To say that American fans of American men’s tennis are “thirsty” for the messiah of the sport in our country is a supreme understatement. Much like any religious zealot desperately waiting on the second coming, we have sold ourselves out to every potential Phenom over the past fifteen years. Ryan Harrison, Jack Sock, Donald Young, Bjorn Frantangelo, Sam Querrey, Isner, Baker, Stevie, are just a few to whom we flocked. There have been numerous fan accounts on Twitter created for these guys by genuine and earnest fans who not only wish for their success to bring the lens of tennis superiority back on us, but who also desperately wish to be acknowledged, retweeted, subtweeted, and loved by these possible heroes of the game in America.
The question is, do they deserve this sort of fandom? If it were results based, then the obvious answer would be “no”. American tennis fans know the statistics. No male Grand Slam champ since Roddick’s one U.S. Open in 2003, no American man in the top 10, barely an American man in the top 20, etc. There are many more stats that support this performance based judgement.
We could look at titles won by American men over the past decade in comparison with the decade before it. We could examine the abilities of this group of American men to break serve over the past decade, in comparison with the one before it. We could examine the lack of success by the American Davis Cup team in the past decade: even more specifically, two bad and surprising losses to Great Britain the past two seasons. In most sports, success builds and spreads fame. Bandwagons form behind winners. In tennis, our little red flyers group behind any man that has a cool tweener clip posted on YouTube or any guy that gets to throw out a first pitch at a Pawtucket Red Sox game (they will forever be Pawtucket in my mind). So why is tennis different?
Well, in a lot of ways it’s not. We know tragically underperforming teams have rabid fans: the Cubs, the Islanders, the Washington Generals, all loveable losers that people have enjoyed rooting for, for years. One camp of American fans simply cheer these men because they are American. Americans love Americans. Nationalism is a core tenet of fandom, and we eagerly fall in line with that. The Nationalists fly their flags, tweet their red and white emojis, and shout out a birthday tweet to every American man ranked in the top 300.
Another camp of American tennis fans will not endorse these men until one proves successful. They were happy Federer beat Sock this past week at Indian Wells, and they completely berated Coach Jim Courier for playing John Isner over Stevie Johnson in the most recent Davis Cup tie, resulting in a social media war between the two camps of serious fans of American men’s tennis.
All of this infighting, bickering, debating, article writing is a symptom of the problem. We don’t have the heavyweight type of players to root for that would stop the polarization of American fandom and promote the galvanization of fandom behind a single player and/or cause.
We are a country without a leader, supporting all sorts of Johnny-Come-Latelies looking to lead us into the promised land, and until that person comes along (I’ve already tweeted good luck to Taylor Fritz) we will continue this sort of unorganized chanting, cheering, and finger pointing.
