India, for various reasons, sucks at every sport — except cricket. Why? Because every boy in the country holds a cricket bat before age seven.

Sampras just happened to find a tennis racket in his parents’ basement and got into it. The goal should be to create an environment where such happy accidents occur more frequently.

April 20th, 2010 at 1:03 am

Yeah, Hypnos :) I may be the only Indian in the country who can’t stand @#$% cricket. And the “various reasons” you speak of, actually all amount to a single Catch-22 reason. Because cricket is the most popular sport, the govt pumps practically ALL the sports resources into that single game, so that’s all we achieve in, and that’s all that keeps the nation’s interest and round and round it goes. All other sports are treated as step-children. Case in point. Last winter olympics, (or time before last, not sure) India had her first and only athlete competing. He couldn’t find a SINGLE SPONSOR.

For a while, when Paes and Bhupati were looking to take over the Woodies mantle, and while Sania seemed to making strides, tennis enjoyed a brief popularity. Then the boys broke up, and Sania hit a brick wall, and POOF!

At least, unlike poor American tennis fans, I’m glad we get damned decent live tennis coverage. ;)

April 20th, 2010 at 2:29 am

Seems obvious to me, as anyone glanced thru the last name on the list of top 100 tennis players in the world?

Yes, tennis has gone international a long time ago and the US last I checked is about 1/20th of the world’s population (more like 1/5th to 1/8th of the tennis players though)

So we should have a male US GS champion every 5 to 8 years…

But all things are not quite so equal, a number of nations (Tchek Republic and others in Eastern Europe tend to skew the pop statistic because tennis is much much more of a way out of poverty than other sports and even academics…AND their programs are very good)

At the end of the day, who tends to win more on the tennis court? Simple, add a fudge factor to the largest nation with the “current” best tennis program…Voila.

Tennis number ones are a little harder to predict…Federer, Kuerten (o.k Brazil is quite populous),Rios, the Black (their actual last name :-) ) family from Zimbabwe,Daniel Nestor…defy all attempts at explaining their success by Geography alone

Not long ago we had Blake and Roddick in the top 10…instead of counting our blessings we were busy criticizing the way Federer would take them out…Statistically, we may not see that for a while.

April 20th, 2010 at 5:41 pm

Ryan Harrison’s tennis strokes seem like they have a lot of hitches in them/flaws. He will do well and I also think those hitches will be exploited by players, to Mr. Harrison’s detriment. Not his fault, that’s just the way it is.

Tough sport.

April 20th, 2010 at 11:19 pm

If Ryan Harrison had Donald Young’s tennis strokes, this would be a conversation about when Ryan Harrison would be winning his first slam. I think he has some obstacles and one of them is definitely the hitches in his shots.

April 20th, 2010 at 11:38 pm