For the love of the game

Author’s note: Apologies for the late drop! I missed last week’s drop as I got knocked out after delivering a workshop and having days of really bad sleep. We’re back to our weekly drops this week—sorry about that! For April, I’m experimenting with Saturday drops starting with this week’s newsletter. Fridays haven’t been working out too well with my current schedule, so I’ll play a bit to see if Saturdays work better for me.

For the past few days, I have found myself returning to a sport that I once loved in childhood—tennis.

When I was a preteen, a classmate of mine told me he was going to try training at our school’s afternoon tennis classes, and he had an extra racket, so did I want to come with him? I said yes, and for the next few weeks I learned the basics of tennis.

When my parents realized I was at least half serious, they got me my own racket. The advantage of playing with my friend’s tennis racket for the first few weeks was that it was heavier than what I should have been playing with, which meant that by the time I started using my own racket, I developed a forehand that wasn’t too embarrassing. 

Tennis occupied the foreground of my mind once more when Filipina tennis player Alex Eala—a wildcard at the Miami Open—beat Grand Slam champions Madison Keys and Jelena Ostapenko on the way to a quarter-final with Iga Swiatek. I had only been reading sports news and I had not watched a match in a while, but when I found out that Alex Eala was going to be up against the world #2, I decided to stay up late and find the most reliable way to watch the match live. And for two hours, it’s as if I was 11 again, watching rallies. I stayed up till it was nearly 5 am and cheered, as a lot of people on Twitter did, when Eala secured a third upset over Swiatek, sending her to the semifinals versus Jessica Pegula, the world’s #4.

The difference between the Eala-Swiatek and the Eala-Pegula match was night and day. For the non-Filipinos in my email list, just a quick background: We are not a tennis country. Tennis is usually a sport available to people who have a lot of space and their own facilities, which usually are middle to upper-class Filipinos. So after Eala pulled off a third upset against Grand Slam champion Swiatek, a big media company decided to organize a livestream for the Eala-Pegula match, which is how I ended up watching a tennis match at 10 in the morning on a Friday. They provided special coverage featuring a tennis pro-turned-sports journalist and hundreds, if not thousands of Filipinos instantly got their tennis 101 education.

While Alex Eala ended up falling to Jessica Pegula, it was a hard-fought match that proved to be such a compelling watch, and the Filipino viewers got to see Alex Eala gain new fans because of how well she played in this particular tournament. Time will tell if tennis’ fanbase and audience will grow in the Philippines, but Alex Eala’s performance at the Miami Open certainly did get more than a few people curious about the sport.

This made me think about how we get curious.

How do you bring someone into a new thing or rekindle interest in something they’ve loved or spent time in previously?

I’ve come to see my curiosity as following threads and different roads. Sometimes, I have a pretty good idea of where it’s going or at least where I want it to go. Other times, the path I’m pursuing takes me by surprise. Sometimes, I just walk certain paths just to see what I might find on the other side—and there’s evidence to suggest that we do follow our curiosities for the sake of it.

Three factors that I think were critical to rekindling my interest in tennis involve what my high school English teacher would call news values—timeliness, prominence, and proximity.

Not only was there a Filipina player in the tournament (someone I could relate to), but she had already beaten two Grand Slam champions heading into her match with the World #2 (a feat that hadn’t been achieved in Philippine tennis), so that made want to find a way to watch her watch with Iga Swiatek.

It also worked out that all of this information came to me less than a day before the upcoming match. If it wasn’t on my feed, I might have missed it.

The availability of the information is also a huge factor.

I saw someone comment about how the Filipino media company that aired the Eala-Pegula match on YouTube also used to be a resource for sports that generally received less attention in the Philippines, like European football.

With professional sports leagues like the NFL and the NBA exploring streaming deals and professional wrestling juggernaut WWE moving to Netflix earlier this year, the availability of matches, tournaments, or games worldwide will be a factor in sports expanding to new markets and finding new fans. I knew my interest in tennis, European football, the X Games, and professional wrestling would not have been possible without cable, so sports leagues would need to figure out how to reach new audiences and give people an opportunity to fall in love with their sport.

Lastly, I think storytelling does play a huge role in piquing one’s interest. Alex Eala has been working hard as an athlete for years, and the framing of her Miami Open run as a Cinderella story—a wildcard entry who beat Grand Slam champions in succession—likely grabbed the attention of people, more so tennis fans. There were certainly tennis fans who weren’t familiar with her or her journey so far who are now tuning in to her career because of her performance and the media coverage.

People who may have only seen her name once or heard of her somewhere will now have more opportunities to watch her game and fall in love with her, especially now that she’s a top 75 player who will get opportunities to get into tournaments directly. I’m already starting to see people find old articles and even magazine covers of Alex Eala and people are now even talking about how eloquent she was at her post-match press conference. We might all be seeing a star being born.

Anybody whose work involves working with fandom would benefit from keeping in mind that to get new people into a sport, a movie, a game, a musician and so on—you need to give people as many chances as possible to fall in love with you.

It doesn’t even have to be an in-person thing—over the past year, I’ve become aware of cup sleeve events (where fans rent out cafés for idols to celebrate a birthday or a milestone, or even just to get together with fellow fans), fandoms organizing running clubs and interest groups, and Stationhead collaborations (where fans of different musicians come together on the app to listen to a curated playlist with each group’s songs), and I have also seen artists do Q&As and livestreams.

The idea of monoculture, where we are all transfixed by the same thing and sharing that experience, is harder and harder to come by. (Some would argue it no longer exists.)

All the more reason to think of the idea of piquing one’s interest, courting curiosity, as no different from actual courtship.

You can’t rely on a good weekend, a big hit, or even a dedicated fanbase to do all of the work. You have to court them, over and over, even when you have them. If fandom’s based on love, you have to find a way to keep the fire burning.