When Will Tennis Stop Awarding Points Like Donkey Kong Scores?
As of Monday, 2,000 points are up for grabs at this year’s U.S. Open.
For the uninitiated, 2,000 points are what the winner of the Flushing Meadows tournament gets added to their overall points that determine each player’s rank. The player with the most points will be ranked No. 1. The player with the second-most points, No. 2 and so-on. Really, it works the same way a professional sports team accumulates wins and losses (and ties if you’re one of the lame sports) over the course of a season.
But imagine if football awarded 1,000 points for every win, 550 points for every loss and 100 points for each tie? At some point, people would become curious why the numbers were set so ridiculously high. This is a big problem with tennis. Tennis developed a system that awards anywhere between 10 to 2,000 points for each tournament (in over 40 tournaments a year), yet has not provided the casual tennis fan any reason to know or care about these points.
So now imagine that your favorite football team not only earned 1,000 points for a win, but the NFL failed to make you care about it one way or the other. Every once in a while, you’d just be alerted that your team was ranked third in its division. It would occasionally mingle in the vague notion that in a few weeks, depending on how things shake out, your team could be ranked higher (maybe) … and now you see why tennis’ methods for churning up excitement without context has really harmed the sport.
Video games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders and Q*Bert made it so each tiny success from a player yielded oddly high amounts of points. Why? Well, because 3 million points sounds way more awesome than a dozen…
In sports however, stupidly high numbers are a bad thing. Yes, fans want high scoring games. A 3-0 football game, 2-1 baseball game, 1-0 soccer game and 75-65 basketball game are all considered boring, but creating a system in which each of those scores are in the thousands will not bring in more fans. Casual fans are scared by large numbers. Baseball has steadily been declining in popularity since the 1960s, while, say, football has grown immensely. One of the reasons for this? There aren’t 162 football games per season. A fan only has to pay attention for three hours once a week to see their favorite team perform. If a baseball fan puts in three hours a week to his team, it means he missed five other games.
For many people, investing in every game of a season is too much to ask in baseball and just perfect in football. The number of tennis tournaments aren’t really the problem here, but the collective meaning of those tournaments over an entire season is.
Below is a basic graph of how ranking points are awarded in tennis:
Click pic to embiggen
Fans need to know what they’re rooting for and what certain accomplishments mean for the players. Most Cardinals fans know how far in first place the team is. Most Knicks fans know how many games out of the playoff picture they are. But if you’re rooting for Rafael Nadal to do well in the Open this year, a shockingly small number of fans will know a) what his current point total is (9,025) b) the number of points he earned at this tournament last year (450) c) how far behind No. 2 Andy Murray he is (585 points) d) How far Murray got in the U.S. Open last year (he earned 750 points) and e) what needs to happen in order for Rafa to slide into the No. 2 ranking again.
It’s all about context. Fans want and need at least a little of it to maintain an interest in the sport.
Have you ever watched a game you’re unfamiliar with (let’s say cricket, for example)? Are the two teams you’re watching any good? Does the fact that one team is beating the other by 90 runs mean it’s a blowout, or is that normal?
Murray has a 585 point lead on Nadal. This means that if Murray makes it to the final four, Nadal can’t surpass him no matter what.
There. The U.S. Open just get a little more exciting.
Tennis has done an awful job in the last six or eight years transitioning from enticing the old tennis fans to enticing the new ones and it shows in the sport’s dwindling fan interest and even more dwindling depth of competition. If children aren’t watching and investing in tennis now, they won’t grow up to play the game professionally in a decade. (Oh, who am I kidding? If they’re old enough to watch TV, they’re old enough to turn pro, like, next year.)
The scoring system can stay the same (if it must, though it’s not recommended), but it needs simplification.
If I want to run up big numbers, I’ll go jump some barrels in Donkey Kong. And unless tennis figures out how to make the game more fan-friendly all season long, it won’t be long before I decide to jump those barrels instead of watching tennis.
Photo courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via Getty
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