Club Players

Our family used to get Tennis magazine when we were kids. This used to be the tennis magazine, though tennis, unlike, say, football, encouraged its readers to play.

In particular, there would be regular segments where American players, like Tony Trabert or Stan Smith, would offer advice to play better tennis. Despite the tennis boom of the 70s, which encouraged the average person to play tennis (up til then, most people had thought of tennis as a sport of the rich), advice was always aimed at the "club player".

At the time, being young, I thought club player meant "not-so-good player", which was partly true, but still reflected the fact that a real tennis pro would still often make additional money on the side teaching people at special camps, for folks who joined clubs, i.e., people who were rich. And why not? Was Tony Trabert and Stan Smith likely to teach kids for free at a public court?

You have to realize that while rich people played tennis, tennis players weren't rich until the mid-70s and really until the 80s when a top player could make a million dollars a year. Players from the 60s and before were amateurs, and pro careers consisted of exhibitions. The Open Era finally moved the big tournaments like Wimbledon to pay pros to play, which meant you could make a living playing tennis, and a pretty good one at that.

Indeed, so good, that top players never have to interact with the average "club" player to make money, so good is the money you make from endorsements alone (at least, at the top ranks).

Thus, while club players meant "players that weren't that good, that weren't pros", it's implied, even in the 70s, that this was the typical tennis player, someone rich, someone who could afford club fees. Even by the 70s, this was no longer the picture the average tennis player in the US, and it was something the editors of Tennis magazine should have realized.

By the way, Tennis magazine was oddly disconnected from the pro game. The publishing schedule typically meant the magazine was printed months afterwards, making any sort of timely reviews untenable. Worse, they probably couldn't even send a reporter to write meaningful reviews of a tournament. Even big tournaments like the US Open merely had previews. The reviews were a pale comparison to Sports Illustrated. You might imagine that they could do really heavy in-depth interviews, exposing people to new players, and so forth.

Not really. The magazine probably could only afford one reporter who probably spent time schmoozing with the players, and not really paying close attention to the tournament that they were allegedly covering. Even now, I doubt the magazine has improved that much.

Pretty sad for a flagship magazine of a sport.