Fun is not everything in sport

In tonight’s Evening Standard (guest edited by Tony Blair), Tim Henman says that if we want British tennis stars in the future, we need to make the sport more fun.

‘I’ve got three girls and anything they have fun with, they’re going to want to do again. But if something bores them, they’ll say ‘no dad, we’ll give it a miss. … If you want to get the best athletes playing, if you want to produce top class players, you’ve got to engage at young age. ‘This facility in Islington [Islington Tennis Centre] is perfect. It’s at the heart of a local community where kids can come in and experience the game. But more importantly for me, they can have fun.’

Sorry Tim, but that sounds like codswallop. The key to achieving tennis greatness is, I’m afraid, to have the opposite of fun. The trick is take a child with raw talent — the younger the better — brainwash them into thinking that nothing but tennis matters, and hope that they don’t have a nervous breakdown. It’s all about mind-numbing hard work. Can you imagine Rafael Nadal’s dreaded uncle, Toni, pulling him aside after a bad game and saying ‘Don’t worry Raf — it’s just a bit fun.’? Do you think Novak Djokovic, learning to play in war-torn Serbia, would have given up if he’d got bored of hitting the same shot thousands of times a day?

Tennis should be fun, of course. But attempts to make tennis seem more fun than it is tend to backfire. I’ve lost count of the number of well-funded, well-meaning schemes which seek to encourage youngsters to play more tennis by making it seem less stuffy, more hip and urban. They don’t work.  
 
The LTA is having more success than in the past, as we can see from the emergence of players like Laura Robson, Heather Watson, Oliver Golding and James Ward. But Britain’s tennis authorities should worry less about making the idea of tennis appealing to uninterested youths, and concentrate on building more courts, as they have in the Islington Tennis Centre, for those who do want to play all year round. In rainy London, it is hard to play indoors for under £20 an hour. That must deter da yoof more than anything else.