Late in January, thousands of people, masked and also audaciously not masked, shuffled into Adelaide’s Memorial Drive Park to enjoy once again the feeling of jostling, and of being jostled, in service of what they thought was the reawakening of professional tennis after a yearlong pandemic lockdown. They were, in truth, witnessing—and participating in—the end of a grand experiment.
The return to in-person spectating is, I suppose, a victory of sorts, and as such this nose-thumb to the coronavirus should be celebrated. But amid the joyful clamor at what we’re regaining, we should probably take note of what we’re giving up: the miracle of crowd-free tennis.
The pandemic and other social ills have rendered unignorable a daunting menu of inequities in this world. The arc of the moral universe lately looks to be a crazy straw. But—and I hate to look for silver linings when everything is just so awful—crowdless arenas have removed some of the imbalance in this sport, for fans and players alike.
To wit: Amid paroxysms of social upheaval and strict pandemic measures, the best place in the world from which to watch professional tennis has been my sofa. My sofa doesn’t generally come out ahead in your best-of contests, but this year, running mostly unopposed, it has emerged the low-slung sectional victor. Thanks to SARS-CoV-2, there’s been no better place to watch tennis, because there’s been no other place to watch tennis. While that took care of any envy I would normally feel upon suddenly seeing someone I know on TV, sitting courtside in, say, Monaco, in a really great hat, my glee at the spectre of empty stadia wasn’t a result of schadenfreude, but rather camaraderie. We were all at home, on our sofas, watching the same matches from the same angles. Even the TV commentators. Even the guy who sunbakes at the railing in Indian Wells, shirtless, had to desiccate somewhere else.
It’s said that the best way to value something is to visualize its absence. Covid did us one better by eliminating the part where we have to visualize. Each of us has enjoyed what amounts to a front-row seat for some thing no one’s ever seen: professional tennis in a State of Nature. Tennis stripped bare, as it might have been before the contract between player and fan added performance and homage to what is essentially just a physical contest between two superathletes. “You perform for me, and I’ll clap for you,” goes the implicit agreement. “I’ll reserve my claps for you only, and by their omission I will help demoralize your opponent, unless that opponent is Daniil Medvedev, who for whatever reason loves an unsympathetic crowd. You must also try to fling a sweaty wristband at me.”
For this year, superstars would have to play like they’re Nobody Special, in it for the points, the pay, and the play, but not the plaudits. When a top player with a rabid fanbase played a lower seed, they’d both just have to play the damned match in silence to see who was better. And we got to watch. For basically free.
Released from the bonds of performance, tennis could be its essential self, whatever that was going to mean. It was a golden opportunity to test whether the sport unscaffolded would follow a more Thomas Hobbes-y pattern, or more of a Jean-Jacques Rousseauian vibe. I’ll leave you to philosophize on humanity’s essential bent, but I’d argue that tennis, at least, falls squarely into groupe Rousseau.
Hobbes, who harbored low expectations of humankind at its foundations, might be shocked to see that humanity—er, tennis—without the player-fan contract was just fine, thank you very much. Rousseau, ever the optimist, would be edified to learn that the sport just spent a year proving its innate ability to function in a vacuum: There was great tennis at the US Open, even with no one there to watch it.
At the French, where only 1,000 daily visitors were allowed, the brilliance of Rafael Nadal’s 20th Grand Slam title was undimmed; Iga Swiatek’s Cinderella story was no less compelling. And for the first time in the Open Era, both Roland-Garros singles winners blew through the tournament without dropping a set. That’s amazing; no asterisks necessary.
For those of us at home, which of course was practically all of us, the tension that comes with being a housebound fan was mostly gone. In an empty stadium, there are no racist boos. No iffy line judges, no challenges, no outrage. No laughter rumbling through the crowd that we at home couldn’t understand because you just had to be there. No unbroken swathes of white spectators at certain tournaments, relieving us of the self-appointed task of counting the persons of color in the stands, alarmed by the enduring all-whiteness of some parts of tennis, and then worrying that that makes us racist.
All year, we could be reasonably certain that the camera wouldn’t pan to an attractive woman and sit there long enough for the panning, and the lingering, to be an unsavory statement of preference by the camera operator, or the producer, or both. Gone was the discomfort of watching a guy in a player’s entourage as his finger dances perilously close to his nostril. That woman was sitting at home eating ice cream in her sweats like the rest of us. There was a mask running interference between nostril and finger. We could all, at long last, just focus on the artistry on display, stress-free.
Those stressors returned with the crowds during last month’s Australian Open: boorish fans, allowed back into Melbourne Park after an emergency mid-tournament lockdown, hooted and whistled as underdogs served, and booed loudly at the concept of—get this—Covid vaccines. It’s a compelling argument for Rousseau and for an extension of crowdless tennis until we can get a handle on what it all means.
Our eagerness to reconstitute the mob, to file back into tennis complexes everywhere and resume the business of group clapping, with no pause to reflect on what we witnessed, is a direct measure of our pandemic-earned enlightenment. We possess a unique opportunity—nay, responsibility—to note what was good about crowdlessness (see above), and what was bad (fake crowd noise comes to mind, as well as bizarre victory homages to empty seats). If we fail to mark this moment—to declare: We saw what happens when the performance part of tennis is gone, and what was left was better than we thought—our shared experience will simply have been nasty, brutish, and short, which incidentally also describes my sofa.
This article originally appeared in Issue no. 16.
Wendy Laird is a humorist who lives and breathes tennis in Seattle. She's the author of The Road Less Graveled and is working on oh, like, four other books.
