Marketing can make a mockery of performance

It is many years now since John McEnroe was skewered by the elegant prose of Red Smith, late of this life and the New York Times, who is fondly remembered here and in many other quarters as the most distinguished of American sportswriters. Appalled by defiling outbursts of boorish behaviour, Smith wrote that Wimbledon was a courtly stage on which McEnroe could demonstrate how ugly an American could be.

Expanding on this touchy theme, Smith went on to berate the tennis authorities for conceding to the dubious notion that advances in commercial activity made it impossible to discipline the game for an audience that had its mind more on the game than the prize-money.

Anarchy on the tennis court has been kept at bay, but one wonders how Smith would have viewed circumstances that make it possible for Anna Kournikova to achieve super-star status without winning a major tournament and when the injury that forced her to withdraw from next week's Wimbledon's Championships provides convenient protection from the distinct possibility that she would not have lingered long in our presence.

Anyone old enough to read this has lived long enough to have witnessed enormous growth in the popularity of sport and realise that the impulse to take up a game today is very often the impulse to earn millions. Any right-thinking person is bound to applaud the fact that games can now provide a hugely profitable career, and the the best games players should be considered like star entertainers in other fields and be paid accordingly.

But Kournikova's rise to fame tells us something about modern sport that would have prompted Smith to reach for the vitriol.

That Kournikova is pictured more often than players who could probably beat her with their shoelaces tied together may suggest that newspaper executives and television producers have taken leave of their senses, when in fact they are responding to the knowledge that fans have been conditioned to expect more from sport than past generations expected.

Kournikova is not a tennis super-star, but a supermodel of the tennis court. When I recently mentioned this to a fellow veteran he pulled me up short.

"Hold on a moment," he said. 'Things have changed but you should know by now there isn't much that is new. How about Gussie Moran?"

A player of modest talents, "Gorgeous" Gussie, as she was known, became famous many years ago at Wimbledon for immodestly flashing her frilly knickers. Difference was that she crossed our vision before arguments about sport were drowned out by the roar of the cash register.

In time, today's debates may straighten themselves out and people will come to take up one of two positions about sport, which won't necessarily be closer to the truth because they have been oversimplified.

Anyway, in all sorts of conspicuous ways, sport has moved steadily away from the position it once occupied in the public consciousness. This has been largely due to the marketing techniques from which Kournikova so clearly benefits. Thus more tosh is spoken and written about sport than ever before, mainly by people who never get closer to games than a seat in the grandstand.

It doesn't take the clearest of eyes to see that marketing can damagingly intrude on performance. Writing in our Sunday sister last week, John Lloyd referred to tennis players suffering serious lapses in form because the the equipment they are handsomely paid to endorse isn't suitable. "Why sign an endorsement if you know that the item being sponsored isn't right for you?" he asked.

Before losing to Retief Goosen in a play-off for the US Open golf championship in Tulsa last week, Mark Brooks hadn't made the first three in a tour event since winning the PGA Championship five years ago. Brooks' game fell apart when he switched to a new club manufacturer. Other leading players have suffered from a similar decision.

Earlier this week, I came across a newspaper article attempting to explain why David Beckham had agreed to being pictured on the cover of a magazine looking as though he had been in a violent scuffle, face bloodied, jacket torn. "We provide icons like Beckham with cool, something their money can't buy," one of the magazine's executives said. "Cool" is a word my grandsons use whenever something appeals to them. Seems they speak Beckham's language.