Welcome to Australia!

I have a number of ways to go this morning. I can go with the "Blade Runner" story. I can go on baseball. I can go on the Packers lack of respect. I could probably talk about Phil Mickelson.

No my friends. Today, we talk tennis. It is back, the most worthless major championship in any sport according to our hemisphere, the Australian Open. Worthless? Because no one really considers anything to be "major" about Australia first of all. Also because we don't get to see much of it, given the hemisphere issue.

But what is there to expect from the highlights on Sportscenter? Well, Roger Federer will most likely dominate winning his 47th Australian Open in a row. Justine Henin will most likely make the final against one of the linebackers AKA the Williams sisters. The 'backers have this knack for getting hurt, then coming back big (sound like performance enhancement anyone?). So we know what's going to happen basically, right?

Let me tell you what isn't going to happen. The US won the Davis Cup in 2007. Yes! But guess what, that isn't an immediate translation into personal success on the grand scale. Why? In defeating the #1 seeded Russians, the two highest ranked singles players were ranked 43rd and 57th, respectively for the ex-Soviets. Congratulations to Andy Roddick and James Blake, you beat guys that no one knows exist.

America is just not putting out talented men's tennis players. Why? Because kids don't want to play tennis. They want to play football or baseball or basketball. Tennis is a game that you can play leisurely for the rest of your life, whereas you only have so many years to play in the major sports. But hasn't this always been the case? It's not like football didn't exist when Agassi and Sampras came up, or Courier, McEnroe, Connors and even Laver. Do I need to keep going?

Roddick isn't good enough to beat the big guns. The distance between Federer and Nadal is so great, it's almost pointless to have the grand slams last for weeks anyway, other than Nadal isn't the best on the hard court. Roddick may be in that second tier, maybe, but it really is going to take injury for Roddick to beat those guys. He just isn't good enough. You saw what Federer did to Roddick in the US Open final. You saw how humbled the unnecessarily cocky Roddick could be.

And then there's my boy James Blake. James Blake is the Texas Tech of tennis. You know how Texas Tech always has a decent ranking, they look good, then they get destroyed when they have to play opponents that are actually good at football? That's what James Blake does. He's supposed to be good, but is on the tier below Roddick, which gets him absolutely no where in terms of becoming in the elite class of professional tennis players.

Roddick and Blake are ranked 6th and 15th in the world. After that you have to go all the way down to Mardy Fish at 43, Sam Querrey at 62 and Donald Young at 98 to find the rest of the Americans in the top 100. The sad thing? None of these guys, except maybe Young, really have any shot at doing anything great in the future. And the only reason we really have heard about Young's potential greatness is because, there is no one else!

American men's tennis is going down the tube. The sad thing is, there's no one to save it whatsoever. Not even Jimmy Connors, and he's trying. Once Roddick begins his fall, there is going to be no one there to carry the torch as a top 10 player from the US. Sampras could probably come back and beat Roddick anyway. But the bottom line is that the McEnroes of the world, well, the McEnroe of the world (no one really cares about Pat) are really going to have themselves planted in US tennis history. Why? Because if nothing changes in the near future, they will pretty much be all we have to remember.