I've been watching a healthy amount of tennis the last seven days, partly because I'm beginning to like tennis - a lot - and partly because the Australian Open (the first major of the tennis calendar) began seven days ago. In any case, other than getting better at recognizing all things tennis, the more complicated noodlings and what not, I'm admiring more and more the fans.
Tennis is unique among "Sports the American Public Cares About," which includes football, baseball, basketball, tennis, hockey and maybe a few others (that's the general order of popularity, too): it's an individual event, one in which, literally, the cream rises to the top. It's incredibly transparent, which is awesome and usually unheard of; the transparency, though, is mainly the result of 1) a lack of calls that require complicated officiating and 2) the ease at which competitors can review calls -
any calls - they think went the wrong way. The fact that it's an individual sport and very transparent means the best people win the most often, an attribute that's highly attractive and addictive.
But here's what I like about the fans: they cheer, scream, hoot and holler whenever anything cool, awesome, incredible or inspiring happens, no matter who is the progenitor of such a moment. There are loyalties, to be sure, but even if you're in love with Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal, you'll make some noise if Andy Murray does something incredible. In your other mainstream sports, this is not likely to happen. The only time a fan will fawn over a non-team-player's action is if it's
really ridiculous, like when Nate Robinson blocks Yao Ming (Nate is 5'8" in heels and Yao Ming is 7'6" straight up) or when Kobe or whoever hits a stupid turn around jumper with two seconds left on the clock and three guys in his face. But if, say, Kobe makes a similar shot in the second quarter or something, the average non-Lakers fan will usually snarl in disgust (because they hate Kobe and whenever Kobe does something awesome, they get angry [because it's a constant reminder of their deep desire to cheer for awesome talent and their inability to do so when it's someone they hate/isn't on their team]).
Of course, part of this disparity between tennis and football/basketball/baseball/et al is the reality that one is a team sport with teams holding camp in a specific geographic location (and geographic loyalty has a certain hold over people's inclinations) and the other is an individual sport in which athletes represent various countries, rather than specific geographic locations. When multiple athletes originate from the same location (in this case a whole country) it's harder to have loyalties. You're all at once loyal to the location (the country) but you can't possibly be loyal to all it's members, because they interact and play eacher and so on. It's like rooting for the Clippers and the Lakers; they're both from Los Angeles and they play each other all the time, the same division and conference, and so it's difficult to be loyal to both. It's a lot easier to be loyal to, say, the Lakers of LA and the Knicks of New York because they play each other rarely, if at all. It's easier to keep loyalties intact if they never come into conflict.
Since tennis operates on a different fidelital (is that a word?) level, it's easier to hoot and holler for different players and it's a lot harder to hold loyalties to a specific player. It's also difficult to sustain loyalties because players get old and retire after a while. And, unlike a team sport, you can't stay loyal to a franchise as it keeps replenishing players and coaches and staff and whatever. When a guy retires from tennis, you have to pick another guy, or another couple of guys. I imagine most tennis fans do something like this: they naturally root for one country, usually the one they're from, and then they latch on to individual players, even players from outside the country of loyalty.
Even so, people don't stay stock still or snarl in disgust when the guy whooping the ass of the guy they root for makes a sick play on the baseline; they bang their head, of course, in empathetic anger and frustration, but only after first marveling at the sick play on the baseline. When you watch tennis, the crowd will respond almost uniformly to each player. There's usually a difference, but it's only noticeable to a small degree, or to a degree that's irrelevant/doesn't matter/who cares. In fact, this unform hooting and hollering makes most matches feel more intense than the first or second round boredom it normally would feel like. In Big Team Sports, regular season games sometimes feel lackluster, for whatever reason, and others feel like playoff games, with the crowd going crazy and especially if the two teams are close together, where the fans split 50/50 in terms of representation. When one side does something the place erupts; if the other responds, the place erupts. That's how tennis feels
all the time. It's great.
Tonight, Roger Federer, best player in the world, one of the greatest to the play tennis, was getting his ass kicked by some 6'5" Czech youngster, and the crowd was responding by cheering the Czech youngster. But everytime Federer started to claw his way back, they let him know they still cared about him, and that he was still awesome. If you were looking to discriminate between loyalties, you'd be confused. It doesn't matter, though, because the crowd was responding to good tennis, not regional/ethnic/whatever loyalties. Of course, when Federer got his shit together and won three straight sets to complete an incredible comeback, the crowd let him know that they enjoyed every minute, every grueling, "will he or won't he?" moment. But people cheered just as much for the effort that the Czech guy put up in order to make the great match possible.
I think what it amounts to is this: in tennis, people are there to 1) watch their favorite players and 2) enjoy the hell out of the sport. If two players play well and give a good match, people are going to let them know. And when it's not too eventful, people still whoop and jump because of regional/ethnic/whatever loyalties. It's win-win-
win.
And, just for kicks, I should mention that not all fans of Big Team Sports react this way. Keith and I, for instance, marvel at any awesome basketball play, even if it is the result of, say, some Spurs player we loathe (which would be all Spurs players, come to think of it). This indiscriminate cheering makes things interesting when attending games, because people start to think I'm either
a) a moron or
b) epileptic. At a recent Suns/Hawks game, for example, some girls in front of us thought we were from Atlanta because I screamed, Braveheart-like, whenever Zaza Pachulia so much as touched the ball. "Paaaacchhhhuuuulliiiiaaaa!" would ring out across the stadium and people started staring. Confusion erupted, though, because I would yell every time Steve Nash ran up the court and shot a stupid, "this-isn't-real" three pointer. So, you know, there are exceptions to those ridiculous people who paint their skin red and white and attend Nebraska Cornhuskers games wearing nothing but shorts and giant corn on the cobs arm guards.
