When Bobby Reynolds was the last American men’s player left standing at Wimbledon this year, you knew that men’s tennis in this country was in serious trouble.

The No. 102-ranked Reynolds was knocked out of the event in the third round, one round after top players Andy Roddick and James Blake met their doom on the grass courts.

Now as tennis balls get smacked around the hard court surface of Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows, N.Y., where the U.S. Open is in progress, only time will tell if the American entries can fare better than they did in England. However they play, they’ll never match the skill and intensity displayed in Wimbledon’s epic, once-in-a-lifetime final between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.

For tennis lovers who saw that classic match, the natural question of “Where are the American men today?” arises. As a recent Wall Street Journal article on the state of tennis in this country said all too correctly, “It is arguably the bleakest moment in U.S. tennis history since the sport’s modern era began in the late 1960’s.” (A moment that brightened briefly when Blake upset Federer at the Beijing Olympics.)

Encouragingly, the TV ratings for the Nadal-Federer face-off showed that not only tried-and-true tennis afficionados appreciated the virtuosity of the two Wimbledon finalists. The Monday morning topic of choice was the comment, “Did you see that match yesterday? What a beauty!”

It doesn’t take a genius to know that the days of Arthur Ashe, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi are long gone. The game has been taken over mostly by superb athletes from Eastern Europe and a few more from South and Central America. For most of these athletes, tennis provides a way out of poverty-stricken environments that become a distant past to them once they leave to attend tennis training camps in this country.

It’s not that tennis is a dying sport in America. In fact, the opposite is true. According to a recent survey, participation in tennis has risen in this country by more than 30 percent in the past seven years. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association, more than 17 million men and women are playing tennis today. One trip around the tennis clubs in southwest Florida to see the almost always full courts would attest to the fact that tennis is hardly a dying sport.

Then what’s the problem? Part of it comes from the fact that tennis, despite its popularity with young men and women, has a lot of competition from other activities that aren’t as prevalent in other countries. Try Little League and video games as two examples.

Then there’s the question of work ethic. Are American youngsters willing to exert the same kind of energy and will power their foreign competitors do?

The problem was addressed in the Wall Street Journal article by two-time U.S. Open winner Tracy Austin who said, “At the end of the day, it’s all about who works harder and what is in the gut. So many of the parents in the European countries, they’ll send the kids away. It’s a hunger and work ethic that seems different over there than over here.”

The American women’s game seems in safer hands, at least as long as the Williams sisters are around and not distracted by their many interests outside of tennis. Once they leave the tennis scene, there’s not a lot of top-notch female talent behind them to carry the load.

It’s the men’s game that carries most of the interest, though, and unless the USTA and the rest of the American tennis hierarchy find ways to drill and coerce younger players in the sport with a rigid, boot camp-like discipline, we may be looking a long time for American men to regain the top spots in the tennis world.



Cape Coral resident Norman Marcus is a dedicated couch potato and author of “Inside Big Time Sports: Television, Money and the Fans.”