Ok...why do you like tennis?

What you say? Why this question? Well it comes of the excellent SFP thread and the comments relating to Simon Barnes.
Sport is a battle of wits as well as bodies, it often defines character as well as builds it.
So with this in mind re tennis - just what is it you like about it, what does it do for you, and what got you into it?

My answers briefly...what I like about it:
1. Complete sport - in the way it taxes both mind and body...it brings together tactics, endurance, preparation, skill, etc.
2. Scoring system - no matter where you are a match it can always be turned around, that creates real edge of seat moments
3. Formats - different surfaces, geographies, singles & doubles, indoors and outdoors...what other sport has this myriad of combinations?

What got me into it:
Simple...those Borg vs McEnroe matches. The contrasts, the battles...and THAT tiebreak. For me tennis is almost a surrogate for human battle...at its very essence its a raw sport, almost gladiatorial...those 5 setters become survival of the fittest mentally and physically, and its those parameters I love.

Over to you!

Lydian - First, thanks for your kind remarks about my post. I'm not realy happy with the title - it was a a biot of "alliterative headline-ese really)
  Next. There is no doubt that the very nature of tennis - and all sports where you can't just simply run down the clock - makes for extreme drama. In soccer, if you're 4-0 up with five minutes to go you are simply NOT going to lose. In tennis - as well as, say, cricket and snooker - you can come back from seemingly impossible positions and still win.
  Also, with tennis, anyone who has played singles (doubles is far more fun but lacks the drama) at any level will tell you what a lonely business it is out there. You are absolutely on your own and even if you have 15,000 people screaming for you on Centre Court no one is going to play the shots for you.
  Another thing is that you might have to go out and play in front of a scattering of fans at 11am, in bright sunshine before a packed house at 2pm, after an interminable wait for the preceding three-hour match to finish, or in the wind and dark and cold at the butt-end of a long day.
  You'll have to play not fully fit or when you don't feel like it or just don't feel well in a strange land, a strange court, with poor line calling and numerous net cords by your opponent. Your match might last 45 minutes or three hours. You might spend all day waiting to play and not even get on court. What a sport.

For all the reasons Lydian has listed but also the long term narrative.

We can see a player emerge as a raw youngster, climb the rankings, win titles and start to claim a place in history. Rivalries emerge, battles are won and lost. Tactics and skills are developed and adapted to meet new challenges. We see them reach their physical peak and then we see them change and adjust as the years and miles slowly begin to work against them. Eventually they leave the scene but live on in our memories.

A player's career is a wonderful microcosm of a person's lifespan.

lydian wrote:1. Complete sport - in the way it taxes both mind and body...it brings together tactics, endurance, preparation, skill, etc.

This is the biggie for me. The top tennis players are among the most complete athletes on the planet. I have a huge appreciation for immense physical and mental application, and tennis is one of the sports that best exemplifies these. HM's point about the constantly ongoing, ebbing and flowing narrative that the sport provides is also a great point. I'd suspect that tennis and boxing, amongst others, have plenty of crossover too.

Plus, I grew up playing the game and have been doing so for 20 years. Hard to let it go after that long!

It's good to see you back, lydian   are you and your son still managing the LTA circuit ok?

I'm a massive boxing fan, and a lot of parallels run with these two sports. I think boxing actually has the edge in mind-body-will, but tennis has the edge in that the power names meet a lot more often, which drives the narrative. Like Lydian, I also love the gladiatorial aspect - It's why I love Nadal - the growl, the fistpumps, it's a challenge to the other guy's id, as Freud would say.

Silver wrote:I grew up playing the game and have been doing so for 20 years. Hard to let it go after that long!

I'm the complete opposite. In my whole life, I've probably played tennis on less than five occasions!

I got into tennis more as a piece of drama. I had a few pleasant years as a relatively neutral observer. Then Novak's career sucked me in and it all got a bit more emotional!

