ABSTRACT
Tennis as a competitive professional sport is played around the world for most of the year. Both the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) men’s tour and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tour open in Australia at the beginning of the calendar year and end in November. During the 11-month season, tournaments are held on every continent around the globe. It is a schedule that offers players a global profile, status and prestige from playing success, as well as lucrative financial rewards and a range of commercial opportunities, but also it is experienced by players as ‘a seemingly never-ending timetable of tension-filled tournaments, tedious travel and, for some … inescapable injuries’ (Macur 2011). Tennis is now a world game, one that provides a media platform for transnational corporations to raise the profile of their brands and enhance the market appeal of their consumer goods and services by taking advantage of the high profile and iconic cultural status of leading players who with the development of a consumer society have become, as Jean Baudrillard (2017, p.63) remarked, ‘heroes of consumption’. Without doubt tennis has acquired a cosmopolitan character as it has successfully exploited the world market and become a world game, but the origins and developmental trajectory of this global sport are complex and warrant close consideration.
