The Australian Open is in full swing, meaning ESPN has sent its traveling road show to the first tennis Grand Slam of the year. The Aussie Open should be a time of excitement; a new year, new possibilities, et cetera, et cetera. However, ESPN has managed to make watching the Australian Open — and any Grand Slam — a chore.
It isn’t that ESPN relegated the Australian Open, French Open and Wimbledon to ESPN2. It isn’t that ESPN barely covers tennis in any other form, unless its some sportswriter drooling over Maria Sharapova. In fact, it has nothing to do with the periphery of the network’s coverage.
ESPN is killing tennis with Chris Fowler. And Mary Carillo. And Pam Shriver, Patrick McEnroe and Mary Jo Fernandez. Thankfully, Brad Gilbert is coaching Andy Murray and hence, unavailable — or else he would make it worse. ESPN is killing tennis with the same questions over and over again, and announcers who talk about everything but the match they are watching. ESPN is killing tennis with biases that steer towards being pathetic and an approach that turns a tennis match into a three-hour edition of Entertainment Tonight.
Every single year at every single tournament, the talking heads ask the same questions. Will Serena Williams finally turn it back on? Will Andy Roddick finally break through? And while other sports analysts are guilty of this repetitiveness, tennis analysts go the extra mile — they ask the questions ad nauseum, answering the questions at the same rate, giving the same answers with different wording every five minutes.
The perfect example? Any Serena Williams match. Chris Fowler and Mary Jo Fernandez called Williams’ first round match, Mary Carillo and Pam Shriver called her second round match, and Cliff Drysdale and Mary Jo Fernandez called her third round match. And all three matches consisted of one statement.
“Hey, you know what? Serena Williams isn’t that good anymore.”
And they repeated the statement, constantly, through the duration of all three matches. Carillo and Shriver were especially critical, seemingly taking glee in the fact that the seven-time grand slam champion struggled in the first set against Anne Kremer. This is where bias becomes an issue.
Tennis analysts, especially Mary Carillo and Patrick McEnroe, are seemingly unable to hide their biases. In the case of McEnroe, who is the captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team, the bias is toward American men. Marty Fish and Taylor Dent are always spoken of as if they have some effect on the Grand Slam field, or are threats in any way to win. Fish and Dent have exactly zero grand slam championships. In fact, the two are the equivalent to Megan Shaugnessy or Lisa Raymond on the women’s side — two other perennially mediocre players.
In the case of Carillo, the bias is against whoever she doesn’t particularly like. Carillo has gone as far as to purposefully mispronounce David Nalbandian’s name because she didn’t appreciate the way he was playing, and has apparently incurred the wrath of several of tennis’ biggest stars.
One would think that in order to attract so much dislike, Carillo’s analysis must be sharp, biting and generally incredible. Instead, it’s weak, peppered with lame jokes, and primarily influenced by what she feels about a player at a given moment. As soon as Carillo decides she doesn’t like a player, the best example being Serena Williams, she critiques quite literally everything that player does and builds up the play of the opponent. One need only look at the Serena Williams/Maria Sharapova semifinal match from 2005.
Carillo’s bias is only matched by that of Pam Shriver; unlike Carillo, Shriver’s bias is limited to Serena Williams — who because of her off the court interests, generally arrogant attitude, size, and yes race, is a magnet for criticism. During the Williams/Kremer match, it was easy to notice that even praise of Serena — as rare as it was — came with qualifiers. For instance, if Serena hit a winner, it was because Kremer made some sort of mistake. When Serena came back to win a match against Nadia Petrova the next night, it was because Petrova had choked, even though it was clear to those who watched the match (including Chris Fowler) that Serena had simply raised her game to another level.
Biases, based on jingoism, personal animosity, and general dislike, are one thing. After all, every sports fan in the world feels as if announcers for national telecasts are biased in some way. But even more of a disservice to the game of tennis is how ESPN’s focus is exclusively on the personalities of the players — not from a tennis perspective, but from a social perspective.
Serena the fashion designer, Sharapova the model, Hingis the horse whisperer. Every match is peppered with needless anecdotes that take up airtime and make the matches seem like the background for a special interest story. Trailers are sexed up when Sharapova is playing — something that’s okay for commercials, but almost insulting during actual game coverage. Players’ relationships are given so prominent coverage that Chris Fowler once asked Andy Roddick about a rumored relationship with Maria Sharapova. All at the expense of actual tennis, and all done for the casual fans who aren?t watching tennis at 3:30 in the morning on ESPN.
And at the end, someone ends up winning a tournament after two weeks of biased analysis, the same points made over and over again, and a rundown of what Maria Sharapova ate before coming to the stadium. The tournaments are remembered for what happened off the court instead of on.