I like playing it, I like watching it

very intriguing and aesthetic at the time

it requires athletism, technique, strategy and character

but in general I think I got used to it as it was watched at home when I was a kid

Kingraf. No doubt you'll appreciate the remark made about boxing by the late Harry Carpenter who liked the sport and admired the fighters because: "You're absolutely on your own out there."

In addition to some of the reasons others have given. It's just fun to hit a tennis ball... especially when it goes were you want it to go. Also it is about the only sport that Woman can have similar pro sporting careers to men.   Billie Jean. That probably sparked my interest in watching tennis as a child. Back in the day Women's tennis was far more interesting than the boring Men's game. At least that's what I thought. No reason to think that I may not do so again.

its true that few other sports have such balanced mediatic importance among the mens and womens version

This came from the ESPN and may help better define what is needed for success in different sports. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/sportSkills

Tennis is #7 in this list, and I like 7 as a number.

One of my favorites (Ferrer) is currently #7 in Rankings.

Daily Fail (I dislike the reference though) has this to say about #7...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2599681/Seventh-heaven-Poll-reveals-worlds-favourite-number-seven-digits-significance-religion.html

Apart from all this, I loved the White and Green of W and was smitten on first sight.

@KR.. Boxing?

Yes, LF, I'm a huge boxing fan, and can be found arguing on the boxing boards regularly. I also go to the local fights very often, been about seven or eight times already this year, and most of the big names locally train at the same gym as me. Much as I love tennis, doesn't really hold a candle. Interesting article on ESPN, don't personally believe there is such a thing as a "hardest sport" (although things like paddle tennis should probably be discounted when Monfils can rock up and beat the world #1 in his fourth ever match).

I think the gradation is probably relative, KR. All sports at international level are tough, not matter which one you pick.

Interesting article LF, thanks for sharing...not sure I agree with all the rankings though but hey it's always subjective in the end where opinion on attributes is concerned.

It's great that people on this forum like tennis for similar and different reasons...those of us wrapped up in the game, yes Silver we're still ploughing the LTA field and trying to develop him as an athlete as well as nurture his skills, and those of us who just love to watch the sport too. For me there is an artistry to tennis that a full on sport like boxing can never achieve. Boxing is too primordial for me to be considered in that way although I know people will argue differently and I'm a former nationally competing martial artist too but that again is different from boxing due to the myriad of moves and forms.

However, tennis is also a weird sport because it concerns such fine margins over a court that's ~80 foot long. For that large size matches are often won and lost by mere millimetres - this is the precision of the sport. And its this precision that engenders traits of perfectionism along with all the endurance, tactics and agility aspects noted. Its also this dichotomy that I find so alluring about the sport. On the one hand we have a sport that is truly global, played in vast complexes and arenas on relatively large playing dimensions...yet for all that scale slam champions are often made via the very smallest of margins. Case in point - look at Federer's serve on Sunday when match point down...an ace that hawkeye showed to be in by ~3 millimetres. So after serving a ball for a distance of 60 feet (that's 18,300 millimetres BTW) it came down to a just few millimetres to call the match at that point. That is true edge of the seat stuff. Those 3 millimetres were 0.016% of the distance travelled. So such are the fine margins...and for all the physicality of the sport it's these unbelievably small differences that can be the making or he haunting of a player. These are the dimensions and attributes of the sport that aren't captured in the article from LF above and what makes it so intriguing for those of us who follow it.

Its these fine margins which attract perfectionists into the sport. I see that all the time with juniors who go on to become the better players. They are often calm on the outside but highly anxious inside by nature, driven by a striving for perfect technique and pitting their wits against those fine margins. It's no wonder many top players have traits of OCD (Rafa), performance anxiety/panic (Federer), self flagellation (Murray) amongst others. To be a top tennis player is to be able to suffer more than most people can. Toni Nadal's mantra to Rafa growing up was "you must endure"...  And it's that mental side I find the most interesting. As Connors said tennis is 95% mental. Its the ability of these guys to sustain their performance within those fine margins under the highest stress and moments of pressure that is fascinating for me. The ability to stay strong when others shrink back, to "zone into" those fine margins, to bring forth the desire to win that hurts so much it becomes a fear of failure.

