...or so one would surmise based on these quotes from the brothers McEnroe discussing their particular sport's image problem:

John: The blue court at the US Open is "all well and good for a couple minutes of conversation, but I think we should be trying different things and we should be reaching out to people and try to go after them the way other sports do because we just can't depend on the fact it's a great game. It's a great game but we have to edcucate people about it. The players need to make themselves more accessible, we need to market the sport better. All these things have been talked about. And certainly we should make the game more TV friendly, try different camera angles. There's all different things we can try and I don't see why we shouldn't try them.

Patrick: "We need to get fans watching tennis and interested in it. People ask me, 'How come there are no personalities?' I say there's tons of personalities, but we don't market them. You've got Federer, who's a tennis genius. You've got Hewitt, he's an Australian Jimmy Connors. You've got Safin, who's a wild man. You've got Roddick, who's this American with charisma and personality and gets the whole marketing thing. And you've got this Nadal. So there's plenty of personalities and interesting stories. But we've got to remember to sell it to the fans."

Just change the names and they could be talking about the NHL. Who knew?

~Adam

Tennis must get better ratings, since ESPN still shows it. wink

Wonder what the reaction would be if tennis shut down for a year due to a labor dispute?

They must be doing something right because I have been watching the entire US Open Series and Cliff Drysdale keeps crowing about how much higher the ratings have been.

When I stopped and thought about it, I realize that tennis and hockey do have some similarities from a US marketing standpoint. Both are sports where many of the top players are not Americans, and sports that most Americans don't play. Tennis used to be more popular, but for whatever reason, it isn't a sport that most Americans grow up playing. They also both have other markets where they are more successful--Canada for the NHL and many other countries in the case of tennis.