ATP redoubles its promotion of doubles

This may come as a shock to you (so make sure you're sitting down), but the ATP's great effort to promote doubles has had no effect.

But, this news comes prefaced with an assurance that this doesn't mean the folks doing the job weren't effective:

"We've been very effective in terms of delivering what we set out to achieve in getting doubles on the show courts and more attention from the media," says ATP chief marketing director Phil Anderton.

Now, as I read English, that says that they have been "very effective" in getting "more media attention" for doubles. So, what planet does this next sentence come from?

"People are not aware enough of the doubles players, and we haven't given them reasons to go watch doubles," he said.

Not if what he'd just said out of the other side of his mouth was true. Media attention = public awareness.

The paradox is that enormous numbers of recreational players, especially age 40 and older, play primarily doubles at clubs and public courts.

That's no paradox. That just means that there is something lacking in professional doubles. For, most tennis players play mostly doubles and therefore like doubles. So why won't they watch it?

Let's just call it a "paradox" or a "mystery," as if there is no answer to that question. Then we won't have to acknowledge the answer.

This isn't rocket science. The fans won't come, because the best players aren't there. So this "attracting fans" approach is an an exercise in futility.

Frankly, excepting the few top doubles teams, the level of play is NOT what it should be. There. I said it. It's true, and everyone knows it.

Who wants to spend their ticket on watching that when they can spend it on watching great tennis?

You simply have to attract singles players into the doubles, playing both events as they used to before the advent of open (big money, media driven) tennis.

In other words, you need to go back to a system in which tennis players are tennis players, who play both games of tennis.

But the media rule the world. They changed everything. They superstitiously cling to marketing the cult of personality. When they have a sport ready-made for that, like tennis singles, forget the media. They don't have to sell their product with two hours of gossip about personalities before the game: in tennis they can do that much cheaper right during the game. They get all kinds of neat close-up shots of the sweating face of one lone gladiator in the area out there. High drama. Better than fiction. So, you won't get them to pay any attention to doubles except at gunpoint.

The change has to come from within tennis itself. You have to take away the disincentives that keep singles players from entering the doubles. But one might as well try to do away with legislative earmarks in Congress, because someone is profiting from all those disincentives.

And you have to increase the prize money for doubles duh.

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