It must be love

You can argue that professional tennis players give more of themselves than athletes in any other sport. Their sacrifice begins when they’re little kids. As they get older, their home becomes the road. Their season lasts all year. Their tournaments can last two weeks. And a single match can last five hours. Why go through all that pain and suffering to smack a little yellow ball across the net?

The answer lies in our new campaign for the United States Tennis Association: It Must Be Love.

To promote the hard court professional circuit, culminating with the US Open (the highest attended event in all of sport), we filmed more than a dozen of the world’s top players, opening up about their love for the game.

To get beyond the platitudes of the typical post-match interview, we mined interesting nuggets from their websites and blogs. And since we were dealing with athletes, not actors, we cajoled them into expressing their “love” for the game in their words, not ours. (Not easy to do when you’re asking professionals to reveal their personal sides while focused on competing in a tournament.)

Most of the top players in the game today are foreign. Tennis fans have a hard time pronouncing their names, let alone pulling for them in matches. We’re out to change all that by helping fans get to know the players a little better—by making an emotional connection built on love for the game. There are 27 million people in America who play tennis. Our goal is to motivate a lot more of them to watch, as well.

Don’t miss the Olympus US Open Series and the spectacle that is the US Open (insert plug for another client) Live on ESPN2.