Leylah Fernandez of Team Canada plays a backhand during the Billie Jean King Cup Finals Quarter Final match between Canada and Great Britain at Palacio de Deportes in Malaga, Spain, on Nov. 17.Angel Martinez/Getty Images
No one’s sure where the tennis term ‘love,’ meaning zero, comes from, but someone’s always complaining about it.
Here’s an example: “[Tennis players] argue that this absurd bit of terminology has been the chief reason for the charge of effeminacy which for years has been held against tennis, and they are probably right.”
That’s not something pulled off Reddit. It ran in the New York Times, albeit in 1919.
Tennis – a rhetorical repeller of manly men. As crusades go, it didn’t get far.
A hundred years later, someone’s found another reason to monkey with success. In a recent interview with the BBC, tennis great Billie Jean King recycled the old objection.
“I think [the scoring] should be one, two, three, four. Not 15-love, 30-love,” King said. “I mean, if you’re a kid? I didn’t come from tennis. I’m like, ‘What the heck’s that mean?’”
King would also like to put the players’ names on the back of their shirts and harmonize the number of sets played by men and women. King’s mission statement: “I want to make it easy for fans.”
By that logic, all sport should eventually morph into one all-encompassing game. They could call it Ball. The goal of Ball is to put ball in the hole. Ball goes to 10. Everyone understand Ball.
Is this where we’re at in terms of cultural aspiration? For everything to be so equal as to be indistinguishable? To knock the quirks out of every single thing so that it can be sold everywhere, to anyone, even those who can’t spare a bare minimum of brain power to figure out how it works?
King’s suggesting may make the grimmest sort of retail sense, but where’s the romance?
You’d think one of the most famous players of all time might be slugging on that side of the ledger.
But no, not in the go-go 2020s. The guiding principle of sport these days isn’t honour, excellence or history. It’s maximizing market share.
Do you remember the very first time you watched baseball and didn’t really understand what was going on? The broad strokes of any popular game are obvious, but the nuances confound the newcomer.
That isn’t a barrier to entry. It’s an invitation to join a club. People should and do enjoy complication. The more complicated something is, the more rewarding it is to learn it.
It’s what drives people to build their own deck and read more than one book on a topic. Curiosity is a pointy skill we’re all born with, which life then attempts to rub smooth over the next 80 years. Billie Jean King wants to make sure children have better access to sandpaper.
Sports is one of the last places a mass understanding of complicated processes still thrives. People love to say that Americans are stupid, but no country that spends its weekends watching 20 hours of football can be that dim. Football is at least as complicated as brainy pastimes like chess or crossword puzzles. There’s certainly a lot more to it than soccer or tennis.
The sort of American who can’t do long division or name the secretary of state can explain the draw play and identify it when they see it. That’s not nothing.
America’s problem isn’t collective smarts. It’s redistributing them to engineering, moral philosophy and cultivation of the martial arts. If that ever happens, we might all be singing The Star Spangled Banner.
Give football people this much – none of them would suggest that a touchdown be one point instead of six, or seven, or occasionally eight. Accepting the weirdness of the game’s scoring is the mark of an initiate. To question it highlights one’s lack of mature understanding.
This is what King is suggesting – that more adult things ought to be designed for children, or for people who think like children.
This approach, which is pervasive in entertainment, is based on two premises – that most people aren’t curious, and that the ultimate goal of any sport is to spread like an infection across the globe.
According to a study by the International Tennis Federation, just shy of 100 million people play tennis globally. Considering that the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants will never lay eyes on a tennis court, that’s a wild statistic. But what does tennis want? More.
At least you can say this much for King’s position – it’s rational. The more people watch tennis, the more money she makes. But I doubt a dumbed-down version of the game means a more successful tennis. I suspect the opposite is true.
The simplest sport in the world is running. Everybody, everywhere admires a great runner. We all intrinsically understand how it works. But outside of an Olympics, there is no clamour to watch running. Because it’s running.
Who wants to watch games a seven-year-old can fully grasp after a few seconds of observation? What is there to talk about?
I don’t want sports that are like every other sport, with all the same rules and conventions and terms of art. What’s the point of that?
I still do long division in my head, not because I’m any good at it, but because I worry that if I stop, I will forget how. I could do with more complexity in my life, not less.
That is the purest sporting impulse – to attempt mastery at something, while accepting that mastery is beyond you. Realizing that even the very best in the world are out six or seven times out of every 10 at the plate. It’s getting beyond the wins and losses to the philosophy of the thing.
The point of watching other people play games isn’t just to while away the idle days. Ideally, it’s to get you to the point where you realize that the rules of the game – especially the ones that don’t seem to make sense at first – inform your understanding of everything else in life.