Something very exciting is happening in tennis and American media is finally paying attention. Harvey Araton’s column in Tuesday’s New York Times sports section compared Federer-Nadal to Frazier-Ali and, almost, anointed the rivalry with greatness. “…I may even be tempted to nominate Federer-Nadal as the most compelling rivalry in sports,” Araton wrote. Qualified, yes, but we’ll take it.

Last time I looked, though, neither Federer nor Nadal was listed as American

We’re immensely thankful to The Tennis Channel for showing ten hours a day of Rome and almost as much of Hamburg, but it would be nice if the lowly sports fan who can only afford the top 60 cable/satellite package – which does not include The Tennis Channel – could tune in and see the best fight in sports. If you wanted to see Federer-Nadal IV, the hard court final at Dubai earlier this year, you were out of luck if you didn’t subscribe to The Tennis Channel and even if you did, you had to catch the text crawl on the bottom of the screen announcing the broadcast because it was a last minute addition.

If media coverage for this great rivalry was a fraction of the coverage devoted to Hideki Matsui’s broken wrist, we might catch the next Federer-Nadal meeting on a network station or ESPN.

Everyone tunes in for the French Open and it’ll be a huge draw for tennis if Federer and Nadal can make it to the final. A French Open meeting would come only one month after the titanic five hour match in Rome. Last time I looked, though, neither Federer nor Nadal was listed as American. When it was Agassi and Blake at the US Open, that was all over American print media, television and radio. Federer-Nadal is treated more like a soccer match between Juventus and AC Milan: an exciting event somewhere across the ocean.

Both Federer and Nadal pulled out of Hamburg this week. I chose them for my fantasy team even after they played a five hour match the day before Hamburg started. I am the dumbest bunny in the world. When we screw up royally, we tend to look around for someone else to blame. In this case I’m pissed off at the ATP Tennis Fantasy league because they don’t allow substitutions if a player drops out after the first match of a tournament starts.

the WTA and ATP could decide to hog all of the fantasy action for themselves

If I want to dump my ATP fantasy team and go to another fantasy league, though, my options might be limited in the near future. Also in Tuesday’s New York Times is a report about a current court case involving fantasy baseball. The legal system has already established that baseball statistics are news and therefore in the public domain, you can’t charge media outlets for reporting scores and statistics, but what if someone wants to create an online fantasy site where players can be drafted and traded – or, in the case of tennis, picked for an imaginary team every week? Is that fair use of players’ names and statistics or should the site pay a license because they are trading in properties owned by Major League Baseball?

Most tennis fans play fantasy leagues run by the WTA and the ATP but there are smaller sites which run tennis fantasy leagues. For instance, fantasytennis.net and Percy’s 896 Tennis Forum. If the lawsuit decides that fantasy league sites must purchase a license, these sites would have to pay a potentially large fee to the WTA and ATP. Then again, the WTA and ATP could decide to hog all of the fantasy action for themselves. Baseball is already headed in that direction.

Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the arm of Major League Baseball that sells licenses to online sites, used to sell licenses to small sites for four figures. Not any more. It currently licenses seven sites. UPI reports that CBS SportsLine, Yahoo and ESPN paid $2 million each. If you can’t spend millions for a license, forget about it.

This is a very shortsighted approach by Major League Baseball. Fans who merely enjoy baseball can become rabid fans once they become fantasy team owners. Look at the ATP Tennis Fantasy League. There are currently 10,9888 teams. That’s a lot of tennis fans poring over draws and picking eight player teams every week. And those fans are a valuable commodity. Look at the sponsors for tennis tournaments: it’s Range Rover and Mercedes Benz, not Hyundai. Requiring a license to run a site using tennis players and statistics would severely limit the number of fantasy leagues and stunt fan growth.

Sports leagues aren’t the only groups trying to limit media access. In an article about media contol for TennisReporters.net, Matt Cronin reported that “… one tournament denied four legitimate web sites media credentials because the tournament itself feels that it can make money off video, audio and photos and didn’t want competition from other places. ”

Keeping people like me away from your tournament can only hurt tennis. Increasing one group’s control over media penalizes the sport as a whole. Media coverage of tennis is paltry enough as it is, don’t make it worse.