China’s move into World Tennis
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Chinese player Li Na is the last Asian to win a Grand-Slam title and she has retired, but the springboard she provided to China is not wasted. Today, Tennis and Tennis events in China are on par with the best in the world. The Beijing-Open offers US$ 4 million as prize money. Currently, only a few Asians are seen in major Tennis events in the world as participants, and a good number of them happen to be Chinese. The boom of the Chinese economy is making an impact in the professional events calendar. In the WTA and ATP events venue, names such as Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Wuhan and Shenzhen have been appearing regularly in the past 5 years. Chinese domination in events in October, which is the closing month of the WTA calendar, is very noticeable.
The huge size of the Chinese economy is helping these cities raise the funds and stage such events. The size of their local TV audience itself provides the numbers, which the TV stations target. Apart from this, China is a country with a long sporting tradition and with over a billion in population. The size of the population attracted to watch Tennis is believed to be somewhere around 50%, which could be in the region of over 400 million TV viewers. Their middle and upper class are growing all the time. All these make China’s Tennis-package one of the most attractive in the world. The second and subsequent professional events work in multiple tiers, which leads to the ‘big money’ of WTA and ATP annual calendar. Many of these events are in Chinese cities. This makes it easy for the Chinese players to go into the world rankings.
Newcomers challenge
The professional events calendar of the Women’s and Men’s is full. In all probability, the only option for a new venue to come up is to buy the franchise from a franchise holder for a year or outright, but I have no indication of the price of these franchises even for one year. A wild guess could be from US$ 1-5 million. Adding up the cost of running the event, prize money, advertising, security and management, could toll up to over US$ 15 million for an event in China now. In Asia, there are only a handful of countries which can dole out this kind of money for Tennis. China has decided to move into the top bracket of Tennis events. Judging from players’ comments, it must be said the events are well run and even spectator-wise, they are well patronised. Even right now in China, Tennis is big.
Player development
China’s player development is on par with their events management efficiency. Currently, the best two Women’s players from China are Shuai Zhang ranked 36 and Quang Wang is at 69. In the Federation Cup and Davis Cup China is in Group 1. All these indicate how successful China is in the player development sector. The pragmatic Chinese approach in this sector seems effective.
Formatting to excite
The way China conducts its events is different to the rest of the world. Their propaganda mechanism is as old as time but, with modern tools and the electronic media, the mechanism to excite the people with Tennis has helped them overtake the rest of Asia. Records show that Tennis was played in China in the last emperor’s court more than 100 years ago. Their prince-lings had tutors from Europe, but Tennis never reached the realm of the ordinary people. Even in communist China, although Tennis was considered undesirable,
Tennis was played and its interest well sustained. In the ’70s, a Chinese contingent visited Colombo, with Chinese-Sinhalese interpreters speaking classical Sinhala. They soon found out that the need was for English interpreters. Subsequently, our Tennis team went to China. The most incomprehensive side of Chinese achievement is the ‘pace’ with which China has changed its sporting image and taken its populace into an elite sport like Tennis. Other nations have been doing this for decades and it is nowhere near the Chinese achievement.
Destination Singapore
The WTA has, in the past few years, been staging their Masters in Singapore. It does not touch the locals that much. It is the global audience that is WTA’s target. The top 8 Women will include USA’s Williams sisters, as their presence in elite Tennis now goes into the 3rd decade; third successive appearance of Romania’s Simona Halep; for the first time Germany’s Angelique Kerber will collect the award as the World No.1 player; the others are Poland’s Radwanska; Spains Mugurusa; Slovakia’s Cibulkova; Czech Republic’s Pliskova; and USA’s Madison Keys.
In the open era, which began in 1969, changes in the game have been significant. It is likely that very soon the WTA too will change some aspects of the game to make it more spectator-friendly and exciting. Games will be played with no-add rule and a ‘super tie-break’ will replace the final set. It will not be before 2020 or thereabouts. China will be another nation to benefit from all these changes.
–George Paldano, Former intl. player; Accredited Coach of Germany; National, Davis-Cup, Federation Cup captain/coach– georgepaldano@yahoo.com