Curious Fish

When Donal Young was 15, he was hailed as the hope of U.S. tennis. He was the youngest kid to win a junior Grand Slam tournament ever, while at the same time being the world’s top ranked junior. Now, at 18, Donald Young is far from a star. He is playing some low-level tournaments, and having major difficulties winning anything. This article in the New York Times magazine explains in fairly good detail how this ‘prodigy’ is struggling to get by.

When I was 14, I played tennis everyday in a fairly run-down tennis club in Tirana, Albania’s biggest tennis club with 5 or 6 concrete courts. I was on and off Albania’s junior champion for a few years, and played in European tournaments for a few years. After reading Young’s difficult path, I am realizing it was a blessing that I wasn’t that good, especially compared to other European players. I did not have a chance to imagine having a career in tennis. Those kids that were better probably did, and they’re far from Daniel Young.

In the realm of professional sports, tennis is among the most expensive. It takes training, on and off the court, coaches, equipment (I used to tear shoes’ soles every other month) and in the “pro” circuit, a heavy budget to cover travel and tournament expenses. And even if you are good, the earnings in the early stages of the pro circuit are meager. Dan Young, once America’s future, is now playing tournaments worth about $7000. That’s barely enough to cover that one week’s expenses, if Young wins that tournament. Anything else, is negligible.

Which leads to one of the most interesting points of the article: compared to other sports, tennis is too expensive and too cheap in rewarding players. Only the top 100 do well (and among those, the top 10 are far from the rest). I.e. in basketball, a mediocre player makes above $1 million a year. In tennis, the equivalent is most certainly bankrupt.

The reason for this is, of course, the invisible hand of the market. Basketball teams are franchises, i.e. solid business enterprises. Tennis players aren’t.

On the other hand, though, there is something to say about star junior players: they rarely make it big. Most tennis superstars somehow skip that stage: they either don’t play in the junior league, or they do fairly poorly in it. But that’s another story.