mtenis.com.pl

"There's no reason to trash, "the lost generation." They're simply a product of demographic reality.

The tennis boom made tennis the single biggest participant sport in the world, and the passion of greater numbers of millions of people than ever before or since. And by the mid 80's, it was winding down. From the late 60's through the mid-to-late 80's, zillions of people were living, breathing, and (most importantly for our discussion) procreating tennis.

If you're going to be great enough at tennis to be a great, you have to start obscenely young. Tennis has to be a passion that comes from a place outside the self, because kids don't have passions for things like career development. It must, to be specific, be a passion that comes from your family. And from the 60's through the 80's, that passion generated the largest pools of young tennis talent in history. If you have ten people, the "best among them" can still be pretty terrible. If you have a thousand, they'll start to look good. Hundreds of thousands? You'll get some really good talents emerging. But the size of the pools in the tennis boom era were statistically guaranteed to generate the greatest talents -- in the greatest numbers -- the sport has ever seen, or ever will.

But a funny thing happened. As quickly as the boom happened, it died. Kaput. In the matter of a generation, college and high school teams dried up and disappeared forever. Public courts went to seed or got bulldozed for more popular options. The size of the global pool of talent out of which the future's "best players" were skimmed was suddenly much, much smaller. And that was compounded by the fact that the ever extending reach of the media's eye showed the group of young potential athletes both how many options there were for their time, and how much better their financial prospects were if they followed those paths than if they wasted their efforts on a low-reward, top-heavy sport like pro tennis.

So starting around 1990, kids were born into a world where virtually none of the good athletes were being pushed into tennis, and the sport had a financial black eye that kept the good athletes from finding their way into the sport on their own. In the 60's, 70's, and 80's, the athletes that broke through into the top levels of tennis were demographically guaranteed to be among the most physically gifted athletes on the planet. After that, the opposite has been true. The gifted athletes are ALL doing other things, and the "best" from the talent pool starting with those born around 1990 are crawling out of a pretty gimped pool. They're just nowhere near the physical talents previous generations were. That's not a knock on them; it's just a fact. The strongest players in a small talent pool aren't going to be nearly as strong as the strongest players from a gigantic one, and that's what we're seeing played out in real time.

The next generations always superseded the last by their mid 20's or so...because there was a steady stream of top flight athletes drawn from a gigantic talent pool. And that kept happening until we hit right around the talent pool built from the children born around 1990 and beyond. Their parents didn't give a damn about tennis, and their society didn't give a damn about tennis, so the alphas didn't find their way into the sport any more. Roger, Rafa, and Novak aren't historically great as talents. But they're the last group culled from the children of the tennis boom. They're world class athletes playing against a tour that's comprised of nothing but less talented club kids. They're essentially pros playing against amateurs. They don't stand out, talent-wise, compared to anyone who came before them. But they absolutely do compared to everyone who's come after.

And that shouldn't surprise anyone. It's just a numbers game."