On Frozen Blog

You might ask, what business is it of a hockey blog to cover a team tennis match? I might reply, forgive me for wanting to chronicle . . . a legend!

Legends are forged both by championship mettle and star-crossed curses. Greg Norman is a legend more for his losing than his winning. And so it is with our sensational starlet from SovetskyLand. So there.

It is an interesting time — some would say fortuitous — to be on the tennis beat. Tennis pro Ashley Harkleroad is in the news, nude. I go on a new beat and on day one I discover that the young, fit, and hard-bodied with rackets in their hands are running around in the buff.

Tennis, anyone?

Harkleroad’s reputed inspiration for extreme exposure in the August Playboy struck me as peculiar: it arrived in tandem with her recovery from an ovarian cyst procedure. How many sinus infections lead to new nose jobs?

She is the first professional tennis player to appear in Playboy, birthday suited. The only other pro athlete likewise unlayered there was swimmer Amanda Beard. For some reason I really wish puck daddy had been around when Ms. Beard took her dip in Playboy’s warmer waters. As it is, I’m saving a seat for him at tomorrow’s Anna K presser.

But who is Ashley Harkleroad? Good question. She’s not in the top 10 rankings of women’s professional tennis; in fact, she’s not in the top 50. Like Anna Kournikova, she made a precocious if palpitating first impression on court: her appearance at the 2001 U.S. Open, in extra tight shorts and a midriff-baring top, is said to have “paralyzed the ball boys.”

Tennis, anyone?

Actually, I don’t feel wholly alien to the endeavor of entering tennis journalism. Around the time I was 15, I thought rather seriously of authoring a coffee table book worshipping Canadian tennis star Carling Bassett, of the Carling O’Keefe brewery family. A hottie Canuck who’d never have to pay for our beers.

Tennis, anyone?

Anyway, Harkleroad, at the onset of this decade, was marketed-hyped as “the next Anna,” and like Anna, she hasn’t won much. She’s 23, and in tennis years — particularly on the women’s side — that’s getting up there if you haven’t won a tournament. It may be with this competitive sunset settling in that Harkleroad devined the inspiration to go streaking about the tennis court.

What if OnFrozenBlog morphed in summers into, say . . . OntheBaselinewithBabes?

A child of the ’70s, I vividly recall the “boom” tennis experienced then. In greater Washington, as in many parts of the country, recreational tennis courts were jammed, day in and day out. That’s hard to fathom today for anyone under 30, looking out over the vast empty fenced-in courts of today, but it’s positively true. It was a surreal time, with anecdotes of fights breaking out among tennis moms over access to courts.

So tennis knew this golden moment in America, and then, without rhyme or reason, it busted. To the point where today it’s all about (exposed, highlighted) busts. To this day I’m not sure why, and I’ve never read an attempt to explain it. Suddenly, everybody just started playing golf, clogging the courses and emptying out the courts. And it’s been that way for two-plus decades.

Anna Kournikova, however, seemed to be the helium for tennis’ flaccid air balloon. But she never ascended into the clouds of acclaim . . . for her play.

I’ve yet to hear anyone in tennis’ leadership articulate, in the mainstream press, a sense of what kind of conditions are needed to replicate the ’70s tennis boom. It happened once; is it the case that it can never happen again? If so, why?

It is money? Are other pro sports so ludicrously well-heeled by TV and sponsors that kids won’t pick up a racket? That seems too cynical a theory.

But who today in the hierarchy of American tennis is working on a Manhattan Project to revitalize tennis to something approaching its glory of three decades ago? Is anyone?

Or, is the sport’s leadership altogether passive and content to pimp out the sport’s popularity to the pinups of the moment?

(Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

(See you at “Guy’s Night Out” Wednesday.)