Tennis Mailbag: An NIL Refresher, the Art of Commentating and More

Hey everyone …

• Here’s the latest Served podcast episode.
• I chatted with Gill Gross about the ATP, Andrea Gaudenzi, L’Affaire Sinner and other tennis issues this week on the Monday Match Analysis podcast.
• We were asked to be a good soldier, so we shall … A reminder that 60 Minutes follows the NFL on CBS each Sunday, with episodes also available online.

Onward …

Jon, for an American fan it probably makes sense. But can you please explain NIL and some of the discussion you and your readers have on this point especially as it relates to college tennis?

Anon

• Sure.

Let’s try to do this succinctly. For more than 100 years college athletes were amateurs, unpaid for their labor, regardless of how much revenue they generated for their school. 

At first, this was something approaching a fair exchange. Quid: Athletes received college scholarships. Quo: They played a sport for State U that either generated revenue or enriched the school in other ways. 

Then came big money—mostly from media rights—and the idea that athletes could not be paid for their labor and revenue generation? It was not only immoral (editorializing), but created a distorted market. Because markets don’t like distortion and people tend to act rationally, athletes sought payment in other ways—under the table, via untraceable buckets of casino chips, homes and vehicles for family members—and schools were often happy to oblige.

College sports generated ever more revenue, so much so that strength coaches could make seven-figure salaries. Still, the NCAA and its member schools insisted that amateurism was the preferred model. Stories abounded of athletes making millions for their schools, while the athlete’s parents couldn’t afford bus fare to watch them compete. Athletes became empowered. And the situation became untenable.

A landmark 2021 Supreme Court case—decided unanimously—ruled that the sham of amateurship in college sports was an antitrust violation and that athletes were entitled to compensation based on their name, image and likeness (NIL). An athlete could, say, endorse local car dealerships or monetize their likeness on Instagram.

Predictably, with warped speed, NIL ceased to become about name/image/likeness and simply became a pretext for paying college athletes. A bidding war for talent ensued. And not just in revenue sports. 

If a benefactor of, say, Duke’s tennis program wanted to throw money around and upgrade the roster by subsidizing six-figure “NIL” offers for recruits, well, they were welcome to do so. Welcome to college sports in 2024.

The plus side: In this NIL universe, athletes rightly are compensated for their labor. (Why should college sports have been one of the few places where capital doesn’t have to pay the workforce a fair wage?) The negative side? College sports have become a bidding war. Recruiting is complicated (corrupted?) by money. Team culture is frayed when some athletes are paid and others aren’t. There’s something unseemly about it all.  

Jon, let me get this straight. You want [Nick] Kyrgios excommunicated from tennis because he was/is a pissant who wasted his talent and makes crass social media posts, but you want to enshrine Maria Sharapova in the game’s pantheon of greatness at Newport, even though she literally cheated? 

Kyrgios is undoubtedly the worse human being of these two. But which player’s legacy will be worse for tennis? The jerk who shirked? Or the champion who broke actual rules meant to safeguard the integrity of the sport but still got into the HoF? 

Paul R.

• I want to see no one excommunicated or canceled. We believe in second (even third) chances to avoid today’s urge to define people by their worst acts.

But I would argue that when prominent public figures act appallingly, it is incumbent on the rest of us not to let it go unremarked upon. Especially when said prominent public figures show zero remorse, and even double down. Especially when the network—the same network that employs one of the targets of Kyrgios’s vitriol—is silent. It's no secret that there is a star system in media. But you can’t be a sports broadcaster and, as part of a sustained bullying campaign, take to social media to imply you have previously romanced a subject’s girlfriend. That seems so obvious, I can’t believe I just typed that sentence.

As for Sharapova … I was surprised when I read Billie Jean King’s letter to the Hall of Fame committee defending Sharapova and urging Hall of Fame decision-makers to overlook her PED scandal. Billie Jean King is using her sway and her moral capital to support Sharapova? To me, it seemed unnecessary, a tennis version of the Streisand effect. But clearly, I was wrong. I underestimated how many people find this disqualifying. 

Full disclosure: I voted for Sharapova—and the other three nominees—on the recent ballot. Without condoning PED use, I think we need to look more closely at the facts. Meldonium was not on the banned list for years. Sharapova apologized. She appealed. (CAS noted, “Under no circumstances, can the player be considered to be an ‘intentional doper.’ ”) She did her time. She also won five majors and otherwise conducted herself with professionalism and without incident.

