With Wimbledon in the air, Tim Thornborough talks to Kent Kinnear - a professional tennis player on 'the tour'.
In England we tend to associate tennis with the couple of weeks at the end of June when Wimbledon is transformed into the shrine of a sport invented over 100 ago by Major Digby Clopton and originally sold as Spairistike - a polite game to play on the lawn with friends on a summer afternoon. Little did he realise that over 100 years later, his game would grow into a vast industry that tours the world, commands megabuck salaries for its leading players and turns them into sporting icons.
'The Tour' as it is known, is a set of competitions running continuously for 48 weeks of the year. Tennis professionals - many of whom we will never have heard, travel round the globe to qualify and win prize money from them. To keep this vast army of players on the move, together with their coaches, trainers and other hangers on, means that prize money is won by players going out in the first round, and sometimes in the qualifying rounds as well. Over 1,000 tennis players go with the tour, hoping to qualify for the actual competition, but often making only enough money to cover their expenses.
Home cooking
During Wimbledon fortnight, some of the Christian tennis players live with members of a local church, and I met Kent Kinnear, an American, to discover what life is like on the tour. Kent describes himself as a 'hard serve and volley' player with an attacking style. Now approaching 30, he is in the twilight of his playing career. At Wimbledon, he no longer competes in the singles tournament, but makes his money playing doubles. Last year he got through to the ??th round, and hopes to do better this time.
Special pressures
'As you can imagine, living away from home for 48 weeks of the year creates its own special kinds of pressure,' said Kent. 'I no longer do the full stretch. I pick my tournaments, so that I can spend more time at home in the USA - but living in hotels and on the move is quite isolating. I have a great church and family back home, but I don't get much opportunity to spend time with them.' Kent warmed up as a Christian at college, where he developed his tennis skills as a college player, and was pretty soon catapulted into the professional tour at the age of 21. 'The tragedy of many of the younger players, who become stars as teenagers, is that they have no real social life of their own - all they know is tennis, touring and temporary housing. They have no appreciation of what is normality.' With this kind of background it is almost inevitable that the tennis profession sees perhaps more than its fair share of blow-outs. 'Witness Jennifer Capriati busted for drugs at the age of 18, and the many child stars who have hit the doldrums after a brief and meteoric career', said Kent.
'That's one of the reasons I love coming to Wimbledon and staying with a family here - it reminds you what is normal again.'
Idol worship?
Being on the move creates its fair share of spiritual hardship too. 'One of the problems with the Christian public is that they love to have people who are at the top of a profession to show off with' Kent said. 'So when a sports star comes out as a Christian, they get put on a pedestal, and that's often quite a hard thing to handle. Worse than that, the whole thing turns sour when things go wrong. That happened with Roscoe Tanner, and to a certain extent more recently with Andre Agassi. Fortunately, we've got some guys who are wonderful, consistent Christians who've been able to keep going through all the success and the failure - people like Michael Chang and Ken Rosewall.
Fellowship on the move is still quite hard to come by, however. 'Country groups kind of stick together: in the restaurant, there'll be a group of Swedes eating over there, and a pile of Americans over here, and the Germans on a table over there. And often, as soon as they're out or have failed to qualify, people move on to the next thing, or to an alternative tournament somewhere else, so it's really difficult to keep anything consistent going as far as fellowship is concerned. For a time in the 1980s, a group of players got together and hired a full-time pastor Fritz to come on the tour with us. He organised regular Bible studies and meetings for the Christians, did some evangelism and helped us along one-to-one, but sadly that came to an end.'
Evangelism is tough among tour people: 'Everyone is just so focussed - on tennis and making money. There are a lot of guys who are absorbed in the rankings, and keep an eye on the earnings league - to see who's making more than anyone else. Talking about Christianity it seems like you're talking to a brick wall sometimes.'
