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Sex sells, but that won't be enough to save tennis in the coming post-Serena Williams era

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By Douglas Perry | The Oregonian/OregonLive on October 01, 2016 at 7:05 AM

Tournament officials have been fretting about it for years. How does tennis draw in the casual sports fan?

Many of the executives running the professional tours today remember the glory years. Teenage girls mobbing Bjorn Borg everywhere he went. Alienated teens putting John McEnroe's "Rebel With a Cause" poster on their bedroom walls. Chris Evert embracing the role of America's sweetheart.

Sports fans -- including plenty who had never picked up a tennis racquet -- couldn't get enough. The 1972 WCT Final between legends Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall nabbed an estimated 21.3 million U.S. television viewers. The 1981 U.S. Open tournament -- featuring Borg, McEnroe and Evert in their primes -- attracted an average of 5.8 percent of all U.S. TV-watching households per telecast.

Tennis was the "It" sport.

Not anymore. The popular "tennis boom" stars retired in the 1980s and early '90s, and the sport's popularity plummeted. By 2007, the TV rating for the U.S. Open final -- always the highest-rated telecast of the tournament -- had fallen to 1.7 percent of TV-watching households. The men's and women's finals in 2016 barely managed one-and-a-half million viewers for each match and a paltry 1.0 rating. With popular stars Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams all nearing the end of their careers, and with no new players generating similar fan interest, tennis' poohbahs are starting to panic.

This year, the only good viewership news for the sport came from the Elizabeth Anne "instruction" video, which scored millions of views online in a single day.

Elizabeth Anne is a busty model who, in a Live Rich Media production, repeatedly swings at the ball (and often completely misses it) while wearing a tiny bikini top and short-shorts. Most of the video is in slow-mo. You can watch it below (but keep in mind that, depending on your employer, it might qualify as NSFW).

The astonishing success of the Elizabeth Anne video surely frustrates serious fans of women's tennis.

Serena Williams, arguably the greatest player in tennis history (male or female), has for nearly two decades been an inspiring symbol of female empowerment. But she never has been her sport's most sought-after endorser. For most of her career, she has trailed the more model-like Maria Sharapova, who hasn't come close to matching Williams' on-court prowess and is currently serving a drug suspension.

To be sure, the men's tour also recognizes that sex sells. World No. 1 Novak Djokovic has broken the two-decade tradition of baggy shorts by sporting a more sculpted kit, harkening back to the hip-huggers of the Borg-McEnroe era. And Rafael Nadal has appeared all but naked in music videos and underwear ads.

At the end of the day, sex doesn't sell enough, at least not enough to keep a struggling sport in the American mainstream. That's why tennis officialdom is starting to think about revamping the game itself, making it move faster, amping up the excitement. One idea is so-called Fast4 tennis, a scoring system that cuts sets down to size and speeds up the games.

Would more sports fans tune in to the U.S. Open knowing that games would snap along and a match would top out at around 90 minutes rather than five hours? If you're a serious tennis fan who wants to see the sport grow and succeed, you should hope so. Because, if you watched the video above, you know Elizabeth Anne isn't going to make it to the U.S. Open final anytime soon.

http://www.oregonlive.com/the-spin-of-the-ball/index.ssf/2016/10/how_can_tennis_survive_the_com.html

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