Sometime in 2011 – around July or August, memory tells me – our cable TV provider offered a free month of the Tennis Channel as a way to draw in new subscribers. I’m not even sure I knew such a thing existed. I knew there was a Golf Channel, because I had many friends and colleagues who subscribed to it, and wouldn’t shut the F up about it….
But a TV channel 100% devoted to tennis? This was news to me.
You’d think I’d have been aware of it, being an avid tennis player and fan for many decades. This is something I’ve blogged about before, quite a few times, so I won’t bore you with all that right now.
The point is this: Finding out that there was a TV channel devoted entirely to tennis – and then getting a free month to check it out – became one of those life-changing moments. Yeah, it sounds silly. But hear me out.
Back in those days (and even more so now), you could count on less than two hands the number of tennis tournaments the major networks bothered to broadcast. Keep in mind, the men’s (ATP) and women’s (WTA) tours hosted more than 100 top-level tournaments every year between them. Yet you’d be lucky to see eight or nine on the mainstream U.S. networks.
Compare that with any other major sport in America – baseball, basketball, football, ice hockey, golf, auto racing, boxing, soccer. You could always count on seeing one of those sports at least once a week, and often a lot more than that.
Not so with tennis.
So here’s what happened during that free month of the Tennis Channel: I spent whatever time I could watching tennis. When I took a short break from work in the afternoon (I worked remotely then, as now), I tuned into the Tennis Channel. When the workday and house/parental duties were done, I’d watch the Tennis Channel.
I watched tennis every day or night, religiously, whenever I could squeeze in the time.
When that free month was up, I immediately subscribed to the Tennis Channel. Today, I still pay for the Tennis Channel. I also subscribe to Tennis TV, which gives me access to even more ATP matches – something that came in handy during our years in London, which does not offer the Tennis Channel.
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Let me just briefly describe what all this meant to me, having access to 24/7 tennis. It became a central part of my life during a period when my life was bounding in many different directions, at lightning speed.
In the summer 2011, my wife and I were living in our first house (in North Carolina), thousands of miles away from where we met a decade earlier (Los Angeles), and hundreds of miles away from where we lived as newlyweds in the mid-2000s (Connecticut, then New York City).
We both worked remotely, so we both were at home all day. We had a two-year-old daughter and another on the way. Between our careers, family duties and house chores, our days and nights were packed solid, perpetually busy, non-stop. Finding a few moments to relax was a tough grind indeed.
When those moments did make an appearance – usually well into the evening hours – I’d head for the living room, grab the remote, and click on the Tennis Channel.
It was as close to a Zen experience as I got in those days, watching elite athletes in foreign lands bang that little yellow ball back and forth over the net, back and forth, back and forth. I became entranced by the rhythm and flow of the matches, and the way the best players seemed to glide from one point to another as if they were floating on clouds.
Now, I was no stranger to tennis. I’d been playing and watching the sport since I was like 11 years old – and I hadn’t been 11-years-old in a long GD time (GD it). But I had never watched tennis this often, or this consistently, for so many days and hours and months and years in a row.
One thing I learned during my early Tennis Channel days was that this was not the same sport I grew up with. It wasn’t even the same sport I knew in the 1980s and ‘90s.
This was a completely different beast, a sport that had advanced so far so fast it was light years beyond what it had been even a decade earlier. The players were bigger, faster, more powerful, and more skilled in just about every way imaginable. They played a game I was not familiar with. I sat there mesmerized at the things they could do with a tennis racket on a tennis court. It seemed impossible to me.
I’m what you might call a decent player. But there are many degrees of “decent” player. I could beat some decent players regularly, while others wiped the floor with me. The players who wiped the floor with me would get wiped out themselves by even better decent players. And the players two levels above me would get absolutely crushed by the touring pros.
It was these touring pros who kept me grabbing the remote to click on the Tennis Channel (or Tennis TV) for the past 15 years. Watching them was like watching a great play or musical. It was that captivating, that enthralling.
