Starting with his first trip to Wimbledon in 1973, girls would literally attack Bjorn Borg, in a phenomenon known as a Borgasm.

Have you noticed a lot of the things that used to be popular seem to be in the tank in the twenty-first century? Do those things just suck now or are we so hyperstimulated today, have such short attention spans that we are ready to move on to the next thing even if the last thing was still perfectly good?

Did you know that American men, and Australian men for that matter, used to be good at tennis? All the great Aussie tennis players of the 1950s and ’60s, Ken Rosewall, Rod Laver, John Newcombe and more were coached by the same guy, Harry Hopman. The Aussies had a saying in those days, “First to the net and first to the bar.” Back then, you see, our athletes could throw back a few after a match or ball game and the press and the public thought nothing of it. Today’s athletes, however, need to be under constant surveillance—mostly by unemployed people with smartphones or blogs—because they’re liable to have a couple of beers, which can lead to ingesting some synthetic substance that then leads to them punching some defenseless someone (and we need all of that on video).

When I came of age tennis was big, certainly, in part, because the U.S. had great players and, since we’re pretty much a country of frontrunners, people were glued to the TV and flocking to the public tennis courts. Jimmy Connors grew up in East St. Louis, where the public tennis courts had chain nets. From maybe 1965 to 1985, tennis was a good racquet, appearing as a fairly prominent dot on America’s sports radar. Now it’s a niche-of-a-niche, mostly an international affair like soccer.

Like tennis, the Olympics has also lost a step. The winner of the first modern Olympics marathon in Greece in 1896 was a dude named Spiridon Louis. During the race, he drank a beaker of wine and ate a red Easter egg. You may think otherwise, but I don’t see America holding its breath and wrapping itself in the American flag every four years like it used to. That’s because our country is distracted, otherwise engaged, with too many inputs. We simply don’t slow down and observe the same roadside attractions we used to. Another big reason the Olympics are an endangered species is TV. As recently as twenty years ago we were a sports-starved culture, still surviving on a relatively small handful of TV sports, mostly on weekends. So starting in the 1970s with the Munich and Montreal Olympics and through the end of the twentieth century, the Olympics offered an opportunity to scratch our collective sports itch so we were all in, even if it meant cozying up to the modern pentathlon and Greco-Roman wrestling. When one of the winners of a swimming event at the first Greece Olympics (1896) was asked where he learned to swim so well, he replied, “In the water.” Now the Olympics has to compete with hundreds of hours of other TV sports programming a day (Nielsen says there were 43,000 hours of sports programming in 2009) and so since most Olympic sports are obscure, the athletes unknown, the Olympics no longer make the sports-viewing medal stand.

If pro athletes like basketball players and golfers are blowing off the Olympics, treating them like an inconvenience, where the time invested won’t be worth the return, how many minutes do you think millennials will spend watching them? Remember when Bruce Jenner was the world’s greatest athlete? (Hint: 1976; he was a man.) Remember Dan and Dave? Remember Mark Spitz? Bob Beamon? They were Olympians, they transcended ALL of sports. Things change.

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Remember wood tennis rackets? I do. I broke nineteen of them in the 1970s at Furman Park. One of them was a really nice Davis Classic; first I threw it over the fence a few times, then I hammered the side of the racket face into the concrete court before windmilling it back over the fence. My job is done here.

John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg were the last two to win Wimbledon with wood rackets, the vinyl records of the sports world. Wilson made a good racket called a Jack Kramer Pro Staff. It was harder to break, but where there’s a will there’s a way. My dad was funding about a racket a week at that point. He understood twelve-year-old anger—thanks, Pops. Pam Shriver played with a Prince Pro in the 1978 U.S. Open, the first player to reach the final of a slam with an oversized racket.

To think of McEnroe and Borg … what a rivalry. Borg kept his weight fastidiously at 160 lbs. He cared not at all about technique, only about arriving at the ball on time, and once there, never missing it. McEnroe barely took a backswing and did not change grips like everyone else in the world. He never got a tan or added any muscle.

Laver–Rosewall, McEnroe–Borg, Connors–McEnroe, Evert–Navratilova, Sampras–Agassi. When those kinds of rivalries disappeared, essentially, so did tennis. During these golden years, there was drama, personality, bad behavior, getting in your opponent’s head, foul language, short shorts and frilly tennis panties, serve and volley, poor sports. The New York Times called John McEnroe “the worst ad for American values since Al Capone.” Those were the days.

It’s safe to say that girls are no longer having Borgasms, but America still loves its balls (and pucks) even if tennis and the Olympics have seemingly climaxed.