Ben Rothenberg’s Journey From Covering His Hometown Tennis Tournament to Writing about the ATP Tour
Cameron Perkins interviews Ben Rothenberg, a journalist who has followed the ATP tour for more than a decade and recently released a book about star player Naomi Osaka.
In the interview, Rothenberg describes his career path as a journalist, his new biography on Naomi Osaka, along with his thoughts about the future of the journalism industry.
Q1: What made you fall in love with tennis to the point where you wanted to cover it full time as a journalist?
I was a tennis fan before I was a tennis reporter. I got more into following it as a fan. I played a little bit with my dad very casually. Then I played it for my middle school and high school tennis teams, but I was rarely one of the better players on those teams. And personally intramurals in college, but I was always watching more honestly. I’d spent a lot of time during summers, when I was home watching a bunch of Wimbledon or French open sessions on ESPN or whatever networks they were on at the time.
I went to the US Open with my dad a few times. I grew up in DC, so we could go up there for the set called Super Saturday, which was when the men’s semis and the women’s final were on the same day. We did that three years in a row, which was a lot of fun.
I liked writing also and it wasn’t obvious to me to combine these two things that I liked doing. It actually started writing about hockey first. I liked writing about tennis because it wasn’t a very crowded space. I felt like I could sort of write stuff that would get traction within tennis fandom or get picked up.
I like writing about tennis compared to hockey because it’s individual. I feel like a lot of times in proper team sports, team athletes are often much more reluctant to speak openly because they don’t want to say anything that will rock the boat within their team. Tennis players as individuals are usually much more open and there’s so many different stories within a Grand Slam tennis tournament. There’s 120 men and women in each single’s draw and they each have their own story that you could find.
Q2: When you started writing about tennis, what kind of stories were you doing?
When I first started, I was just basically writing what I saw on TV. I started going to the Washington tournament, and so, when I saw it each day, I would just go and watch and take some notes on things and then write them up.
This was before adequate matches were televised. That’s a relatively recent development and even at a terminal in Washington. Often the main course wouldn’t be televised until the quarterfinals. So, there was a lot of curiosity from big tennis fans who wanted to know more about what was happening in these matches where all you can do is follow the Live Score. You’re able to get a lot if you can be the eyes and ears for people who didn’t have any other real option. As I started to get credentialed in the media, I did some interviews. I was interested in doing more thorny topics and we were doing a long blog post or article about Wayne Odesnik who was this American player who got caught with HGH, which is one of those very clear intentional doping cases. I wrote a long piece about him and how he was sort of like the most hated man in tennis. It was a good example of a story that was more on the periphery of the sport because he was outside the top 100.
Q3: You’re most known for covering Naomi Osaka since 2014 and you’ve just published a biography about her earlier this year. Why did you decide to publish it and was there a message you wanted to get across about her to your audience?
I don’t know there’s a certain message per se, but she’s certainly someone who’s gotten very famous within and outside tennis. I felt like her early life story especially has a lot of ins and outs, if even appropriate, were not especially well known. I know her kind of level of tennis coverage can be very wide but not very deep.
In this room, especially internet news culture, it’s kind of like posting a quick story and getting trapped from that and then moving on to the next. We’ll get clicks rather than having time to dig deeper into something. I thought it was a good chance to do that. And she is unique among the big players that I’ve covered during my career. I think she’s the youngest of the sort of major stars of the sport and I’ve seen her entire rise while I was on tour. Players like Federer, Nadal, Serena, Sharapova, Djokovic were already pretty well established and came before I got on tour whereas Naomi was still a teenager and outside the top 100. I felt like I could kind of trace her before her pro career more completely.
Rothenberg’s new book can be bought on Amazon today.
Q4: What’s your day-to-day life like when you cover these tennis players? Is there a lot of traveling involved due to where tournaments are located?
Yes, certainly. I did it for a long time. I guess like nine or so years, until the pandemic kind of interrupted things largely. I was traveling the tour, you know, anywhere between like five and maybe at most seven months a year. Going to all the Grand Slams, going to a lot of big tournaments like Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid, and Rome. Usually one of the grass events like Halle. I would often go to Cincinnati, Washington, my home tournament obviously, and New York.
There’s also a different layer of writing coverage. That is, when people write from home, they often do things that are more like essays or more opinionated, which are less reliant on breaking news. But also it’s just easy. There’s no barrier to entry for that. Basically, if you have an internet connection, you can do that. That’s what I started out doing early in my career. That’s the sort of phase I was in.
I haven’t been traveling as much in the last year or so since I was doing the book, so I’m trying to figure it out myself since it’s kind of in between phases. You can discern that a classic way to do it is definitely being there and meeting people. That’s where I think the best reporting and journalism has to happen. And then, if you’ve been there long enough, you can get a collection of phone numbers and contacts. You can stay in touch with the tour from a distance, but you have to start at least by meeting people I think face to face to be meaningfully impactful.
