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Cincinnati’s 102-year-old tennis tournament began as
the Cincinnati Open at the Avondale Athletic Club in
1899. Tennis fashions have changed a bit since then.
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Cincinnati is a tennis town. Yes, you heard right: a tennis town. We've been known as a fight town, thanks to champs like Ezzard Charles and Aaron Pryor. And we've been known for baseball, courtesy of Pete Rose and the Big Red Machine. But overshadowing those fleeting achievements is one of the longest-running and most prestigious international tennis tournaments in the world, what's now called the Tennis Masters Series Cincinnati.
Competitors from all over the world are about to converge on this chili town for a week of heated head-to-head break points, frenetic volleying and acrobatic backhands. They're not looking for 40-love in all the wrong places: They're seeking set, game, match in this place, alternatively nicknamed Porkopolis or the Queen City of the West.
As director of communications for Tennis Masters Series Cincinnati and author of From Club Court to Center Court: The Evolution of Professional Tennis in Cincinnati, Phillip S. Smith illustrates, "People around the globe don't know anything about the Bengals or the Reds, but they know our tournament. So Cincinnati goes out to people around the world one week per year. It's the only regularly scheduled international sporting event in the entire city."
It all started when an elite businessman from Mount Auburn named John Shillito went on vacation to Narragansett Pier in Rhode Island in 1878. He saw a game in which people smashed a little ball back and forth over a fish net with heavy wooden racquets. Intrigued by the sport, Shillito returned to Mount Auburn to fashion a court of similar dimensions in his backyard. This was the first tennis court in Cincinnati and the beginning of over 100 years of local tennis history.
From Shillito's backyard lawn fétes, tennis caught on very quickly in popularity. A mere two years later, the Cincinnati Tennis Club and the Avondale Athletic Club (where Xavier University is now) were founded. Mean-while, in the rest of the country, the demand and need for governance of the from-over-the-pond sport prompted the formation of the United State Tennis Association (USTA) in 1881. The U.S. National Championships were born in the same year.
In 1899, the Avondale Athletic Club, under the stewardship of the USTA, decided to create a tournament called the Cincinnati Open. The significance of the club's endeavor shouldn't be understated, because there were only two ways in which players could exhibit their talents and determination at the time: at the state and national levels. The formation of a regional tournament was exceedingly popular, so much so the event grew from the Cincinnati Open to the Tri-State Tennis Tournament. As Smith points out, the term "Tri-State" had a different meaning then from what it has now.
"That's not like Tri-State Roofing or Tri-State Pest Control. It really meant something," Smith says. "What it meant was in a time when the state titles were the most important in addition to the national title, this tournament carried with it the titles of three states. So it was a bigger deal. That's why you'll see, in the book, the newspaper saying this was the second-biggest tournament in the United States."
Not bad for a city famed mostly for its furniture-making and meat-packing expertise at the tail-end of the 19th century. Over the years, the event has found its home in various venues -- from the Avondale Athletic Club to the Hyde Park Tennis Club, from Indianapolis to the University of Cincinnati. It's also gone through a few different names -- from the National Clay Court Patriotic Championship to the ATP Championship. But since 1979, the tournament has resided in Mason in a facility built specifically for the week-long event.
But despite its popularity over the last 102 years (CBS will broadcast the tournament next week to 110 million homes worldwide, equaling an inestimable number of viewers) and internationally acclaimed talent that meets to play for the Tennis Masters Series Cincinnati Shield (the tournament trophy), tennis is still, some would say, largely considered a hoity-toity, frou-frou kind of game in the United States.
With sports commentators like NBC's Bud Collins flouting their crusty command of defunct French phrases, wearing checkered ties done up in a full Oxford knots and using the strawberries-and-cream imagery of Wimbledon as if it were superior to beer and brats, it's amazing Americans, especially Cincinnatians, find any appeal in the game at all. There's little to no Joe Average connection, unlike golf, whose descent from royal pastime to prole preoccupation over the years has only been accelerated by the likes of Tiger Woods, various other youthful golf figures and the meatball, no-respect etiquette of Rodney Dangerfield.
Smith offers theory No. 1: "I think it has to do with the fact that you can look like John Goodman and play golf. If you play tennis, you have to put down the beer and cigarettes. Golf is a lot less exertion and more mental."
But that concerns the physical demands of tennis. What about the fact that tennis -- by its very tallyho, pip-pip, hurrah nature -- is almost downright un-American?
Smith offers theory No. 2: "Americans -- and it's no secret -- are incredibly isolated," Smith says. "We are cut off from the rest of the world except for Canada and Mexico, and we don't have a lot of regard for either one of those countries as a whole.
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John McEnroe won the Cincinnati tournament title in
’81.
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"If it's not an American thing, it's not worth it," is how Smith portrays the attitude of many. "But tennis is one of the few real global sports. Even golf doesn't have that. Follow golf on the PGA tour. It goes from Florida to California to Arizona. In tennis, you go from England to Sweden to Newport, Rhode Island to Los Angeles. You're all over the map. And then it goes overseas, and it's gone from the American landscape for weeks on end.
"That's why Americans who can't think beyond their shores don't tie it all together," Smith continues. "But tennis is doing fine. It seems like ratings for every kind of sport are going down, whereas tennis is going up. But it's not one of those sports Americans think of right way. They think of it a few times a year. One of the things I think tennis has lost (as a global sport) is that Joe Six-Pack connection and the affection of intense fans like you see with football and baseball. It's a globe-trotting sport. You can't Americanize every country. Tennis is not an American sport; it belongs to the world."
THE TENNIS MASTERS SERIES starts Thursday in Mason and continues until Aug. 12.
