Kastles Fall to Aces, Sink to 0-4
Most of the excitement, such as it was, about last night's poorly-attended match between the Washington Kastles and St. Louis Aces vanished when the main attraction, former star Anna Kournikova, was sidelined by a wrist injury. Or, at least, that would be true if the WTT was really about tennis, which it is not. Party tennis is right: the tour is obviously more entertainment than sport, focused on giving away T-shirts and Chipotle gift certificates and other such fun. Fans looking for an authentic tennis experience are advised, as always, to wait until next month's Legg Mason Classic.
In any case, all Kournikova really had to do was show up -- which she did -- although she spent the entire evening in her black Aces warm-up suit. Kournikova, who went into semi-retirement from the pro game several years ago because of injuries and to market her other (considerable) assets, was never a truly great player. Although she may have become one in time, her celebrity vastly outpaced the medium of tennis. But there she was at the edge of the court, chewing gum, tossing balls to her teammates during warm-up, even sitting on the Kastles bench to chat with her team's opponents. At one point, in an interview about what she liked about WTT, Kournikova responded with the boilerplate answer about seeing all five kinds of tennis matches in the space of three hours. She then added -- apparently forgetting that the question came from a child interviewer -- "And you get drunk, right?" Nice.
The matches were, in comparison to the Anna-rama, fairly unremarkable. The Kastles managed to squeak out a win in the mixed doubles, 5-4; but even without Kournikova the Aces dominated in women's doubles (5-2). Playing without their star, Serena Williams, the Kastles went with Olga Puchkova for the women's singles match. In spite of a serving meltdown midgame, Puchkova defeated Ashley Weinhold, 5-2. Scott Oudsema left his "boom boom" at home, serving so many faults that an exasperated fan at one point yelled out, "Over the net!" In the men's singles match, the Aces' Mislav Hizak rolled over Oudsema, 5-0, and Tripp Phillips and Hizak dispatched Oudsema and his teammate, Leander Paes, in the final men's doubles match, forcing the Kastles to an overall 21-15 loss, their fourth consecutive to open the season.
The lesson learned from this experience is that a Kastles game without at least one star player makes for a fairly uneventful evening. WTT may be an experiment doomed to failure, because tennis, no matter how you tweak the rules, is unlikely to have the speed and appeal of a major team sport. Most people who buy tickets (or at least those who did last night) to a WTT match are not much into the cheering or other crowd-riling tactics of the organizers without some kind of star power to pull it all together: the announcers became more and more desperate in their appeals to "bring it on" as the evening wore on. The occasional lonely cheer of the Kastles slogan ("Refuse to lose!") seemed to be mostly for comic effect. That said, the audience was more than content to watch each point quietly and applaud politely for good play -- which seems an awful lot like real tennis to this writer, just, you know, without the real tennis. The rules -- in an attempt to make the game faster -- eliminate most of what makes tennis exciting and a sport of athletic endurance. Perhaps the one redeemable aspect: when the occasional long volley or hotly contested final point actually happened, it did a fine job of reminding you why you liked tennis in the first place.