World Team Tennis: Antidote for sports violence

The fatal beating of a Phillies fan after Saturday night's game— apparently over a spilled cup of beer— prompted local journalists to trot out the customary indictments against Philadelphia sports fans.

"You know the highlights," the Inquirer's Phil Sheridan reminded his readers: "Booing Santa, cheering Michael Irvin's apparent paralysis, a stadium that required its own courtroom to handle the volume of arrests for drunken hooliganism."

The exception is World Team Tennis. This organization is now in its third decade, and the Philadelphia Freedoms are one of its longest-running franchises. Of all sports, none is more focused on pure entertainment and the joy of sport for its own sake. At the Freedoms Stadium, adjoining the King of Prussia shopping center, aggressive competitiveness is nowhere to be found. Crowds of about 3,000 each night enjoy themselves without much thought as to who wins or loses.

Each evening is preceded by the coaching of young players, aged about six to 12, by professional players like Anna Kournikova. Kids' matches take place just outside the arena, on part of the mall's parking lot. At the halftime intermission, stars like Andre Agassi and Venus and Serena Williams function as masters-of-ceremony for auctions of collectibles. (Agassi signed a Freedoms T-shirt and one of his racquets, and they went for a bid of $5,000 to Abington Hospital, the Freedom's designated charity for this season.)

Agassi gets tired

Each match consists of five "sets," or mini-contests: men's singles, women's singles, men's doubles, women's doubles and mixed doubles. The biggest star on each team usually participates in two doubles matches and a singles in one night. This heavy load pleases the patrons, many of whom come to see the celebrities. But may exhaust some of the older stars. Andre Agassi looked great as he and his teammate Nathan Healey won a doubles set, but he seemed tired as he lost a singles set afterwards.

The crowd didn't mind. Regardless of the outcome or Agassi's physical condition, it was a treat to see this all-time star in action. Whether Agassi slammed an ace or hit one into the net, the crowd cheered him. This was the case when John McEnroe came to King of Prussia as a member of the New York Sportimes, or Martina Navratilova with her Boston Lobsters.

An innovative scoring system

World Team Tennis uses an innovative scoring system that inadvertently helps to minimize partisanship. Unlike Wimbledon or Forest Hills, there's no progression of love, 15, 30, 40 and game. Instead, each successful shot is one point and the first player to get four points wins a game. Then the first to reach five games wins the set. In the rest of the tennis world, a winner of a set has to go on to play anywhere from two to four more sets in order to finish the match. In WTT, each new set has a different line-up of players.

The scoring is cumulative, which means it's easy to lose track of who's ahead in a given match-up. If Philadelphia wins the opening doubles set by, say, 5 games to 2, and then wins a women's singles by 5 to 1, Philadelphia would come into the next set leading by a score of 10 to 3. In such a case, even if someone as famous as McEnroe were competing against Agassi, the outcome of their match-up would lack significance because one team was already so far ahead. And an out-of-bounds call by a lineman that cost McEnroe a point would hardly be cause for anyone"“ even the notoriously hotheaded McEnroe"“ to get upset.

Navratilova at 57

Each of the league's teams boasts at least one famous player, and Philadelphia has two: Agassi, who retired from tournaments two years ago, and Venus Williams, one of the top two female stars of our time. (her sister Serena, who plays for St. Louis, is the other). They play alongside younger players from the Philadelphia area like Nathan Healey (originally from Australia), Lisa Raymond and Madison Keys, who's only 14 years old and therefore unable to compete in major tournaments, but who recently appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Martina Navratilova at age 57 and John McEnroe at 50 are the oldest WTT competitors. Other celebrity stars like the Williams sisters and the Belgian Kim Clijsters (who plays for St. Louis) are still in their 20s.

Why they persist

You might wonder why celebrities have come out of retirement to play in second-tier WTT towns like King of Prussia, Kansas City, Sacramento and Newport Beach. The salaries aren't high (players derive greater income from product endorsements). They appear to do it as a way of keeping their hand in the game as well as a form of public service. Serena Williams told my son that she likes to play in smaller venues where the residents don't normally see tennis stars. Agassi and others say that they participate as a favor to Billie Jean King, who organized the league and who emphasizes the education of kids.

At halftime last Monday night, King volleyed with a group of teenagers. A few weeks earlier, the glamorous Kournikova spent a half hour instructing six-year-olds on the main court.

Needless to add, WTT fans are different than those you see at other sports. No rabid partisanship as at Phillies games, none of the rowdiness of Eagles and Flyers crowds. But this isn't a hushed assemblage, either. We're not at a country club. People do cheer and applaud— but strictly in a good-natured way.