With technology and improved athletic physique, has the value of pro sports diminished?

It is the unpredictability of success or failure that is instantly gratifying to spectators

In a satirical novel, two weekend tennis players are described in a convivial exchange across the net. Their game is so sluggish and mediocre that once the set gets going, out of sheer boredom, one of them launches a high skyward lob. So slow and endlessly parabolic is the rise of the ball that the other player goes into the clubhouse for a beer and waits for it to arch back down to earth… The physics of weekend tennis oscillates between such extreme lethargy and farcical tedium that neither Newtonian gravity nor quantum mechanics can answer its difficult call. In fact, in the past few years, as technology and athletic physiques have progressed, even the value of professional sport has diminished. In 1969, Rod Laver’s quest for a Grand Slam in the final of the US Open Tennis Championships — then called Forest Hills — was aided by a wooden racquet strung with dried sheep gut. He carried a couple of extra racquets in a bag, in case a string broke during play. His light rubber-soled shoes merely wrapped his feet in thin canvas, much in the way his label-less shirt did, earning him no endorsement money. In the locker room, he had limbered up with some basic callisthenics.