It's the game, stupid.

The usual line about tennis' declining popularity just blows me away with its obliviousness to the obvious. Sometimes I wonder if the air is too thin way up high thar in them thar skyscrapers.

People flocked to tennis courts in the 70's and early 80's because of the publicity John McEnroe's antics attracted? Because Chris Evert or Rod Laver were so hot and good at the Hollywood-style publicity stunt for attention getting? Come on.

Newsflash: sorry, the stars just aren't that important. It's the GAME, stupid. It's too hard to learn.

That's why there are about only 5 million people left in the United States who play tennis regularly (i.e., at least once per week for 26 weeks out of the year.)

But let's blame EVERYTHING else instead.

For example, it's pure plain-truth-defying myth that Americans are interested only in American players. Americans are the last people in the world you could say that of. Look at Germany, for example. Tennis boomed there while Boris Becker and Steffi Graf played, and it went bust the moment they retired.

And that isn't a moral issue that a people should be reproached for. It's simply a natural consequence of national circumstances. Other nations are (or at least until recently were) an entity of breed, nationality, an ethnic identity, more often than not with its own distinct language. What's more, when 50 miles away, you have international borders with other countries, each with its own language, your ethnicity figures much more prominently in your identity than it does to an American.

And so what if Germans or Americans are MORE interested in tennis players from their own country? That's only natural, because we can identify more nearly with them. People should not be criticized for their preferences. Liking ketchup, liking NFL football, or pronouncing words a certain way is not a sin, but the hubris in being so judgmental as to make a moral issue of such things is.

Tennis boomed shortly after the Open Era began. But it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that open tennis was the cause. That was also the time that television broadcast technology boomed. Now they could broadcast baseball and footballs games. Guess what? They got millions of viewers = millions of commercial advertising dollars. Why not try tennis too? Initially the problem was with unreliable satellite transmission of overseas events like Wimbledon. But as those problems were solved, millions of commercial advertising dollars were injected into tennis as well.

TV introduced the American people to tennis, which had previously been a country-club sport. Tennis boomed.

But in its boom were the seeds of its bust. Fads come and go, and that's what the tennis boom was, nothing but a fad.

Why aren't baseball and basketball nothing but fads too? Because those sports are fun and easy to learn, so young people in every generation are attracted to them. You need no formal lessons to learn them. You just grab your bat and ball and head out the door to play with the other kids in your neighborhood. You learn by watching better players, by watching pro players on TV, and by imitating what you see.

In other words, you learn these sports the natural way, the same way you learned to walk and talk. Nobody gave you verbal instructions to think on and follow as a toddler. While you were taking your first unsteady steps into Mother's arms, she wasn't barking, "Pronate, pronate," at you. You weren't telling yourself to "Pronate" your ankle with every step you took.

I dare say that you couldn't walk today if you tried to do it that way.

Because these other sports, like baseball and basketball, are learned the natural way, very soon, you get good enough to enjoy playing the game. And the game's the thing in your mind, because you never do get infected with an obsession about form.

If you stick with it long enough, you eventually have contact with a coach who gives you some pointers. But you haven't been plagued since Day 1 with a hundred Yoga-like instructions on the "right" way to throw, shoot, or swing. No baseball, football, or basketball coach would dream of doing that to a kid.

Ever since Tim Gallwey's book The Inner Game of Tennis came out in 1972, we have known what's wrong with the standard method of tennis instruction. But the tennis establishment let it all in one ear and out the other. There was money to be made, you see. The old way requires formal private or semi-private lessons and a constant litany of verbal instructions from the instructor that show off how much he or she knows. Indeed, students are impressed by that … until they add up all the money they've spent over a year of such lessons and how little progress they've made. How many rackets have they thrown? How much frustration and chagrin have they suffered? Do they ever really enjoy a point? Or are they always playing in fear of missing the next shot?

That ain't fun. People give up a sport like that.

But it doesn't have to be that way. We know how to make tennis much easier to learn. We have only to give in and start teaching it that way.

And golf had better pay heed. It is a fad headed down the same path, for largely the same reason.

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