Sport Marketing and Communication Research Papers (original) (raw)

Anyone for tennis? It’s that time of year again when our favourite racket sport suddenly re-emerges as a fashionable and engaging spectacle. While other sports, notably the popular North American team-games of football, basketball, hockey, and baseball, alongside their equivalents in Britain, notably soccer, rugby union, rugby league, and county cricket, have entire seasons that typically reach their climax in exciting post-season playoffs, championships and cups, tennis rather oddly seems to peak mid-way through its season and, again rather oddly, at a tournament played on an out-dated surface, and in a nation with very little elite-level success to speak of over the last eighty or so years. Naturally, of course, I am speaking about Wimbledon and about England, not Britain. “British” fans happily cling to whatever successes they can muster. Before the First World War, the British used to claim Australia’s or indeed any of our extended (crucially, white) colonial “partners’” victories as their own, while now they can more conveniently include Andy Murray’s recent successes. However, the fact remains that Wimbledon is very English and Andy Murray is very Scottish, and in the light of the recent referendum on British membership of the European Union and the subsequent likelihood of a second, but this time successful, referendum on Scottish independence, Murray’s British identity will come under intense scrutiny, and not for the first time. As of right now, however, very few people in the British tennis scene, at Wimbledon or inside the headquarters of the Lawn Tennis Association in leafy west-London will mention his Scottish identity, particularly when he is winning. Consider also the fact that this very English tournament gives its entire annual profits – typically between £25 and 30 million – to the LTA for the development of tennis across Britain, and therein lays an interesting dichotomy. This English-British distinction is just one of the key confusions, or indeed contradictions, that makes Wimbledon so fascinating for sports fans and historians alike. There are others.