Q5: With that experience, comparing the US to international countries, are there any big differences you’ve noticed when you were reporting? In particular, was the media different in those countries compared to here?
I was always writing for the same outlets. I was still writing New York Times stories, whether I was in Paris, London, Australia, or Rome. I was doing the same kind of stuff more or less for my home employers.
If you look at the way the British press operates on Wimbledon, that’s a very different ecosystem. There’s a lot more coverage from tabloid reporters who are just going to get gossipy stuff for more shocking headlines. They will ask a lot of questions that are more controversial or silly, whatever it may be, just to generate those kinds of stories.
And they really exist at Wimbledon in big numbers, and in a way that’s not really a factor almost anywhere else on the tour. And so that can definitely change the tenor of press conferences at Wimbledon, when you have people asking questions about new rules like what underwear is allowed. They’re supposed to just sort of make everyone kind of giggle or something.
It’s different from what you get at an average tournament, where it’s just the core beat writers of tennis who know the players and the players know them. They usually care more about results and on court things.
Q6: Is there a certain event that you enjoy covering the most out of all the events you go to, and in particular, abroad?
They’re kind of boring answers but I like Wimbledon and the US Open a lot. I think they’re very different from each other. Wimbledon has this tradition. I think it’s really cool since it’s kind of like trapped in time and everyone sort of agrees to abide by the traditions like the all white and role playing of grass. Both of those things are pretty outdated in terms of modern tennis, but everyone sort of agrees to go back and it’s almost like a time machine.
It’s sort of a tournament that’s less overly commercial in a lot of ways. It’s creeping up. There’s more commercialism. There were even 10 years ago limits in terms of ads on court. It’s all kind of quieter and more reverential. Then the US Open I like as an American because it’s much louder and in your face and honest and direct and not about being polite or being proper. I find it much more emotionally honest in a certain way as an American since it’s less pretentious. I like those two opposite ends of the spectrum. There’s things you see by traveling the world, like how every country has their own version of how they express tennis, and it does reflect some of their culture in their native country.
Q7: I don’t know how much you follow it, but AI and in particular, Chat GTP has been getting bigger in recent years. How do you see it shaping future work that journalists such as yourself do?
They certainly can since a lot of places are using that to just create content and so much of trying to make writing into a profitable business is about getting traffic and and it can be really garbagey content out there in terms of the actual writing. Personally, I don’t think any of the chat GPT stuff is anywhere near good enough yet.
I’m not an expert on these things, but when I’ve tried it a couple of times, it just makes things up and it guesses certain things that often aren’t actually true. It tells you what things you want to hear rather than what’s actually true, but it also has this interesting way of trying to be instinctive as a machine.
There are certain kinds of posts that are for websites that are more mindless. Let’s say that you are trying to generate content and here’s the latest Instagram posts from some famous tennis player. Let’s write 150 words about this. AI could do that just as well as chatty media. AI could start it and then a human could maybe edit it for 30 seconds and then post it.
So, it’s definitely encroaching on a lot of the general turning out of articles and content that some people do. I don’t think Chat GPT can do anything close to the sort of investigative stuff that often is the more important work of journalists.
Q8: Journalism can be a tough field, especially at the beginning. Seeing as you’ve written for publications such as the New York Times and Slate, if you were to give advice to aspiring journalists who want to eventually write for those newspapers, what advice would you give them?
It’s definitely not a blooming industry. It’s right to mention the AI thing since there are these sorts of labor questions. Journalistic institutions haven’t really figured out all the answers in terms of how to keep people employed or how to tell the stories while still generating revenue. It’s not an easy thing to do. I still ran with it and I don’t regret going into it. I think it’s a very fulfilling and fun and creative thing to do, but in terms of jobs, it’s tricky. There’s just a lot fewer of them and there’s a lot more people looking for those same jobs and leaving journalism. It’s tricky. I’m not going to say you have to do it, or everyone should do it. It’s definitely a somewhat shrinking island, but I’m still hopeful that they can find solutions. So, I can’t say it’s booming and be especially optimistic, but at the same time I do believe in it as a thing worth existing in the world.
Q9: To conclude everything, do you think tennis is still a niche enough market where people could enter in and make a name for themselves like you did?
Yeah, I think it is. I think it would certainly be much tougher to go and do anything like what I did in the NFL, since there’s a lot more gatekeeping and a couple people like Adam Schefter types that monopolize all the scoops, which doesn’t leave as much wiggle room. Although, I haven’t covered the NFL closely, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Tennis is much more unregulated and less popular.
I think with journalism, you can build up a relatively niche thing and it’s not just sports. There are certain kinds of music reporters, certain kinds of environmental reporters. There’s people who are invested in those lanes, who want to find a lot of value in just having someone who’s really on top of that as a beat or sphere and that can be sustainable in some way.
Reporting by Cameron Perkins shared with Reynolds Sandbox
