It was a fun day on Sixth Avenue with good natured crowds and lots of really really hard core baseball fans. The problem was they had to keep the side streets open so the chevy trucks with the players had huge gaps in them which we filled in with baseball chit chat. The young kids near me were totally obsessive, watched lots of classic baseball and knew their stuff. I asked them if they ever watched tennis but only did and he only liked Agassi.Anyway the old guys were great enduring lots of talkback from the crowd but the old All Stars knew how to work the crowd  and were perfectly comfortable while the current All-Stars were a little stiff and taken aback by the comments from the crowd and some of those drop dead gorgeous wives looked a little shell shocked. I have to say as a group they were fine looking young men, not overly muscled and far better conditioned than the players of my era. When you look at athletes of this caliber you wonder (as you do watching tennis) how very few make it to the top and what special skills they have developed. Too bad one or two didn't grow up near a tennis court. 

Peggye:

   I have to confess: fell asleep late in that all-star game. Probably best as I am an NL fan and would have been disappointed to see the AL win again.  I am old enough to remember seeing Willie Mays play for the Mets (remember him dropping to his knees to plead his case on the call at the plate in the '73 Series vs. Oakland) and then I talk to people who are old enough to remember Willie Mays play for the Giants - when they were in NYC - and once even met a guy who watched Willie play stickball in NYC! So that's the beauty of baseball in that it does honor and remember the past all-stars. Wish tennis did more of that.

   Reading this board I gather I am in the minority as so many bemoan another mention of McEnroe-Borg '80 Wimbledon final as if it's some sort of annoying commercial jingle jarring their brain cells while to me it remains a pivotal moment in the history of tennis. Can you imagine baseball fans expressing disgust over another mention of the '69 Mets or of Russ Hodges screaming "The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win the Pennant!" or of another mention of the importance of DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak? Yet tennis fans sometimes seem to get off on beating up on their game rather than recognizing what happened in the past - in some cases - created the potential for what we have now. Every die hard baseball fan can tell you what number Babe Ruth wore and his best days were 80 years ago, how many tennis fans can tell you what racquet brand Rod Laver played with and we're approaching the 40th anniversary of his Grand Slam? It's probably related to the fact that there is an affinity and loyalty to a specific team, but I think it goes beyond that too.
 

You know Richard I think it is just the difference in the way people approach their favorite sports.Baseball has an oral culture passed down through families and friends and widely shared memories. I was lucky enough to have a father who took me to all three great old parks in the 40's and to the Yankee/Dodger World Series and when the Dodgers left I became a Mets fan. I always notice how keen people are at baseball games to discuss the past. So young people growing up will hear about Bob Gibson or Ozzie Smith or Casey Stengel or my hero Ted Williams when the people around them talk about it or in my house my account of the being at the Mets 7th game win.I know golf has the same culture because I had to walk with my parents along with Ben Hogan and Sam Snead in the days when nobody much watched golf and I would hear people talk about Gene Sarazen or Bobby Jones. I still watch golf . If you go to a bookstore or a library baseball, football and golf have the most books as well. Even basketball slips in there but not tennis. I think what happened(judging by my familly's disgust when I opted for tennis lessons over golf) was its country club tennis anyone image. As the Open era began and TV came along it was certainly and suddenly accessible. Before that I saw Riggs, Seixas ,Van Horn, etc. in matches at small private clubs and then later I saw the Aussies and Maureen at Forest Hills. When the pros broke off you could only watch at crazy places like the Westchester Coliseum and of course the old Garden. So while Jack Kramer struggled to promote and Dell and others a whole group of would  be fans never got that oral culture. It is also a sport that is often difficult to write about. The craft, the strokes, the opposing personalities so wonderfully shown in Fed/Rafa seem to slip to the back pages how ever talented the writer. Actually our sports pages downplay tennis compared to Spain, Latin America and Europe. Too many competing sports I guess.

