The World is Flat” and realize that the same logic applies here. When information is available everywhere (coaching, technique, training strategies), you’ll see the world come to play.
Shriver: I think that it’s exaggerated maybe some because we were due probably for a dip. No country can just continually produce champions or players that are contending to win the majors. I don’t care who you are. Probably Australia thought that back in the ’70s their talent would never dry up. You know they had decades of somebody right near the top. And England, back however many years ago, they always had top players. (I mean years and years ago.) You know, but these things change, and you have to keep up with the times and move your programs in a direction that modern times dictate.
Teltscher: The men’s game is cyclical I think, but the women’s shouldn’t be. It’s still the highest-paid women’s sport here, so we should be inspiring and producing the best women players. Why would a great woman athlete play anything other than tennis? Saying its cyclical is too easy.
- Things can change, but right now there is no obvious successor to the top U.S. women in the juniors. There has always been a U.S. woman at the top of the sport; if there isn’t in the future, how do you think it would affect the popularity of the women’s game here?
Shriver: We either need to have homegrown talent that’s at or near the top, or you need international stars, you know like the Beckers of yesteryear, Bjorn Borg, Maria Sharapova. You need those crossover foreign stars that can grab the U.S. market and be of great interest. I do think we have some very charismatic, history-making foreign stars at the moment in both the men’s game and the women’s game. I think Federer and Nadal, if it doesn’t capture the U.S. sporting market, then I think we’re kind of showing we’re very limited because they’re two amazing athletes and tennis players.
Teltscher: Well, until very recently, we’ve had three of the Top 10 women in the world, and the Williamses and Lindsay are still threats to win any Slam. For the future, one key is that we get into schools early and look for the talented and athletic 9- and 10-year-olds. We haven’t done a good job of identifying those girls; we’ve almost been cursed with too much success. But being complacent obviously must become a thing of the past.
- We seem to be able to train champions from around the world on our soil, but not produce as many of our own as we once did. Is there an explanation for this? Are young players from other countries hungrier, or are there just more of them around than ever?
Teltscher: This is really about Sharapova. But it does show you why we [the USTA] need our own academy. Sharapova and some other Europeans made their games at U.S. academies; we’ve got to give our players the same chance, where they can get scholarships and compete against each other in one place. We’re the only major tennis nation without one right now.
Shriver: I think those foreign champions when they get here, those foreign players, like Sharapova who’s been here for such a long time and Seles, I think when they arrived here they already had the table set. In other words I really think an athlete’s DNA is set at a very early age. They do need the facilities and they need competition and they need coaching, but the parents are already driven and the child’s talent has already been developed.
I have some concerns about the desire, the overall... Have we gotten a little fat and happy here, not just as tennis players? I think the world is moving ahead of the U.S. in other areas besides sports, whether its technology, or… I don’t know, these are much bigger topics; I’m getting a little off point. But we’ve kind of dominated in a lot of thins as a country—whether it’s how good your cellphone is, or how good your cars are, or how great your education system is, or you healthcare, your hospitals. What do we sit at the top of right now?
- Is there a positive story about the game here that the U.S. media is under-reporting?
Shriver: I think the amount of effort that the USTA has been putting into the investment into grassroots tennis and tennis in general in the last 10 years is quite extraordinary. I think we would be in a more difficult position if the governing body had not been spending a lot of money trying to keep people playing tennis, develop new players, spending money on player development. It’s easy to criticize the USTA if the results aren’t there, but I kind of take the approach, Wow, where would we be if the millions and millions of dollars had not been invested. And I think there would be even fewer players, and less interest, and not as many professional tournaments on TV in the United States. I’m awfully glad that this big effort has been there in the last 10 years. It’s easy to grow a sport in a time like the tennis boom. I mean that was kind of, I don’t want to say a marketing accident, but I mean there was no great push, tennis was just sort of the in thing. These things happen. Sports get hot for a number of years and great champions help feed the grassroots interest, and so on and so forth. And then, people had to go to work, both mothers and fathers, and kids became less active, and I don’t know.
- If there were one change you could make to the way we train juniors here, what would it be?
Shriver: Compete more. Compete in tournaments. Practice yeah, and prepare. But put yourself on the line and, you know, everybody loses on the way up. You cannot be afraid of losing. And I feel like for too many generations, people, and you know parents may be partially responsible, but they’ve been a little bit afraid of losing.
Courier: We need better technique and training on multiple surfaces (grass, hard, clay) at a very young age.
Teltscher: I think it’s to look for players earlier and stop assuming they’re just going to appear.
- Tennis has tried for years to increase its visibility among U.S. sports fans. Is there anything else the sport can do, or should it be happy with the popularity it currently has?
Courier: Tennis should continue to look for ways to enhance the popularity through investment in the sport (more marketing dollars) and innovation. It’s a competitive landscape and tennis must be more united to compete against other sports and entertainment options.
