Tennis Needs to Find Some Love

We can watch golf, the WNBA, and the NWSL on the major networks, but tennis is nowhere to found

by John Furgele (The Serve and Volley 228)

What is tennis doing? This winter, we saw what the Caitlin Clark Effect had on both women’s basketball and women’s sports in general. For the first time, the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship Game outdrew the men and it wasn’t even close—18 million to 14 million.

With Clark now in the WNBA, that league is seeing a huge increase in ratings and in-game attendance. In golf, we have a superstar in Nelly Korda and if the LPGA can market that properly, we could see a higher profile for ladies’ golf.

The National Women’s Soccer League also gets national TV coverage. Games can be found on CBS and on the CW each weekend.

In addition to the women’s sports, there are plenty of other sports we get to watch on major TV and streaming. The United Football League, the NBA, PGA Golf, the NHL, Triple Crown Horse Racing, and MLB, are all fairly easy to find. This Sunday, we’ll get the Indianapolis 500 on NBC and the Coca-Cola 600 on Fox.

But there is one sport that you can’t find—tennis. While all the other sports find their place on major networks, where is tennis, a sport that millions play? There’s the Tennis Channel, but that’s a fringe channel that many cable and streaming subscribers do not receive unless they pay extra for it.

If I can watch the NWSL and the WNBA on major networks, why can’t I watch tennis? Now, once the French Open begins, NBC will get involved, but what about the Italian Open, the Swiss Open and the other weekly tournaments? If we can watch the PGA’s John Deere Classic on CBS, we should be able to find the US Clay Court Championships.

You may watch any or all of these other sports, but the fact is clear: they are televised on the major networks. Tennis is not.

The Tennis Channel is great for the die-hards. It was created to make sure all the tournaments were available to watch and that’s a terrific thing. True fans can watch the opening rounds during the week, much like they can watch the first two rounds of most PGA events on The Golf Channel.

But when it is time for the semifinals and finals, the sport needs to find a major network partner. For some reason, tennis is choosing to hide its sport and in an era where showcasing is King, tennis has fallen behind.

There was a time when that wasn’t the case. As a kid, I remember watching weekend tennis tournaments on CBS and ABC and if you search on You Tube, you’ll find matches on CBS with Pat Summerall and Tony Trabert calling the action.

Now they’re invisible. You understand why. All the sports wanted to create their own networks and all have done just that.  We have the NFL Network, the NHL Network, The Golf Channel, NBA TV, MLB Network and of course The Tennis Channel.

The Tennis Channel, though, decided that they didn’t need to partner with the major networks. They created a channel, it was available on most basic cable packages and now, the fan had one go-to for all their tennis needs.

That is all well and good but sports is really about luring in the casual fan and when all your tour events are shown on a niche channel, the casual fan can’t find them and worse, they sort of forget about the sport entirely.

It’s the casual fan that has driven the Caitlin Clark Experience. The die-hards will always watch a sport; heck when ESPN showed the Canadian Football League, games drew about 150,000 viewers. But it’s the casual fan that moves the needle.

The Super Bowl is the greatest example. There is no doubt that football is the Holy Grail when it comes to televised sports, but consider: the Conference Championship Games average 50-55 million viewers, but two weeks later, that number increases to about 110 million for the Super Bowl. Why? The casual fan wants to watch and knows  where to find it.

Tennis needs to partner with a network to get their sport that much needed exposure. The United States used to have household names in Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Vitas Gerulaitis, Chris Evert, and Tracy Austin and one of the many reasons was that we could watch them on the weekends on a major network. Can anybody recite the top five American men and women right now?

If the networks can find room for all these other sports, they can find it for ATP (men) and WTA (women) tennis, too. And, the networks can hype the majors just like they do in golf when they’re showing the RBC Canadian Open two weeks before the US Open.

Tennis is a game where love is used to keep score. It’s time for the sport to find some love and get on a network so we can love it too.