Why Eastern Europe has become better at tennis than the U.S.

The schedule on Rod Laver Arena on Tuesday afternoon had two quarterfinal matches with plenty of import for tennis fans, especially in the United States and Eastern Europe.

There were big names on the court – Coco Gauff, the 19-year-old U.S. Open champion, and Novak Djokovic, the 24-time Grand Slam champion. In Marta Kostyuk of Ukraine and Taylor Fritz of the U.S., they faced two players trying to punch their way into the upper echelon of the sport.

The underdogs didn’t make any progress on that front. Gauff survived her worst performance in months, a mistake-filled, error-strewn afternoon. Fritz has long struggled against Djokovic and is now 0-9 against arguably the greatest man to play tennis. 

But pull back the lens a bit, view this tournament from 30,000 feet, and it becomes the latest chapter in a story that has been evolving for more than two decades, a tale of the sport’s power center shifting from west to east for reasons that mostly involve elements of opportunity and desire. 

“You grow up in some of these countries and you’ve got to win to survive and these players will die on a tennis court,” said Rennae Stubbs, the former Grand Slam champion from that once great tennis power Australia who has spent years living in the U.S. “If you’re from a place like the U.S. or Australia, chances are your life is pretty comfortable and you have to dig to find that inner mongrel part of your personality.”

That is a generalization of course. Plenty of people in the U.S. struggle economically and use sports to escape those challenges, fighting tooth and nail every step of the way. And yet it’s hard to watch Djokovic, the product of the war-ravaged Balkans, and so many other players who entered the sport without much of a safety net and not notice an inner fire that burns very hot. 

“I’m from Ukraine,” Kostyuk said earlier in the tournament. “I like to fight.”  

That’s part of it. This is the rest.

How it used to be

Once upon a time, there was a sport that was played almost entirely on grass and red clay. Men wore trousers and ties. Women wore long dresses. Most of them had a good deal of money. This was a sport of the elite, played mostly in Great Britain and Western Europe, Australia, and the United States. 

After the Second World War, that notorious Iron Curtain fell across Europe, with socialist governments in the east, many of them puppet states of the Soviet Union. They did not hold the hobbies of the Western elite in particularly high regard. Tennis was popular among the educated class of the former Czechoslovakia, a country that had tried to break away from Soviet rule and played some tennis, but the sport did not exist in a large or meaningful way in much of the rest of the east. 

By 1984, following the tennis boom of the 1970s and America’s burgeoning suburban middle-class population, American dominance of the sport had become nearly absolute. Tennis academies were appearing throughout…