Peggye:

   I think you're right in that there is a different cultural approach. Also, you can look at the major team sports and understand MLB can promote its past (and obviously there are advantages of promoting the pre-steroid days) and in effect it is still promoting its present so when they bring Mays, McCovey, Yogi, Brooks Robinson, etc. to Yankee Stadium the other night they're putting the spotlight on the sport as a whole and it's a reminder of how rich the tradition is, how great the game was and how great it can be again. Whereas tennis' governing bodies are not always on the same page and do not always share the same interest so it's not as easy to centralize such an effort.

   You make a very valid point though: the oral culture and history is vital particularly given what you point about the early pro days that those barnstorming players were sometimes struggling playing from city to city and pro tennis at that time was really a renegade sport so tennis as a whole was divided in those days and you could argue the best players of that time were even willfully diminished by those amateur governing bodies. It would be hard to imagine in today's game Federer, Nadal, Djokovic traveling by car to play in places like Wichita or Wisconsin and not being able to contest majors. You can argue that tennis - or at least some authorities in tennis - have had a history of cannibalizing itself at times. And while there have been some tremendous tennis books: Handful of Summers, Levels of the Game, Ashe's books, etc.  - they aren't nearly as popular and don't occupy the same shelf space (recently tried to buy a few copies of Handful of Summers here in the city and have yet to find it).

Also, in many ways tennis is more inaccessible to the average sports fan in that almost every kid in this country who has attended school - boy or girl - has swung a bat at a baseball or softball, shot a basketball at a hoop or kicked a ball at a goal, but you can't say that all of those kids have swung a tennis racquet. So I think those subtleties that we - as tennis fans and rec players - can understand and appreciate can get lost in the translation to someone who hasn't had that experience. That's not to say someone who has never played tennis can't be a great fan and appreciate the sport just as someone who has never run a marathon can appreciate just what a feat it is watching someone complete one, I just think that is one of the reasons why it doesn't cross over as much. Richard Evans just wrote a fascinating piece comparing the Nadal-Federer final to cricket in asserting that the longer best-of-five set format in Grand Slam tennis allows drama to build over time in the same way that test cricket played over 3 to 5 days does what the new form of cricket "TwentyTwenty" cricket does not (will post his piece once our server is back in working order).

    I also think that the advantage team sports has is the loyalty and affinity to a franchise. A Yankee fan who grew up rooting for Jeter may have never seen Mickey Mantle or Bobby Murcer play, but on some level understands and recognizes their role and importance in their team's history whereas tennis fans tend to have a favorite player and may not see a connection from Tilden to Don Budge to Kramer to Gonzalez to Agassi, but I would argue there is a connection there - just may not be as obvious.
   

I bought A Handful of Summers from amazon.com a few years ago. It's a terrific book about the era when tennis players were supposed to play for a trophy and whatever under the table cash they could squeeze out of the tennis establishment.

I think the reason that tennis does not have the history that baseball has is that pre 1968 the best players were banned from the Slams and you had to make a real effort to find them. The Slams were a sham because the best players were banned and everyone knew that Rod Laver could whip any of the so called champions during his exile from the Slams. It would be as if Babe Ruth had to barnstorm while Double A players played in Yankee Stadium.  

One key difference between tennis and baseball is that baseball still uses the same equipment that it did gernations ago. Yes, there are some differences between the wood that is used now for the bats and the handles are smaller and the fielding gloves get better all the time but it is still basically the same equipment. So the quality of play on the diamond is still reasonably close to what it was a generation ago. With tennis, that has all changed. The racquets are completely different, the strings are different and there is always tinkering going on with the courts.  If you watch videos of great players from a generation ago, even guys like Edberg, Lendl, Courier, Chang, etc., you can immediately tell that they played a generation ago. Lendl would have no chance against Rafa. It would be destruction city and Ivan was a great, great player. Maybe with today's equipment Ivan could be competitive with Rafa. My guess is that Ivan would lose to Rafa nine times out of ten and the same fate would await Stefan or Mats or even Boris. If Chang played today, Michael would have no chance against Federer, Rafa, Djokovic or Dayvedenko. So fans see no connection between yesterday's stars and today's stars. I am reminded of what Bobby Jones said when he first saw a young Jack Nicklas smash a drive. Bobby looked up and said: "he is playing a game of which I am unfamiliar."