I have been a regular contributor to the popular BBC television series Grumpy
Old Men. For years, one source of my grumpiness has been the state of
British tennis. Simply moaning, I have discovered, is not terribly good for
you, other than getting you a nice fee for the odd TV appearance. So five
years ago I decided to stop moaning and try and do something positive. More
about that later.
I wasn’t alone in having a moan about tennis in the UK. Everybody has done it
at some point or another. The most common gripe? “How come we don’t produce
better players when we’ve got so much money to spend on the game?”
Last year’s outlay by the Lawn Tennis Association was in the region of £49m,
while Serbia spent £1m and has three of the top five players in the world.
Granted that whoever is at the helm of British tennis has a tough job
because of the pressure to produce results quickly but Roger Draper, LTA
chief executive, has made some bold statements and there are many who are
growing tired of waiting to see results. By his own admission, he began his
tenure by concentrating on the “elite” end of the tennis ladder. People like
me, and many others, now want to see if the LTA is prepared to put time and
resources into ensuring that the bottom rungs of that ladder are in place.
That’s where I would have started. I’ve climbed a few ladders in my life and
I’m certain I wouldn’t have been able to get to the top if there hadn’t been
anywhere to put my feet in the first place.
For some time, the popularly held view has been that if we can produce a
champion quickly (and surely that means Andy Murray) it will give us
something to build on. Are we forgetting that Greg Rusedski and Tim Henman
reached the dizzy heights of No 4 in the world and the number of people
playing the game in Britain actually fell? This is because the grassroots
have been neglected. Worse than that, tennis is actually unfairly treated.
Five years ago, while in America, I arranged to play tennis with friends in a
park. I arrived early and was sitting around waiting when a man approached
me and asked if I was looking for a game. I told him I was going to play
shortly but he enquired about my standard and organised a game for me while
I was waiting. My friends arrived, they all joined in, and we played for
hours. There was no cost. I asked my new-found friend: “Why don’t you have
to pay to play these courts?”
“We’ve paid our property tax, why would we pay again?” he replied.
When I returned to Britain I went to all the park courts in the London borough
of Merton, the borough that includes the All England Club, Wimbledon. An
hourly rate was being levied. When I asked where the money went, I
discovered it went into the central kitty of the council. It was not
ring-fenced for tennis, or even sport. As a council tax payer, this meant
that effectively I was paying a tennis tax. I was outraged and formed a
charity called tennisforfree with two like-minded individuals, Patrick
Hollwey and John Kinder (www.tennisforfree. com).
We went to the LTA and asked them how it could be that they allowed their
sport to be unfairly taxed. They seemed to be embarrassed by us, probably
because they had been involved in numerous schemes that positively endorsed
the charging for court time on park courts.
“Pay and Play” was advertised on their website and was seen as being a good
thing. “Could someone please tell us,” we argued, “what sense there is in
taxing a sport that keeps you healthy when the government is spending
millions trying to get people to exercise?”
I sat in meeting after meeting arguing this case with people who struggled to
grasp the concept of what we were saying. “When we are in parks,” I said,
“we don’t have to pay to look at the flowers. Kids don’t pay to use the
children’s playgrounds. A kickaround on the grass is free. All of these need
maintenance - probably less than a bit of Tarmac with a net across it - and
yet we have to pay to use tennis courts.”
I had seen kids thrown off a tennis court because their hour was up, only for
all the courts to then remain empty. Councils, it seemed, were paying staff
to stop people exercising.
Why, I asked, were there only a few of us who wanted to see this reversed? All
we wanted was a level playing field, for tennis not to be treated unfairly.
We quoted instances when tennis courts with an hourly charge of £5 or more
had been removed by councils and replaced by basketball courts or skateboard
parks that were free to use, even though neither basketball nor
skateboarding have wealthy governing bodies representing them.
