You know, I've been fortunate in my life to have witnessed Laver and Rosewall walk out onto the court to play each other; to have heard the applause, to have heard dead silence from the crowd as a point was in progress. The years have come and gone as did the antics of Nastase, Connors and McEnroe... the stoic determinations of players like Borg, Evert, and Sampras... and now the space age materials and all-court players such as Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic. Between submitting articles to tennis magazines, I've watched the ladies game move from lithe of foot players like King, Goolagong, and Navratilova, to athletic powerhouses, using hi-tech equipment, such as Graf and Williams. Service has changed from having to keep one foot on the ground or just getting the ball in play, to players who can fire a dart that only high speed cameras can behold. The four majors have changed in my lifetime from three grass courts and one clay court, to one grass court, two acrylic courts, and one clay court. The courts have also been changed in the last 20 years to be closer to the same speed; Wimbledon slowed down and the French Open sped up. The balls have also been slowed down and with all those changes the tougher-to-master net game has disappeared but the multi-surface champions have blossomed.
Of course I wasn't there in the 1920's when tennis truly went international and the ILTF wrote into their bylaws that no Major championship could claim to be a "world championship" or that the language of tennis would be "for ever in English", but the repercussions of those early days, and binding together of adversarial organizations, laid the groundwork for what we have today. The sport is special to me and it always will be. As we venture into the unknown of pandemics and crowdless stadiums lets applaud how far we've come since Spencer Gore won the first Wimbledon Championships back in 1877. We'll get through this with flying colors, and not just tennis. We'll mourn our great losses but eventually move on like juggernaut. Tennis looks like it's in good hands with the youngest generation of players ready to grab the brass ring from the seats of their steads, but the legends are still hoping they get some splinters from reaching out too quickly. Cheers.
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