Shriver: I think never be satisfied. You can never, ever, ever be satisfied. And why should we be satisfied at this point? If you saw tennis on the list of popular activities, it’s too far down to feel acceptable. We need to sell the sport as what it is. It’s as gender neutral, as generational friendly, as globally accessible as any sport you’ll find—male, female, from age 5 to 95. It is a skill sport, though. And a skill sport means you better start early and you better spend some time doing it.
Teltscher: People like [U.S. Open tournament director] Arlen Kantarian have down a great job with this, and instant replay was a great move. Why not on-court coaching? Fans would get Gilbert, Murray, Roddick, and Connors on the same court at once.
- Does the influx of foreign talent into our college system hurt the development of our players? Is there anything we should be doing about this?
Shriver: I think it’s something to have a little asterisk or a little subtitle, but I don’t think it’s a main headline. Look, by the time people are 18 on both the men’s or women’s tour, if you’re going off to college, then you’re going to lose ground. Assuming you have the talent, and the drive, and the resources to go after a pro career, by the time you’re 18, you better be doing that. Look at how young Nadal was, and Djokovic now, there’s a lot of good 20-and-under male players. I mean, you can’t go to college.
Courier: If having foreign players playing college tennis increases the competition that can only help push our players to be better. The discussion about how to allocate scholarships and whether funding foreign minds who don’t plan to stay and work in the US is a different conversation and this is not a political magazine so let’s avoid that for now.
- Many make the case that the U.S. is hampered by the fact our best athletes don’t play tennis. Do you think that seriously affects us?
Shriver: You certainly need your fair share of top athletes. I mean certainly that’s a concern. If the sport of tennis is not getting it’s slice of the elite, most talented natural athletes, then we’re going to have a problem. Because believe me in Russia, if you look at the athletic ability of Sharapova, Dementieva, Petrova, Kuznetsova, I mean most of their parents were elite athletes, they had this in mind, they were groomed to do this. I’m not saying you have to have a parent who was a professional athlete, but you have to have the skill set—the hand-eye coordination, the footwork, the drive—that adds up to being in the elite category. And you can groom these people at a very, very young age. And you can find them at a young age.
Teltscher: I used to think this was true. But I’m not sure it is anymore. Tennis is a very specific skill that requires a good hands and a special mental fortitude. I sae Julius Erving play Harold Solomon in an exhibition once. Harold was lobbing him to see how high he could get up, but Dr. j couldn’t put jump and hit an overhead at once. It isn’t just athleticism that makes a great tennis player, obviously.
Courier: We have many sports options so it is natural that our athletes will disperse in a varied manner. I await your suggestion of how to force people to pick up tennis if they are marked as ‘athletic.’
- Is there anything we can learn from the way other countries, like Spain, develop their players? Is training on clay one of the answers to building better players?
Shriver: Absolutely. We should be looking at best practices all over the world, and not just in the sport of tennis. Look how China is developing their athletes, look at Russia. Does Belgium have something in their tennis system? Does Spain? The Dominican Republic in baseball. How is the Major Leagues now suddenly an amazing grounds for Latino superstars? We should be looking at it all.
You bring up the clay. I sort of have mixed feelings about that. I think it’s really hard to be a player that can feel comfortable on all surfaces. I mean a Roger Federer is a very rare, rare bird. But, you know, I think clay is too much of a dominant surface in this day and age. We need to play on it a lot more, and certainly young U.S. players need to be more comfortable. But I don’t think our future rests with our success on clay. I would never want to overstate the importance of clay-court tennis. I mean I think if we had the same success at Wimbledon as we had on clay in the last 30 years, I think that would hurt us more. Just because Wimbledon, on the grand stage, you know more people tune into Wimbledon than any other tennis tournament worldwide.
You know, I think the dialogue is good. I think that everybody sort of needs to think how we can do it better. But at the same time, we have to realize how fortunate we have been. Just player, after player, after player, since forever. The other important thing to remember is voids can be filled very quickly. I can remember possible voids in the past when everyone was like, uh oh, uh oh. Connors, McEnroe, Evert, that generation was starting to get old and fade away, and how are we ever going to replace them? But I mean, especially on the men’s side, on both sides it’s been an amazing last 15 years.
Courier: There are no silver bullets here. Pete, Andre, Michael, Venus, Serena, Lindsay, etc all came out of home environments that pushed them to excel at tennis. Bollettieri’s was the answer for me to be able to compete at a high level as I didn’t have adequate competition in my home town. Being in an environment where I was with the world’s best with multiple surfaces at my disposal gave me the platform to succeed but it was MY CHOICE to go there, not one taken by a federation, coaches or my parents. There is a big distinction. With the USTA partnering with Evert’s academy perhaps this type of “opportunity” will be given kids who find themselves in my shoes…a good junior player who needs some help to take it to the next level.
Teltscher: There are always things to learn. I would personally like us to do better on clay, so we need to expose kids to clay sooner, the way someone like Andy Murray was in Spain. But it’s tricky because we also want Americans to continue to succeed on hard courts, which is our bread and butter. We need to balance grass, clay, and hard and build well-rounded players, and see what happens from there.