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It turns out that my Tennis Channel life also coincided with the greatest era in men’s tennis history, and one that will likely never be duplicated. It was the era of the Federer/Nadal/Djokovic three-headed monster – the three greatest male players of all time, bar none, all competing at their peaks at the same time. This kind of thing was unprecedented, in any sport.
Oh, and Serena Williams was the greatest female player of all time. She also dominated this era.
Every week I could watch the greatest players ever do battle on the court, and what a gift that was during a time of life when so many other things competed for my attention.
And now?
It’s all over.
Done and dusted.
In what seems like a flash.
That Fed/Rafa/Novak/Serena era – over.
That time of my life – over.
Federer, Nadal, Serena and the nearly-as-great Andy Murray have all retired. The ageless Djokovic still competes at a high level, but he can no longer beat the very best on a regular basis, and the sun is setting fast on his career.
2026 has brought the retirement of a number of top players – three-time major champion Stan Wawrinka, Japanese superstar Kei Nishikori, and France’s Gael Monfils, who might have been the single greatest athlete in tennis history.
Nishikori became one of my two favorite players over the past 15 years, along with American (and fellow NC native) John Isner.
Wawrinka also became a favorite, with his mighty one-handed backhand, and his stout, rugby-like, non-tennis build.
Well, they’ve all exited stage left.
I just watched Nishikori play his final match at the Japan Open in Tokyo, a fitting place for him to call it a day.
I felt a certain degree of sadness watching Kei lose one last time. He’s a classy guy who rose to No. 4 in the world during his prime a decade or so ago, despite being undersized. But for all practical purposes his career as a top player ended in the early 2020s, when injuries kept him sidelined for long stretches of time.
Beyond that, I personally found, when watching his final match, that it didn’t really matter all that much to me. It was more or less just a couple of dudes hitting a little yellow ball over the net, back and forth, forth and back.
Which brought a different kind of sadness.
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This is supposed to be “not really a tennis blog,” even though so far it’s been a very tennis blog.
But from where I sit, in the here and now, it’s more a blog about different life phases. Specifically, my different life phases.
The life I had when the Tennis Channel first entered it seems like a foreign land compared with the life I have now.
Back then, in summer 2011, we were a young family in a new home, navigating our way through a whole new experience that was as exciting as it was exhausting. The world had an entirely different rhythm and hue. I was an older Dad, yes. But I was also a new Dad, and a new homeowner, and a fairly new husband, having been married only seven years earlier.
At the same time, I was old enough that my career as a salaried company man was edging toward the finish line. A change was coming that would turn me into a self-employed free-lancer, while my younger wife’s career as a salaried company woman was moving to ever greater heights.
I look back on those days with great affection. But also with the knowledge that in a few short years, our lives would shift in immeasurable ways.
Since the Tennis Channel entered my life, we’ve moved to three different cities in two different states, two different regions of the country, and two different continents. Our daughters are now high school teens, soon to enter university life. It’s been a fabulous adventure, and it continues to this day.
And it has almost nothing in common with the life we had in 2011.
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For whatever reason, I associate my Tennis Channel experience with that long-ago former life. It was just the tonic I needed at the time, something I depended on to offer temporary relief from the workaday grind. Man, how I loved just sitting there watching tennis for a short while.
For whatever reason, it occupied a prominent place in my life. Go figure.
And for whatever reason, I no longer feel that connection. I still watch it, yes. But I don’t feel like I need to watch it. I find my mind wandering during the matches I watch these days, no longer entranced by the action on the court.
Players have come and gone. Generations of players have come and gone. A whole phase of life has come and gone. More than one phase has come and gone.
Now I’m knocking on the door of senior citizen status, and for whatever reason, watching tennis every day just isn’t as important as it used to be.
I’m glad it was there when I needed it. But I’m not sure I really need it that much anymore.
As I write this, I wonder what will take its place, what will fill in the gaps. I’m not sure just yet. But I look forward to finding out.
Image: My AI creation, with instructions to show a match between Nishikori and Wawrinka. Yes, I know I’ve recently blogged about the danger of AI. But I also held out hope that it can be contained to do what it’s supposed to do. Like create non-copyright-infringement images for this blog. So it either destroys us, or lets us create fun images.
