Western Players Lack Dedication to Compete With the East

The Babel that is the foreign press room at Roland Garros is disproportionately filled with English voices given the limited impact made here by Americans, Australians, South Africans and, needless to say, Brits.

The outnumbered press pack from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, who do have a positive story to tell, are mostly too busy writing about the successes of their players to indulge in any triumphalism, but one of their number did manage a dig of sorts after the Russian Dinara Safina and Ana Ivanovic of Serbia made it through to tomorrow's women's final.

In a voice just loud enough for most of the room to hear, he asked a scribbler from the US what his country was going to do once the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, retired. Unsurprisingly, the reply was inaudible as not even Bill Gates could answer that one with any certainty.

The implication behind the question was that the women's game, in particular, in America is in decline - and if the health of the game in the US is ailing, tennis as a whole should be worried. The well-being of a country of so many great champions of the recent and distant past is far too important for no one to be concerned about it.

The implication has some fairly solid evidence to back it up. Serena and Venus Williams - at five and seven - are the only two American women in the world's top 20 and none of the other four players in the top 100 - Lindsay Davenport (26), Ashley Harkleroad (61), Jill Craybas (62) and Julie Ditty (100) - is exactly storming up the rankings.

American men are not doing much better. Andy Roddick (six), who skipped the French Open, and James Blake (eight) are the only players in the top 20. Of the other five in the top 100, Sam Querrey (40), John Isner (82) and Donald Young (83) are at least prospects rather than has-beens but none has made the sort of rapid advance that many people were expecting.

The problem is that successful players today commit themselves to the game at a far younger age than they used to, and in the US and many other Western countries, making boys and girls commit themselves to anything is neither easy nor necessarily desirable.

The idea of the cradle-to-grave tennis player is relatively new - Sweden's Bjorn Borg, the dominant player of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was arguably the first - and there was no immediate rush to follow his example. As late as 1991, Germany's Michael Stich, an all-round sportsman who did not commit himself to tennis until his late teens, managed to win Wimbledon. It is unlikely that anyone who delays as long as Stich will ever again be as successful as he was.

Now your chances of making an impact on the game are limited if you don't start hitting on a pretty regular basis soon after you have stepped from the cradle.

Until and unless attitudes change, we may not see the US reassert itself as a consistently powerful tennis nation.