Nick Bollettieri has trained a lot of tennis champions. More and more, those champions are non-U.S. players. Is he hurting U.S. tennis?

Kei Nishikori, a Japanese tennis player, had just evened the match and taken the second set from U.S. player James Blake in the final of the ATP event in Delray Beach last Sunday. Here was a perfect opportunity for the home crowd to stomp and yell and lift Blake’s spirits in preparation for the decisive third set.

Nishikori faltered a bit at the beginning of the third set giving the crowd another opportunity to get behind their man but they wouldn’t do it. There is no nicer guy than James Blake. He’s good looking, well-educated, well-read and he has a terrific story – he suffered through a broken neck and the death of his father from cancer to return to the tour and make it into the top ten. What more could you ask for?

The crowd must have been fans of The Prince of Tennis (see above), an animated television show in Japan about a high school tennis team. Think of that, Japan can support an animation series about a high school tennis team despite the fact that Nishikori’s title was the first singles title for a male Japanese player in 16 years and the U.S. can’t even cheer for one of its top ten players. Jeez!

Nishikori is 18 years old. He has trained at The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy for the past three years and he’s not alone. Players from over 70 countries have trained at Bollettieri’s place and that includes Maria Sharapova, Tommy Haas, Xavier Malisse, Jelena Jankovic, and Nicole Vaidisova.

All this has our reader Sakhi asking the following questions: Can we blame Bollettieri’s Global Village for some of the xenophobic comments she hears on the local tennis courts in the U.S.? Can we blame Bollettieri for the diminishing popularity of tennis in the U.S.?

The answer to both questions is that Bollettieri gets a bit of the blame but not most of it.

The parade of Eastern European women players has decreased my interest in the WTA. There were 14 Eastern European players in the 32 player draw at the Pattaya Open two weeks ago and six of those were Russian. I recognized about half of them.

Anna Kournikova started it all and, yes, she moved from Russia to Bollettieri’s as a child as did Sharapova. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, times were hard in Eastern Europe as the socialist state fell and left everyone to fend for themselves. Kournikova moved to the U.S., made millions of dollars, and became a huge star all without ever winning one lousy singles title. On top of that, she now lives with Enrique Iglesias. How much better could it get?

You don’t think Yuri Sharapov was following in Kournikova’s footsteps when he traveled from Siberia to Florida with little Maria when she was 7 years old? Absolutely he was.

I do have a stereotype or two in my head for Eastern European players: tall, blond Siberian ice maidens who’ll do anything to win except travel to the net – implying artlessness. But that’s part James Bond (From Russia with Love) mixed with a bit of Sharapova and a touch of Cold War propaganda thrown in. I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news then going to bed sure that I would never see another day because the U.S.S.R. was going to drop the bomb in the middle of the night. That was before I knew what propaganda was.

I know my stereotypes are stupid and I don’t pay them much mind. They are not a major source of any xenophobia I might have. My xenophobia comes from becoming a minority less than one generation after immigrating to the U.S. myself. My family came here to find a better life and we found it. I now live in California. As of the year 2000, Caucasians made up less than 50% of California’s population. By the year 2050, projections put the Hispanic population at twice that of the Caucasian population.

I’m Caucasian and I’m afraid of becoming a minority. This is how it plays out in the immigration world. I see it where I live in Los Angeles all the time. Older immigrants complain that newer immigrants put them out of work by offering services at lower prices. We all want to freeze the country when we get here forgetting that every generation of immigrants before us had to go through the same cycle of fighting to stay ahead. That’s a pretty good definition of capitalism.

Bollettieri is only doing what everyone else does. Look at college tennis. Five of the last six years, the men’s NCAA champion was a foreign player. The sixth player was an immigrant. The U.S. is the only country in the world that gives athletes a college education for playing on a tennis team.

There have been some NCAA rule changes to help out U.S. players. The NCAA created a maximum age for accepting a scholarship because foreign players were turning pro for a few years then taking scholarships at an advanced age. Twenty-four year old foreign sophomores were beating up on 19 year old U.S. sophomores and that wasn’t fair.

But it’s not like the U.S. to close its borders. It’s the land of opportunity.

This week the ATP event in San Jose has Andy Roddick, James Blake and a bunch of scrubs. The tournament in Rotterdam has five top ten players and five more in the top twenty. Last year the U.S. lost the Tier I WTA tournament in San Diego. The U.S. is losing tournaments and audience. Is Bolletterie to blame?

Except for Roddick and Blake and what’s left of the Williams Sisters and Lindsay Davenport, it doesn’t look good for U.S. tennis stars. Bollettieri will train anyone. That’s not his fault.

First of all, there’s too much competition for tennis players. Professional football, baseball and basketball have always been more popular and now we have the X Games. Any athlete can find an X Game to match their skills whether it’s flipping a motorcycle or doing a 360 on a skateboard or getting big air on a snowmobile. If that doesn’t get the attention of a U.S. youngster, I’m sure there are more than a few video games lying around the house.

Baseball and basketball have a lot of foreign players yet it hasn’t affected their popularity. A Chinese basketball player, however, was trained in China, and a Dominican baseball player learned the game in the Dominican Republic. That’s often not true for a tennis player.

Sharapova may have been born in Russia but she played Fed Cup for Russia for the first time this year and only then so she can qualify for the Olympics. And she didn’t play a match in Russia until 2005. On top of that, she is quintessentially American. She is now pitching story ideas to television producers and she doesn’t just have endorsement deals; in her Sony Ericsson deal, she is also a “consultant with the company’s design team”.

It’s not like Russians aren’t entrepreneurial but design consultation and pitches to television producers and an apartment in Los Angeles? Come on, she’s an American.

Except that she’s not. She’s a global tennis player from Bollettieri’s Global Tennis Village. We don’t know whether to cheer for her or not. And for that, we can blame Bollettieri.