Fans Should Be Allowed To Cheer
By Redhead

Tennis has to change its archaic ways and let fans cheer during points, when a player is serving and to razz players. What is with the idea that Roddick needs to have total silence when he serves, but Joba Chamberlain can throw a pitch with 60,000 people yelling?

Tennis players expect fans to honor total silence during points, but why?

If fans were allowed or encouraged to cheer, yell, stand up and gesticulate during points, it'd be a lot more fun watching tennis matches. Right now, outside of Davis Cup, there's no great allegiance, fan support, for any one player and that has to change.

There is a certain peace and focus that goes with having silence during matches, but it also inhibits fan interaction with the event. In most sports, drunken fans don't rule the show. How can a pro athlete like Marat Safin say a fan is annoying because he's cheering a lot and then says he just wants to be able to "enjoy" his game. Well, Marat, pro sports is about winning and losing and entertaining fans, it's not about whether you enjoy your game or not. Tennis players have to be riled up, toughened up, and made to understand that their slow pace and often aloof, fan-unfriendly manners must cease.

Look, I like quiet, too. I long for the old days at a basketball or baseball game where every idle minute is not filled with dancers or music or stupid games. But during the contest, fans should be able to move about and make as much noise as they like and when they like.

 Advantage Cheering
By A. Hack

 
There does not seem to be a good reason why fans should not be allowed to cheer in tennis ... or in golf assuming anyone can be interested enough in it to arouse him or herself thusly. The game experience will change a bit:

• It will prove itself an advantage time after time and not one that will be ever be balanced as unpopular players never get to have home games.
• It will encourage more entertaining melt downs by the weaker of mind.
• It will make the referee's job a mite easier since one voice won't have to try and quiet thousands.
• There will continue to be no good reason why anyone should be allowed to hit two plastic tubes against each other.

And as long as we are trashing traditions from the "gentlemanly era," how about if we get rid of players warming each other up. What real sport does that?

 It's A Tennis Match, Not A Frat Party
By Hairload

I don't understand everyone's problem with "our sport". Do you really want to be sitting next to some jerk who had six Heinekens yelling whatever stupid, drunken thought comes into his beer-soaked brain from the first point of a match to 5-all in the fifth?

Personally, I enjoy the quiet during the points. In between points, scream, whistle, fart, do whatever you want, but I'm there to watch tennis, not to hear some doofball whistle as a toss goes up in the air, or some vulgarity when someone is about to hit an overhead.

As far as warming each other up, I can't figure out a solution in that case. Should they bring a hitting partner and each get half of the court? Should they go to other courts get a warmup and then to their assigned courts? I don't think the sponsors want them to come into court sweaty and frothing at the mouth.

Tennis Week periodically posts opinions written by members of the Tennis Week.com message board.