Tennis: Success for VASSS

Tennis is a curiosity among competitive sports: the players outnumber the spectators. An estimated 8,500,000 Americans play tennis, but only a handful ever attend top amateur or professional tournaments. The reason, according to James Van Alen, 63, president of the tennis Hall of Fame, is the sport's 85-year-old scoring system, which belabors spectators with archaic terminology ("love," "deuce," "advantage"), places no time limit on the duration of a match, and encourages a brand of play—the wham-slam "big game"—that often makes the match a bore to watch. Van Alen's answer: a totally...

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