The Never-Ending Anxiety of Making Tennis Fun

The second biggest sport on the planet is apparently still too boring.

If you’ve been a tennis fan on American soil long enough, you’ve probably had to deal with some level of grief from friends and colleagues about your sport of choice.

“Country club sport,” they might say. “Inaccessible. European.”

Or, “Too complicated. I don’t even know what’s going on.” Comments easy enough to write off as willfully ignorant.

But the most common and most potentially damning remark you’re likely to hear is, “It’s so boring!”

Now, we know that’s not true. But that allegation is one of the most difficult for a tennis defender to unwind because, well, it’s a subjective thing. Worldwide, tennis is loved thoroughly enough that some metrics have it listed as the number two most popular sport in the world, and, impressively, the number one most popular women’s sport of all time. Many of us might turn around and try and frame football or baseball as being more catatonically uneventful. And in my eyes, we’d be right.

But ticket sales and general public interest in the sport, especially in America, often tell the opposite tale. Pro tournaments in America continually close down. TV ratings and raw market share lag far behind basketball, longtime “fastest growing sport in America” hockey, and the only show on TV that can still pull 20 million live viewers, football.

The Ultimate Tennis Showdown (or UTS), a bleeding-edge new tennis concept developed by semi-celebrity tennis coach Patrick Montagalou, aims to change all that. Montagalou and his associates have exercised their connections and goodwill (and more than likely large sums of money) to lure big name players who can attract tennis fans and curious newbies alike. They market the event like it’s a supercharged one day event, which in a way it basically is — a single ticket will allow you to see four or five matches in an afternoon.

And once play starts, UTS makes its goal clear from the outset: in an effort to make boring old tennis lively and loose and constantly edge-of-your-seat exciting, change every possible rule in the book. After a few minutes getting acclimated at a recent UTS event in Los Angeles, I started trying to count the changes on my fingers.

The first thing that always gets cut when anyone tries to reinvent the tennis wheel: let calls. Okay, gone. Next, welcome back the shot clock — and an aggressive one at that. I think it counted 25 seconds between points. From there, they double down: no second serves either. Miss one serve and you lose the point. Doubles alleys are gone too, physically, off the court — why not?

Getting more creative now: sets only last eight minutes. It’s a race against the clock to gather points instead of to reach a certain number. (If you’re keeping track at home, that’s now two timers actively counting down, at different intervals, at any given time.) Also, they’re not even called sets — they’re called “quarters.” Even though sometimes there are more than four of them.

Weirdest of all: you also have “cards” in your arsenal. (Like it’s Pokemon, or something.) At any time you can choose to “play a card” that makes the next point you play count for three points instead of one. A little animation washes over the big screens when you play it, like we’re in a Saturday morning cartoon.

Oh, and there’s music playing. The entire time. During the points, between points. The song changes, without fail, after every point. Even if it was an ace. Two seconds of an Usher track and then “next song.”

And finally, maybe the worst and least necessary of all, the players are given these…nicknames. Taylor Fritz becomes “The Hotshot.” Stefanos Tsitsipas becomes “The Greek God.” Chinese player Wu Yibing becomes “The Great Wall.” (A name I hope to God he chose himself.) And then everyone proceeds to just call them by these names the entire time — in interviews, announcements, promos. The chair umpire (newly suffering in this gig, I’m sure) has to say things like “The Hotshot leads The Hammer by 2 quarters to 1.” Why?

But I was most taken by an announcer yelling encouragement throughout proceedings — in-between points, during points. At one point he shouted, “Let’s stay loud throughout the whole point, guys !” You wondered what their goal actually was. A bunch of noise?

Sam Querrey once said that crowd interference is only a bad thing when you can get an entire stadium to be silent and then have someone yell out, as often happens in tennis. In that way, this worked fine — it did neutralize the risk of any one cell phone or baby or dropped drink or sneeze throwing off someone’s rhythm. Just add it all to the din of noise. Still, it seems there’s a natural volume level that tennis seems to gravitate toward. Even with the encouragement to get loud, the crowd would still find moments where they quieted naturally — when things got tense or points dragged on.

And the leniency also allowed for some bad actors to make an impact. During Fritz’s match, a group gathered near the front of the crowd and managed to yell a coordinated call of “miss it!” every shot. Right in his ear. If the rally went ten shots, he would hear “miss it!” five times. It was like the energy of a taunting audience during a basketball player’s free-throw, but all the time, every time.

So players were left trying their best to wade through this marsh of inconveniences and adjustments that all these changes thrust up on them.

You often see something like this, oddly enough, in professional poker. Each tournament comes loaded with a different cute little new “feature.” Some have their own “shot clocks.” Others have big novelty chips that have silly uses like extending thinking time. Or they use big silly stacks of dollar bills in place of chips. One tournament had a system where, if a player is particularly embarrassed by a bluff, they have to spend a round sitting in something called “the shark cage.”

Gimmicks, in other words. All changes brought about by organizers and companies expressing their anxieties, hedging against elements they worried made their game boring or unaccessible. And players gamely agreeing to whatever they’ve been asked to agree to that week.

But tennis doesn’t have to be like that.

Sitting there watching that day, I couldn’t help but be entertained. Multiple matches came down to a sudden death moment governed by a final new rule: the first player to win two points in a row won the match. It was extremely exciting. Wu Yibing had a star-making moment, coming from behind to defeat Fritz and win the final. (Days later, in a standard format rematch in Atlanta, he would lose to Fritz in straight sets.)

And the people around me had fun too. I could feel them actively tensing up during big points, and relaxing into appreciative ovations and cheers when their favorite player won points. Smiles and laughter. But I couldn’t shake the feeling: this mess of noises and countdown clocks breeds a deeply frustrating variability. The sanctity of the competitive element is, pretty undeniably, tainted. I was sure the players considered it a fun exhibition and nothing more (I saw enough tweeners and jumping slap forehands to convince me of that). But if we were to take this seriously as a competitive league, there was still considerable work to be done.

Think about the French Open. There’s no music. Nothing but the chair umpire’s microphone and the sound of the ball being hit. Even during the warmup. Even on the changeovers, we just sit murmuring in pensive silence, watching the players sit in their own pensive silence. There’s not even an announcement when the players walk out at the beginning. They just…walk out.

And those crowds still manage to make those matches the most raucous and dramatic moments of tennis the entire year. It makes us sound pretty pathetic by comparison for having to pipe in a tinny MP3 of Firework by Katy Perry to keep us from getting bored after ten seconds of inactivity.

After each of those eight minute quarters, the players go to their benches and don a headset to be interviewed by commentators. Both players get interviewed every time, up to four times a match. Which is a lot of times, but it’s fine.

This time, somehow, they ran out of things to talk about.

Gael Monfils was asked plainly, “How are you feeling?”

“I’m tired.”

“Why is that?”

“Because tennis is exhausting.” The crowd laughed.

“Good talk, thanks.”

One thing Taylor Fritz said in one of those mini interviews has been ringing in my head since I heard him say it.

“This format is brutal.”

Why put our players through this — panting and sprinting around and dealing with newfangled rules — just because we’ve shredded our attention spans?

The Europeans seem to have it figured out. They know what many of us already know: tennis is fine and exciting and beautiful and fun, as is. Watch one match and see for yourself. Second serves and all.