COLUMN: When tennis stops looking like tennis, everyone loses

A video from the first round main draw of a $35,000 professional tournament in Nairobi has gone viral today. It’s not viral because of a great rally or an underdog breakthrough. It’s viral because it barely resembles tennis.

The wild card entrant does not know how to keep score. She does not understand the rules. She cannot execute even the most basic strokes. Over the course of the match, she wins three points—two coming from her opponent’s double faults. Watching it feels less like sport and more like a parody. Or worse, a breakdown.

This is not harmless internet fodder. It is tennis carnage. And every time something like this surfaces, it chips away at the game’s credibility in a way that no marketing campaign can fix.

Tennis sells itself as a global, merit-based sport. Rankings matter. Pathways matter. Earning your way into a professional draw is supposed to mean something—to players grinding on the Futures circuit, to sponsors writing checks, to fans investing their time and trust. When a first-round main draw match looks indistinguishable from a beginner clinic gone wrong, that promise collapses.

The uncomfortable truth is that tennis has a standards problem. And it’s not confined to one country, one tournament, or one player. Wild cards exist for a reason. They are meant to support development, reward promise, and grow the game locally. They are not meant to be participation trophies. When wild cards are handed out without basic competency thresholds, they stop being developmental tools and start becoming evidence exhibits in everything critics say about the sport.

This is where the conversation always gets uncomfortable, because it forces tennis to confront its long-running credibility gap.

At times, tennis remains deeply corrupt—not always in the obvious, headline-grabbing ways, but in the quiet, structural ones. Favor trading. Box-checking development programs. Federations prioritizing optics or politics over standards. A willingness to look the other way so long as the draw gets filled and the event goes on. That mindset is short-sighted. And it’s costing the sport more than it realizes.

For the players who actually belong at that level—many of whom are barely scraping together travel money—moments like this feel like a slap in the face. For sponsors, they raise an obvious question: what exactly are we funding? For fans, especially new ones, the takeaway is simple and brutal—this isn’t serious.

Tennis already struggles with perception issues. The lower tiers of the professional game are underfunded, poorly understood, and vulnerable to integrity concerns. When a viral clip reinforces the idea that professional draws can include players who don’t know the rules, it doesn’t just embarrass one tournament. It undermines the entire ecosystem. The fix is not complicated, but it requires will.

Minimum standards should exist at every professional level. Not aspirational guidelines. Actual enforcement. If a player cannot demonstrate baseline competence—rules knowledge, stroke fundamentals, match readiness—they should not be in a professional main draw. Period. Development can and should happen elsewhere.

This is not about elitism. It’s about respect—for the game, for the players who have earned their place, and for the audiences tennis desperately needs to keep. Because every time tennis stops looking like tennis, everyone loses.