Tennis Diary “Teddy” Awards 2007

If Sports Illustrated won’t give the Sportsman of the Year award to tennis players, we’ll hand out our own awards, thank you very much.

National Football League player Brett Favre has been chosen as Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. At this rate, Roger Federer will have to win the grand salami – all four slams in one year – to get the award and that’s if Tom Brady doesn’t lead the Patriots to the Super Bowl in January.

Roger should be sure to throw in the Olympic gold medal and get himself a golden slam while he’s at it. Let’s see if SI would be dumb enough to ignore that too. They probably would be. SI has given out the award for 53 years and it’s gone to exactly three tennis players: Billie Jean King, Chris Evert and Arthur Ashe.

Oh well, let’s just hand out our own awards shall we? Let’s call them the Tennis Diary Awards –Teddys – and let’s do this all together.

Pat and I will lay out the categories and we’ll all nominate the best players for each category. Leave a comment with your choices and your reasons for those choices. The better the reason, the better your nominee will do. Then we’ll put a poll up for each category and we can choose the winners.

Pat and I will, of course, join in. Prediction market theory suggests that the best predictions come from a group of independent people who range from experts to idiots. I’m not exactly sure where I fit in there but I’m sure that between all of us, we can cover that spectrum.

Oh, and if you have a category you think we’ve missed, suggest that too. These are coed awards. Men and women will be competing in the same categories except in the centerfold category. It’s probably unfair to make Ana Ivanovic duke it out with Feliciano Lopez in the looks department. Besides, our sexual preferences differ.

Okay, here we go. Here are the categories for the 2007 Teddys.

Player of the Year
Most Improved Player
Most Disappointing Player
Most Surprising Player
Male Centerfold of the Year
Female Centerfold of the Year
Player in Most Need of a New Coach
Player Most Likely to Succeed in 2008
Player Who Should Really Think About Retiring

One last comment. The Sportsman of the Year SI has exactly one page of Davis Cup coverage. That’s two pages less than the high school sports section. Pretty amazing considering that Davis Cup is an international title. That tells you where tennis ranks in the U.S.: below high school sports.