Business: Net Loss

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The tennis boom fades

Only five years ago, tennis was booming. Top players were getting seven-figure contracts to play with pro teams, big companies were fighting to sponsor tournaments, and TV networks were broadcasting even routine matches. On the amateur level, a game that could claim just 14 million adult regular players in 1972 had by 1976 some 26 million participants eager to invest in such paraphernalia as fluorescent balls, designer outfits, $30 shoes and $62 carbon steel racquets. Now the game has gone soft, at least as a business.

Team tennis is dead, and the networks have sharply cut their coverage of matches. Philip Morris no longer has its Virginia Slims circuit, once the keystone of the women's tour. Fully one-third of last year's corporate sponsors for the U.S. Open, which is held every September in New York City, have failed to renew their pledges. Most telling of all, sales of racquets, which peaked at $184 million in 1976, skidded to $137 million last year and are expected to fall another 30% this year. Wilson Sporting Goods, the PepsiCo subsidiary that introduced the first steel racquet in 1967, has been losing money and is widely rumored to be up for sale.

Joe Fenton, a marketing vice-president at AMF/Head division, explains that the game is "solidifying its base among dedicated tennis players—people who take to the sport as a sport, not as a fashion." Many of those who tried tennis during the boom times but found it tough to master have moved on to jogging or simpler racquet sports. In fact, some of the nation's 11,000 indoor tennis facilities, which cost about $165,000 a court to build, have converted their underused courts to racquetball. It is a tennis-like game that employs a bigger racquet and a slower ball and, its promoters hope, may be more easily mastered by the nation's millions of would-be Everts and Borgs.