What Ever Happened to Tennis?

Recently considering how the image of luxurious, glamorous living film and TV offer has changed I happened to mention the scale of the houses we see--which seems to me a matter of the exploding fortunes of the wealthy. Still, not everything seems easily explicable in such terms, with the changing nature of pastimes an obvious case. In our movies and television shows the rich and glamorous still play plenty of golf--but, I think, rather less tennis, a game that seemed ubiquitous in that kind of fare. Jonathan and Jennifer Hart, after all, were not unknown to be on the tennis court. In the opening montage of the first season of Charlie's Angels, during Farrah Fawcett's bit we see her swinging a tennis racquet. What did the original Bionic Woman do before becoming an OSI agent/junior high school teacher? She was a tennis pro.

And so on and so forth.

All that is rather less evident now.

It seems plausible that this is bound up with the decline of interest in tennis more generally.

The generally accepted version of the story seems to be that tennis was, for the broader public, fresh and new in the late '60s and early '70s--thanks to the airing of major tournaments on television as the sport newly went pro, while it is held that colorful personalities and gender politics (John McEnroe's temper tantrums, Billie Jean King's feminism) sustained interest for some. That could not and did not go on forever, while the relative decline of American players' prominence at the sports upper levels reduced interest in the U.S. (kind of like with boxing). Given that even at its peak tennis was never exactly football or basketball (the U.S. Open no Super Bowl or NBA Championship even at its long ago height), all this meant it was vulnerable when "secondary sports" got squeezed out of press coverage and television broadcast (also like boxing), leaving it a long way from its glory days--and TV writers and producers less expectant that an audience will be suitably impressed by the sight of their protagonist on the court.