When Andy Roddick lost his second-round match at Wimbledon to Serbia’s Janko Tipsarevic, joining compatriot James Blake on the sidelines, it was America’s darkest day at SW19 since the tournament became an open event in 1968.

“We’ve been struggling for a long time, and it has just gotten worse,” New York-based tennis coach Gene Mayer told the Canadian Press. “We just are producing no players.”

Tell that to the women. The Williams sisters are on pace for yet another finals showdown; they’ve won six of the last eight championships between them. But it is true that American tennis has dried up otherwise. All the great players who came out of Florida’s training academies in the 1980s – including international stars like Monica Seles who became Americans – are part of tennis history now.

Getting the infrastructure back up and running will help. But this is really more about the rise of the rest of the world rather than the decline of the American empire.