To me tennis guys are the ultimate athletes because of the perfect balance & unity of mind and body. But it's the mental aspects that intrigue me and it's those attributes that made me follow Borg, Sampras and then  Nadal (for all the physicality levelled at Rafa this ironically is not why I like him). These 3 players have amongst the best 5 set records such was/is their mental strength (5 set winners arent those who are the fittest when Sampras had a well publicised anemia probem, USO '95 anyone?). The mentally toughest players are the ones who tend to stay the calmest in the eye of the storm and its these dynamics amongst all the others in tennis that I find the most fascinating. The beauty is that we all like different attributes in our sporting idols - attributes that often mirror what we feel is important in ourselves. Tennis is a fantastic window into combatorial sport, the struggle to endure amongst the artistry but perhaps above all tennis is such an enthralling sport to watch because its a window into our own souls?

For me, one of the great elements of tennis is the aesthetic - watching someone hit a great shot is a thing of beauty (well, other than Naomi Broady's forehand...). That they are doing this on the run against balls being whacked at 100mph makes it even more remarkable.

There's also the element that anything can happen at any moment. A fairly normal looking rally, but then (e.g) Djokovic decides to flatten and hit through a backhand down the line, and you suddenly have a 'wow, where did that come from ?' moment.

Also there's the question of handling pressure - watching how some players are able to raise themselves when in moments of crisis while others just wilt (and sometimes how it can be the same player at different stages in the same match - Fed on Sunday being fantastic at the end of the 4th but surrendering the break to lose the 5th quite tamely).

Tennis has its own particular toughness, in that your ranking - and hence your livelihood - is on the line at every match. Do badly and you will suddenly find yourself excluded automatic entry at tournaments and having no chance of avoiding the big boys/girls in the early rounds.
 Get injured and your ranking plunges, with not all players getting the luxury of a prevented ranking.
  Golf is the same. In contrast the pressures in a team sport are different although the agonies of a top batsman when out of the runs (Alistair Cook?) are particularly acute.

I'm a Borg, McEnroe, Connors generation also and certainly a fantastic era to be introduced to tennis, but it was also great that there at the time were Chrissie and Martina and BJK and Evonne Cawley all on the same stage being treated as serious professional athletes (at a time when there the only other women you saw in sport were draped over F1 cars!). Great era for contrasting styles and personalities in both draws.

I love that in a slam fortnight, you can flick onto a match between players you'd never seek out to watch, but get totally sucked into a battle between the world number 28 and the world number 103 and find yourself caring who wins.

I remember the Agassi and Henman days in the late 90's, Andre was the first player I cheered for!

Bought a tennis game for every console i've owned   

Well for me my first tennis memory was that of Borg/McEnroe 1980 Wimbledon. I fell in love with the game then and there.

I think for me tennis offers an array of things, or use to anyway. You had power players, craft players, fit players and they all offered something different. Hence why I love the sport. You have different surfaces and Major tournaments played in all parts of the world and well it truly is a universal sport. I loved the Lendl/McEnroe/Becker/Wilander/Edberg dynamic. Never seen anything that will match that ever again. We have had the Federer/Nadal/Djokovic/Murray dynamic, but I don't think it matches up to the other dynamic from the 80's.

That was when tennis pure!

confession time - I only started following tennis because of Elena Dementieva's legs.

The one on one combat between contestants in which any of guile, power or flair can be used as a weapon in unique matchups?

No... Elena Dementieva's legs

This is where I see that your tennis knowledge is seriously lacking! How can anybody prefer Demetieva bulky legs to this?

http://us.cdn001.fansshare.com/photos/mariasharapova/maria-sharapova-legs-783525233.jpg

No... Elena Dementieva's legs
http://www.listal.com/viewimage/1149852h

(admittedly though... that is a stunning MaSha snapshot)