I am never quite sure if the SA Tennis Open is so well covered in the media, in recent years, because it is held at a casino complex, namely MonteCasino, or whether there is some delusion that tennis is still some major spectator sport.

I think there was a time in South Africa, because Wimbledon was about the only sports event that was allowed to be broadcast in terms of some of the anti-apartheid boycotts, that tennis really was big – but that’s way back in the past now. Quite frankly it is really a bunch of no names that come to the South African Tournament. Every year we get the media complaining that the Sun City Nedbank Challenge Golf Tournament does not have the big names that it used to have, but the names that it does have are far bigger and earn far more money than the tennis players who are brought to South Africa and yet they seem to get much more press coverage.

In short, my question is have the media got an incorrect sense of the pulling power of the two tournaments or is there just better marketing by the tennis tournament? One thing is for sure, whether you are at the complex, or you saw it on TV, half of the stands were empty and so people cannot really allege that tennis is more popular when they cannot fill a 3 000 seat arena and you will probably get in excess of 20 000 people at the final day of the Nedbank Golf Challenge alone.