So, what have we achieved, five years on? The penny has finally dropped. The
new charitable arm of the LTA, the Tennis Foundation, has stated it will not
put any money into initiatives that involve charging for court time. Roger
Draper told me at a meeting with the sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, that
he wanted a campaign to highlight the injustice of court charging, and that
it would be launched during the Wimbledon fortnight this year. It didn’t
happen. I’ve asked Roger why and so far he hasn’t supplied a satisfactory
explanation. Maybe we will have to wait another year until the same amount
of media attention is focused on tennis again.
We hope a coordinated campaign will be launched but until then we intend to
continue with our efforts, and have already set up a website - www.stoptaxingtennis.com
- with the intention of getting a million people to sign up to a petition so
that we can then take it to 10 Downing Street.
It was a great Wimbledon final, wasn’t it? Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, the
two best players in the world, battling it out in a thriller. Thirteen
million people watched it on the BBC. How many were enthused by the game and
would love to have gone out and played? A lot. Where would they do it? How
much would it cost?
And who would show the new players how to hold and swing the racket? British
tennis has failed to set in place an infrastructure that can enable people
to learn the basics of the game and play it on a regular basis at no cost.
Let’s begin a debate on this. For too long, the millions of pounds available
to British tennis have been spent by a small elite who are seemingly only
accountable to another small elite who appointed them in the first place.
The public, who generate most of the tennis wealth through their continued
love affair with the Wimbledon Championships, are left with little or no say.
I would be interested to learn what they’d make of some new proposals that
would benefit each and every one of them, should they wish to take
advantage. It’s about time for new balls.
Six-step manifesto to improve tennis at grassroots level
FREE TENNIS
Offer free tennis in parks. Where councils refuse, name and shame them and
have central government hold them to account. More than 100 councils have
already made their courts free at all times
TEACH THE GAME
One free ‘participatory’ session to take place once a week, all year round, in
as many parks as possible, outlining the basics of the game to allcomers on
a Saturday or Sunday morning to bring new people into the game
HELPING HANDS
The LTA or the British Tennis Foundation (or both) to employ people to be
‘tennis facilitators’ at the free park courts for a few hours every weekend,
overseeing how court time is allocated
TENNIS ACADEMY
One of the sets of free courts in every borough in the country to become a
kind of tennis academy. This is where we hire the better coaches who train
the kids who have been talent-spotted by the ‘tennis facilitators’. Cost to
be covered by sponsors: companies such as Ariel and Barclays, who already
pour money into British tennis
JUNIOR RETURNS
Our best junior players receive financial backing from the LTA and train at
the fabulous National Tennis Centre at Roehampton. They must give something
back. I propose they give some of their time to help promote tennis in
British parks by putting on a tennis roadshow. We need to get our good
tennis out there in people’s faces
PLAY THE GAME
Each set of free park courts to have one tournament a month, perhaps rotating
the age groups through the year. This would be a knockout event - just one
tiebreak each, so the whole thing only takes a couple of hours. You would
have a prize for the winner - in the region of £100 (again, sponsored by an
IBM, Barclays, or Tesco). These tournaments need not be expensive to stage.
A good cash prize will get the kids out there trying to win. Do this for a
few years and just watch the standard improve
STARS BACK THE INITIATIVE
‘It’s great what the Tennis For Free campaign is doing. Best of all it
encourages kids to play tennis and what the sport in any nation needs is
plenty of new talent’ Bjorn Borg,
‘I am fully behind anything that allows more youngsters to get on tennis
courts and try out the game. After such a great Wimbledon there is currently
a buzz about tennis and it would be wrong to allow that to disappear’ Tim
Henman
‘There’s no doubt there is a need for free tennis courts in parks in Britain.
It’s absolutely crucial and if there are going to be home-grown champions,
there need to be more youngsters playing the game’ Pat Cash
‘Anything that gets kids on court and gives them the experience of tennis is
an excellent initiative. British tennis needs a combination of diverse
backgrounds playing the game’ Greg Rusedski
Tony Hawks is a comedian and author and former Sussex county tennis player (www.tony-hawks.com)
