I started watching tennis in the early 80s.  In those days, cable was just starting to get popular.  ESPN was already the premier sports channel because, well, there was no such thing anywhere else.  Even so, it competed against the three big American networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC.  For the most part, CBS and NBC had tennis coverage, but it was somewhat sparse.

None of the stations would touch the Australian Open.  It was too far away, in the middle of Christmas, and at the time, few of the top pros ventured to play.  Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors, the top 2 players in the world, routinely skipped the Australian Open.  The event didn’t get back on the map until about 1982 when a surprising field that included Wilander, Lendl, and McEnroe played the event, and ever since then, the Australian Open has had a pretty illustrious field of players.

It took until 1979 for NBC to broadcast the finals live in its innovative Breakfast at Wimbledon.  They would eventually show the men’s final of the French Open live, but tape delay the women’s final, often editing it to fit comfortably in the hour and a half they had allocated for the event.

Forget any early round coverage, at least, until ESPN started taking tennis more seriously.

American television was as likely to show an exhibition as it was an official event and often didn’t bother explaining the difference between the two.  On the women’s side, they showed the Family Circle Cup in Florida.  Big events were routinely not covered nationally.  Miami was known, I believe, at one point as the Lipton Championships and used to feature best of 5 matches, as it aspired to be considered the fifth Slam.

However, some events, such as the Philadelphia Indoors, held early in the year, was never televised nationally despite some great matches between McEnroe and Lendl.   With cable, the WCT, started by Lamar Hunt (who also created a rival pro football league that eventually merged with the NFL to become the AFC) had a deal with ESPN to televise its events.  Eventually, the WCT merged back with the ATP and they were no longer a split tour, but for a while, they had separate rankings.

This was all before the Internet, or at least, the popular Internet.  You couldn’t get tennis scores easily, nor rankings easily.  You had to rely on Tennis magazine which gave you rankings about 2 months out of date (and probably stopped posting it as they still can’t seem to publish in a timely manner).

Before cable, you might be able to see about 6 tennis events a year.  That easily doubled with ESPN and USA network, but the coverage primarily focused in the US where it was much cheaper to do television coverage.  You might get to see the Italian Open, but you wouldn’t see Monte Carlo or Hamburg.  And why bother?  Americans rarely did well in them or even played them, and in those days, the networks, especially NBC were overtly patriotic, only covering American players and often blatantly disregarding great matchups if an American was involved.

Things have changed for the better with Tennis Channel.  By piggy-backing on a UK feed, they can televise the various Masters 1000 events, even those in the US, which have often been neglected.  Tournaments as small as Estoril get coverage, and even the Hopman Cup, an exhibition, gets coverage.

Even with all this coverage, there are still times when you can’t get coverage.  For example, the big news today, is Juan Martin del Potro’s second return to the pro tour.  Last year, he came back for two tournaments.  He lost to Olivier Rochus in Bangkok in two close sets, which was respectable, given how long he was off the tour, then lost to Feliciano Lopez in two quick sets.  He and his coach pronounced him not ready to return to tour, so he shut it down for the rest of the year to do additional training.

Women have left the tour for long periods of time only to come back and resume where they left off.  Monica Seles, Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin are three prominent examples, but no male, at least in the last 30 years has taken that much time off and managed to get back in the top 10 (not that I’m aware of).

As fate would have it, del Potro would once again draw Feliciano Lopez in the first round, and this became a test of who could break serve, which was neither one, all that often.  The first set went to a tiebreak, which Lopez won.  The second also went to a very long tiebreak with Lopez having opportunities to win the match, but del Potro winning in the end.  The third set proceeded without a break into yet another tiebreak, and del Potro won that, although more handily.

That’s pretty impressive.  Lopez is a top 40 player, and del Potro has only played 3 times in the last year, so to come back and win a close three setter against a top 100 player is pretty good.  del Potro would face Florian Mayer next, and if he could somehow get past that round, he would have to consider that a success, I imagine.  The one good news is that he appears able to hold his serve, which will be critical to his comeback.  He may not able to hang in games where he receives, but if he can get to tiebreaks, he can win the Karlovic way.

In any case, I was unable to watch this match except through the update of scores kindly provided by the ATP Tour.  It’s too bad every match can’t be on-demand, but I guess that’s at least another decade away.

So congrats to del Potro for winning his first match of the year.  May there be more to come!