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Pasco County hopes the surging popularity of women's tennis will help boost plans for a stadium in Wesley Chapel?
By JAMES THORNER
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 30, 2001
Venus, Martina, Serena and Anna.
Few sports fans fail to recognize the quartet for who they are: Some of the top names in women's professional tennis.
The combination of athleticism and intriguing personalities has launched women's tennis to heights not seen since the days of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in the 1980s.
"Arguably, our top 20 are household names," said Chris DeMaria, spokesman for the Women's Tennis Association. "A lot of them worldwide are known by their first names."
It is the surging appeal of women's tennis that Pasco County hopes to harness if and when it builds a multimillion-dollar tennis stadium near Saddlebrook Resort in Wesley Chapel.
Though generally supportive of financing a stadium with 2 percent tax on hotel rooms, two county commissioners, Ann Hildebrand and Ted Schrader, have worried aloud that tennis is a sport in decline.
It is true that, compared to its glory days of the 1980s, men's tennis is in the doldrums, partly due to the perceived absence of compelling personalities and rivalries.
What is more, if surveys are to be believed, tennis has suffered a decadelong plunge as an American participatory sport.
A National Sporting Goods Association poll of 35,000 Americans last year showed that 10 percent of respondents played tennis the preceding year, half the number of a similar poll in 1990. Tennis ranks below darts, target shooting and volleyball.
But something else is happening to tennis as a spectator sport, judging by the recent high television ratings and attendance figures. Though some smaller professional tournaments still struggle to draw fans, major tournaments have thrived.
The surplus of talent, particularly in the women's ranks, has sparked interest since Sports Illustrated, in an influential cover story, announced the demise of the game in the mid-1990s.
Some commentators even trumpet these as the best days ever for women's tennis.
They point to the youthful appeal of the top-rated Williams sisters, the talent and poster-girl allure of Russian star Anna Kournikova and the comeback-from-drug-abuse tale of Pasco resident Jennifer Capriati.
"Six or 7 years ago, we were nowhere where we are now," DeMaria said. "It's been a slow but steady growth, but in the last couple years, it hasn't been slow at all."
The French Open broadcast of the women's final on June 9 was the highest rated sporting event for the day, beating out Major League Baseball and the PGA Tour.
The Australian Open, where Capriati beat Martina Hingis, showed ratings up 55 percent between 2000 and 2001. Capriati's victory was the third biggest audience for tennis in ESPN's history.
Cliff Drysdale, the former tennis star from South Africa and now a tennis commentator for ESPN, said women's tennis benefits from the Tiger Woods/Michael Jordan effect: People who normally wouldn't watch the sport will tune in to ogle a celebrity.
Kournikova, the blond Russian player, is a case in point. Even as she falls in the tennis standings, her legions of male fans continue to make her a marketable commodity. The Internet teems with thousands of her photos, many highlighting her trademark bare midriff and long legs.
"It's coming back now for a couple of reasons," Drysdale said. "The personalities with the Williams sisters, Kournikova, Hingis, Davenport and the Capriati story, which is so endearing to everyone.
"There's no doubt that women's tennis has never been stronger, never had more compelling stories."
Drysdale and others trace the sport's image problem to the Sports Illustrated story that bemoaned the lack of winning personalities in professional tennis.
Taking their cue from Sports Illustrated, U.S. sports editors picked up the tennis-in-decline theme regardless of whether the bad press was justified, Drysdale said.
"Yeah, we were having a decline," Drysdale said. "But it was within the normal bounds of public acceptance of the sport."
He adds: "To call tennis dead was a great disservice to tennis."
But the spoils of tennis' newfound popularity aren't shared evenly across the country, a fact that could have repercussions for Pasco's bid to land tennis tournaments at a future public stadium.
The Grand Slam events -- Wimbledon and the French, Australian and U.S. opens -- are booming. So are the major tournaments that pay huge cash prizes and draw top stars, events such as the Ericsson Open in Miami and the Tennis Master Series in Indian Wells, Calif.
Ericsson, considered the fifth most prestigious tournament in the world, draws a couple hundred thousand fans for a week of tennis in March.
But Drysdale warned that outside the Master Series, Grand Slams and the Davis Cup, "the rest of tennis is interesting but doesn't have the same feel."
In other words, tournaments featuring less-than-marquee players often lose money. Drysdale cited two examples of major cities that lost their tournaments for lack of fan interest: Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn.
Pasco could benefit from the presence of the Women's Tennis Association, which agreed this summer to consolidate its headquarters at Saddlebrook next year.
So far, the WTA has promised Pasco a "special event," an off-season tournament in November or December that Saddlebrook owner Tom Dempsey hopes will attract some top names in women's tennis.
Whether the proposed 5,000- to 8,000-seat stadium stadium could sustain itself and generate the kind of national television coverage county officials crave has yet to be proven.
"You can spend a lot of money on the stadium," Drysdale said, "and not end up with the right event."