Are today’s top tennis players too boring? It’s an interesting question because – nice though they may all be – a lot of today’s top stars are a little dull. You’ll rarely read about them in the tabloids for all the wrong reasons, or see them snapped in a night club at three in the morning the day before a big tournament in the way you do with other sports.
Of course, this may all be a little bit of a ‘chicken and egg’ situation in the sense that the players that are a little more outlandish simply never make it to the top of the game whilst those who are more single-minded tend to flourish. And tennis is a sport that demands complete concentration and peak physical fitness without let-up which isn’t true of all sports and particularly team sports.
So do the top players in the game become like this or were their personalities already that way before they got to the top?
Realistically, there’s a little of both here, but the truth is that some of the more colourful characters of yesteryear like Ilie Nastase, John McEnroe and yes, even Boris Becker, probably wouldn’t get to the top today – unless they were able to become calmer and more single-minded.
But it isn’t only in tennis that such qualities are necessary. So just in the same way that footballers may be able to “hide” a little more in their game and mainly of them certainly don’t enjoy reputations for being bring and single-minded, they are, undoubtedly, very fit. Yet the converse is also true – some of the world’s top poker players, for example, are extremely unfit, but no-one would accuse them of not being single-minded. Even with on-line tournaments in live casinos etc., these players need to be able to play to the exclusion of all extraneous factors; but fit most of them certainly aren’t!
But tennis – perhaps more than any other sport in the world – demands both these things simultaneously; and never more so than in the modern game. So perhaps it’s no surprise that some of the more colourful characters just don’t come to the fore like they used to?
