Tennis courts new fans

Five years ago, Fan Wei was brought by his parents to the Beijing Tennis Center to watch the inaugural China Open.

The then eight-year-old was so enchanted by the game that he jostled with other fans at the player's entrance in the hope of getting a glimpse or even an autograph from one of the world's elite practitioners of the sport.

To his delight he saw the Thai player Paradorn Srichaphan but, even though he failed to attract the attention of the former world top 10 player, the day's experience was enough to get him hooked and he took up the racquet with relish.

Now the 13-year-old has grown into a 5ft 9ins, 70-kilogram skillful amateur. Outside the classroom he spends as much time as possible on the tennis court with his coaches and has made a name for himself by finishing within the top five at a competition for Beijing primary and secondary school students.

"I love tennis more than anything else," the appropriately named Fan said. "I have no intention of becoming a professional tennis player in the future but I enjoy playing it because I can have fun and make a lot of friends."

Fan is one of millions of tennis lovers to have emerged in the past five years in what has become a golden era for tennis in China which began with the gold medal won by women's doubles Li Ting and Sun Tiantian at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

What was once considered a pastime for the privileged has now become a sport everyone can enjoy as participant or spectator.

American sports marketing veteran Tom McCarthy sees scope for even bigger growth for the sport in China where the economy is in a better position than elsewhere.

McCarthy, CEO of Beijing International Group, a sports promoting company focusing on tennis in China, once promoted other sports in China in which the US excels, including basketball and baseball.

China now has two tennis Olympic medals - the gold from Athens 2004 and a bronze from the Beijing Games last year - and a world top-20 player (Zheng Jie is likely to reach number 15 in the world rankings shortly). The nation also hosts both the highly-respected Association of Tennis Professionals World Tour and the World Tennis Association tournaments, with Beijing hosting the China Open with its $6.6 million prize pot and Shanghai hosting the Shanghai Masters, which offers $4.5 million in prizes.

At the grassroots level, the state government declared tennis a mandatory sport in schools in 2007, putting it alongside basketball, soccer and table tennis.

"There is now the recognition that tennis isn't just for the rich but for everyone," McCarthy said.

"Many more people are exposed to tennis on a daily basis. The broad base began to expand naturally and people began to look at tennis as a healthy and a lifetime sport. Then you added the success of the national team over the last three years and alongside that came commercial promotions.

"This is a very good mixture with it all happening at the same time, not over 20 years but in less than six years, which does not happen often."

The Chinese Tennis Association (CTA) claims tennis is one of the country's top five most popular sports with 8.12 million involved in the game now. According to a public survey last year, more than half of the population of the large and medium-sized cities in China rate tennis as the sport they would most like to learn.

The national tennis stars, in particular the internationally acclaimed women's players, became national heroes. In the Forbes China celebrity top 100 list released in March, 2008 Wimbledon semi-finalist Zheng Jie and current world number 29 Li Na were placed 58th and 71st respectively and are the sixth and seventh highest-ranked athletes in China.

"Tennis never looked so good," said CTA vice president Sun Jinfang.

However, such "exuberance" could be deceiving, according to Xu Yang, owner of two tennis clubs in Beijing and the manager of Beijing Deep Sports Development Company. He considers the tennis industry to be still very immature in China.

"The tennis industry is definitely no bigger than those of the table tennis or badminton industries in China, no matter how good the sport looks right now," he said.

Xu, whose company has organized a nationwide annual tennis tournament for amateurs, thought it is more valuable to let tennis touch people like the young Fan rather than focusing on the national players, who have been supported by the state since their childhood.

"Only when tennis reaches 'ordinary people' does the industry follow," he said.

McCarthy agreed, although he has achieved marketing success at the national level, signing big sponsorship deals with companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Dunlop and Nike for the national squad and establishing the China Grand Prix, the nation's richest domestic tennis tournament with a prize of 1 million yuan ($146,500).

"There's still a lot of groundwork to do," he said. "Our challenge is to design a good program that connects to people in their daily life."

(China Daily 05/18/2009 page7)