How Tiger Woods Crushed American Tennis

As Tiger Woods makes his 2012 debut on American soil this week, he is not surprisingly the center of attention. It is well documented how Tiger changed the sport of golf, but his impact on American sports extends beyond the golf course.

On the whole golf and tennis are both currently thriving, but these sports are in two very different places. Golf’s current excitement is based on the lack of a dominant force, and the fun that comes with watching who will step forward each week. Tennis, on the other hand, has been dominated by three all time greats who are playing at levels never seen before- Djokovic, Nadal and Federer have won 27 of the last 28 majors. However, American tennis (especially on the men's side) is beyond struggling. On February 1 there were only 8 American males in the Top 100 of the world rankings. This is a shockingly low number. What many people have missed when considering this rough patch in US Tennis is the enormous role that Tiger Woods has played.

The inescapable truth is that tennis and golf remain country club sports. As great a job as many organizations have done to introduce these sports to less privileged children, they are simply unable to provide the consistent access that is necessary to allow a player the chance to be great. Obviously this impacts the composition of the elite players. Think of how the landscape of the NFL would change if the majority of the US population had access to a football field once a week or possibly even once a month. The one group that has unlimited access to these facilities are members of country clubs.

Access issues are old news, but how does Tiger Woods fit into the tennis side of this equation? What Tiger did when he burst onto the scene about 16 years ago was make golf cool. This caused the kids running around the country club pools at that time (think early teens and younger) to ask their parents for golf rather than tennis lessons. Pre-Tiger, tennis was the game for the athletic kids and golf was a secondary consideration. Enter Tiger and every kid wanted to give golf a chance. Fast forward to 2012 and the Tiger influenced generation has reached its late twenties and early thirties. Players this age are starting to hold the mantle for American golf, but elite American players of this age are completely absent from professional tennis.

It would be easy to counter with the argument that we are not necessarily in a golden age for American golf. Someone could correctly point out that the top 4 ranked players in the world are European. Still, 9 of the Top 20 ranked players in the world are American. 6 of those players are younger than Tiger, and that does not even include Keegan Bradley (last year's PGA Championship winner) or Bill Haas (last year's Fed Ex Cup Winner). If born 10 years earlier, I bet Dustin Johnson would currently be hitting 140 mph serves rather than 325 yard drives.

So where does American tennis go from here? Much like Tiger cost tennis young players, he also cost the game young fans. This is a big reason why the Golf Channel is flourishing but the Tennis Channel has not been able to receive full national distribution. But tennis in the US is not lost and the US Tennis Open remains the most attended sporting event in the US. This leaves the sport in an interesting spot. Is this a blip on the radar for a sport that has been extremely popular for nearly a century? Or will tennis go the way of horse racing, where fans only tune in a couple of weekends a year?

There is also the possibility that a transcendent figure like Tiger Woods will come along in Tennis and in 2028 someone could write this same story about the struggles of American golf.