Are we really so … what? … strict? …  righteous? … uncharitable? … that we are going to claim that this one bad act should negate all Sharapova’s success and positive contributions and keep her out of the Hall of Fame? Some may. I’m not.

Jon, are there players who would be good commentators but who aren’t hired because they don’t work well on a television team? Despite their high tennis IQs, I don’t expect Marcelo Ríos or Yevgeny Kafelnikov to be hired anytime soon.

Kevin Kane, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

• I’m thinking Yevgeny Kafelnikov’s audition material isn’t getting a lot of run. Here’s the latest. Yikes. And while Marcelo Ríos is jacked … just kidding … but he really is jacked … remarks like this are perhaps disqualifying.

Having done my hard time in the tennis TV sector, here’s my hot take on former players in the broadcast compound. The best of them take the virtues of high-level tennis—problem-solving, self-sufficiency, curiosity, observation, worldliness and adaptability—and put them to good use. I don’t want to name-check and leave people out. But I also feel like people excelling in their jobs ought to be acknowledged. So a non-exhaustive list would include Jim Courier, Lindsay Davenport, Andy Roddick, Andrea Petkovic, Chanda Rubin, Martina Navratilova, James Blake, Chris Eubanks, etc.  

The former players who struggle are the ones who take some of the necessary evils of high-level tennis—self-centeredness, narcissism, paranoia, hyper-competitiveness, hotheadedness and discomfort with a team dynamic—and bring them to bear in this new workplace. I suspect this is not unique to tennis but there are a number of highly qualified, insightful, incisive voices who don’t get work—or don’t get enough work—because, as much as they might master Xs and Os, they struggle to play nice with others.

Let me suggest the Kyrgios documentary has already been made, except it’s titled Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose.

Skip, Philly

• Except that Pete Rose is—and, likely, always will be—baseball’s all-time hit leader. And Rose, for all his flaws, was about toil and trouble—he literally has the word “hustle” in his nickname. Kyrgios, on the other hand, is a talent minimizer whose career-high ranking is lower than that of, say, Joachim Johansson. (Look at the hard-hitting Swede out here catching all kinds of strays!) The anti-Rose, Kyrgios takes pride in his lack of work ethic, and the success that has come despite his commitment and professionalism. I got a B-plus, dude, and I didn’t even study!

But A) the Rose documentary is worth your time. B) To Skip’s point, there are some similarities. A membrane of yes-men. Entitlement. Self-destructive streaks. Utter lack of self-awareness. An unapologetic stance in the face of indefensible acts. Rose is in his 80s and still doesn’t get it. Maybe Kyrgios will one day.

I think your answer on signature shots was a hedge; it’s pretty clear now that 90-plus percent of players have almost identical strokes, serves, etc., it’s just power and blasting balls—no sense denying it, lucky we have [Carlos] Alcaraz and [Karolína] Muchová and Ons [Jabeur], maybe [Daria] Kasatkina, [Grigor] Dimitrov?

@tenns4ever

• I don’t know … I still see plenty of variety. Even among the many players with games predicated on “power and blasting” is there not variety? Aryna Sabalenka, Coco Gauff and Iga Świątek … do they not have distinct games, to say nothing of personalities, backstories and modes of being? If anything, I would submit there is more variety in tennis now than there was, say, 20 years ago, around the time the phrase “Big Babe tennis” was coined. (h/t Mary Carillo.)

 Jon, worth noting that Ines Ibbou won her first-round doubles match at the WTA tournament in Tunisia last week. She’s played in a handful of WTA qualifiers in the Mideast before in singles but never won a match. Fairly certain this makes her the first woman from Algeria to win a match at the WTA level. Small potatoes, maybe, but still a great leap forward. Got to love the internationalism of this great sport.

Jim

• Great. Now, perhaps the WTA can improve upon this bio? 

Jon, you were described to me as a really nice guy and a really bad tennis player. Care to comment?

Jerzy T.

• Can we plead that down and get rid of the “really” clauses? I am not that nice. I am not that bad a player.

Shots

• RIP Robert Lansdorp.

• Congrats to Joel Drucker and other Norcal Tennis Hall of Fame inductees.

• 2024 US Open finalist, Olympian and top-ranked American Jessica Pegula has entered the 2025 Credit One Charleston Open, the largest women’s-only professional tennis tournament in North America. The tournament kicks off on March 29. 

• Tennis journalist Paul Fein notes his new tennis book Game Changers: How the Greatest Players, Matches, and Controversies Transformed Tennis is available to order directly from Amazon or him, at [email protected].