sp6r=underrated wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:sp6r=underrated wrote:Tennis is similar to hockey. Whenever I watch it I think, I should watch this more, this is an awesome sport, and then go 6 months without watching. I don't know much about Osaka but I find the ongoing story fascinating as it tells a lot about the modern athletes relations to fans and media.
Question for tennis fans: Is she treated different than the other mostly white tennis players?
Questions for everyone:
What do you think the media/fan reaction would be if a male athlete acted like Osaka?
What do you think the media/fan reaction would be if a white athlete acted like Osaka?
So, I think the first thing is this:
Osaka gets way more attention than she would otherwise get if she looked different. Call it the Tiger Woods phenomenon. Literally impossible for a white golfer to get as much attention as Tiger got. Why? Because golfers are White, and he's not. For a converse example: Consider Larry Bird who has regularly seen his collectibles go for more than Magic Johnson. Why? Because basketball players are Black, and he's not. Or Jeremy Lin for that matter. (And of course the Williams sisters in tennis.)
When you're a spearhead. It matters to people. Osaka is biracial with a country of origin that hasn't ever produced a dominant player before.
Then there's the attractiveness angle. If I say the name "Anna Kournikova" y'all will know. Why? Not because she was good at tennis - she never won a single professional tournament as a singles player, not Grand Slam tournaments here, she never won even a minor tournament. You know her because she was beautiful. Osaka is beautiful too.
This along with her appearing to emerge as the next great female tennis player after a decade plus without any new great female tennis player emerging, caused her to become a phenomenon.
And what we're seeing is someone who very clearly has major anxiety issues - clear from Day 1 - getting more attention than almost everyone else in the world. It's a recipe for something to go sideways.
I do think the tennis media can be overly "gotcha", and can do so with patronizing, exploitive sexism...but this isn't happening because they are all monsters. It's happening because Osaka just doesn't have the personality to be happy like this...and least for now, but time is ticking.
And tennis is such a mental game - so much harder mentally than a game like basketball. Why didn't Monica Seles go back and dominate the world after she got stabbed? Not because she wasn't physically able, it was the mental strength she never recaptured. She was known as someone with absolute laser focus who growing up as a prospect often didn't even pay attention to the score (Chris Evert was similar). After the attack, it was like she could never stop thinking about all that was around her.
And even beyond that, it's so, so common for great tennis prospects to never reach that top echelon. You can scout the body much easier than the head. An incredible physical talent may have so much success against his/her age group that he/she has little reason to doubt their capabilities. And then you get to the pros, and if you have any mental vulnerability, you're going to hit a wall it's no given you'll be able to climb over.
Feel free to ask if you have any other questions. Tennis is my dad's favorite sport so I grew up with it even more than I grew up with any particular team sport.
Thanks for the reply.
1. Was she considered a Lebron James level prospect? By that I mean, did people in the tennis community, expect her to be a dominant force since childhood?
2. I looked her bio up on wiki. She's won 7 titles and 4 Grand Slams. How dominant was Osaka stretch of play? As someone who doesn't know much, it seems like female tennis players ***rack*** up titles?
3. I remember following Hingis during her brief peak, and as you mentioned one factor was I thought she was beautiful, her performance during that time period seems similar. As far as I can tell, no one thought Hingis was going to end up a GOAT tennis player.
Did Hingis burnout for any specific reasons or was she too small for Serena era tennis?
4. Why are male tennis players so old now? When I was a kid tennis was a young man's game. Intuitively it makes sense it favors the young due to the demands of the game. But now it seems like the same guys who won years ago are still on top.
I don't think LeBron level prospects actually exist in tennis. Other knowledgeable people may disagree, but I'd say that it's far harder to predict because tennis is so much more about fine motor skills and mental toughness than basketball is. We can talk about the top prospects in the world at any given time, but the tennis world treats all of them with skepticism until they start looking dominant at the pro level.
In fact, if you're looking for a male tennis prospect not much younger than LeBron who coming up had some naive folks saying "He's going to destroy everyone when he comes of age", may I present
Donald Young who in 2005 became the youngest male Junior #1 in history. As a pro, he peaked at 38.
I think people would be inclined nowadays to talk as if the Williams sisters were sure things, but there have been so, so many similar prospects who just never really did that much in the pros.
2. Don't female tennis players rack up titles? They sure used to. Basically up through the Steffi Graf era the most dominant women were always more dominant than the most dominant men. Since then, all the women have been spotty. Serena Williams stands head and shoulders over all of these more recent generations, but the reality is that if she had the kind of consistent dominance that earlier generations did combined with the longevity she's proven capable of having, she could have racked up 30+ grand slams easily. Instead, when all is said and done, it's possible (but not likely) that both Nadal & Djokovic will end up with more while losing out on 20 to Federer.
What I'd say about Osaka (born 1997), is that she's already shown the most dominant player of anyone we've seen in women's tennis born after 1982, and while that's not as dominant as we maybe think the top woman should have been able to achieve, it's no hyperbole to say that there's literally no one around in the pros who seems likely to ever be more dominant than Osaka was.
That can change quickly of course, but we've been waiting and waiting and waiting and Osaka was the best we got. And incidentally, the next name on that list until recently would have been Ashleigh Barty, who at age 25 just retired.
The cupboard is incredibly bare.
3. Hingis. Actually, Hingis was way more dominant in her early run - who at 17 was in the process of getting to 5 straight grand slam finals and winning 4 of them. Hingis was one of the all-time great prodigies, and drastically ahead of the Williams sisters at the same age.
But with her there was always a concern over her lack of power, and this type of concern is a recurring theme in tennis. We've had various #1's like Hingis, Lleyton Hewitt, and Caroline Wozniaki, who reach the top at a young age but there's a general feeling that they may get surpassed by a superior physical specimen who comes into his/her own, and and the fears proved quite right - though it's important to note that that means people think every superior physical specimen is going to surpass the inferiors. Most of those specimens never come close to reaching the top, it's just that if one of them does, they reach the highest highs.
Back to Osaka: She's a power player, and power players are the superior specimens. If she could just keep up her peak level of player - which she's demonstrated over two sustained stretches already - there's every reason to think she could dominate the world.
Re: Hingis: burnout, too small for era. Well, there's a long going on here. I do believe her first retirement was about burnout. She was dealing with injuries, but also with being hopelessly outgunned by the Williams sisters, and while there was good reason to believe she could still earn a lot of money as a tennis player, she was also getting paid a lot as a celebrity. Then she came back for a couple years only to receive a 2-year ban for a positive cocaine test. She'd stay away from the game then for a half decade and when she came back it was just to play doubles (where she won 4 more majors beginning 13 years after her last).
4. We have top male tennis players who are old because the top players have been able to stay on top like never before, as is happening in a variety of sports. I would attribute this to training and technology, with the additional note in tennis that guys like Fed/Nadal/Djokovic can afford all sorts of things that less rich players cannot.
We know that the LeBrons and the Bradys of the world have a major edge over most of their peers, and that's in team sports where you have a billion-dollar business looking to spend a lot of money to get you in the best shape. Imagine how bad the difference can be in a sport where you're truly on your own?
It will be very interesting to see how things look when this generation finally shuffles off in to the sunset. We may actually see a future where the most successful players regularly end up with their greatest dominance in their 30s even though all the lesser players hit their apex at a much younger age.
