Anna Tatishvili is leading the USTA Australian Open Wild Card Challenge by virtue of reaching the finals at the USTA Pro Circuit Tennis Classic of Macon last weekend. Good for her. Maybe not so good for USTA marketing purposes. In my 4 1/2 years of covering pro tennis on this website, no other American woman has produced so little interest during my coverage. No retweets. No youtube views. Crickets.
What’s up with that? It’s like she’s an American Kate Makarova.
Most state-side tennis fans associate with players ranked outside of the top 50 from certain states and regions and universities. I suspect some kind of institutional apathy that American fans project on naturalized players. If she were born in Georgia instead of Georgia, things would be different. I promise. I mean, look at Varvara Lepchenko. Please! She never draws a crowd either and she’s a consistent top 50 player.
And that’s whats fun about the participatory democracy of the Wild Card events. It’s not always the 16-year-old phenom from {insert city/region/college here} or the grizzled journeyman from {insert city/region/college here} nabbing a ticket to a grand slam, but sometimes it’s just a someone, a Jan Brady, from nowhere you know, in between. And that someone could be Anna Tatishvili, if you’d just pay attention to her.
Tennis Atlantic 