Motivation Quote by Jana Novotna

Novotna is doing something athletes rarely get credit for: admitting that the spectacle isn’t automatically sacred. Tennis loves to frame “conditions” as neutral facts of nature, but her phrasing - “some kind of adjustments, maybe in the game” - treats them as design choices. That hedge (“some kind,” “maybe”) isn’t uncertainty as much as diplomacy. She’s pushing at the sport’s power structure without sounding like she’s demanding a rewrite.

The heart of the quote is a tug-of-war between purity and entertainment. “Slow down the surfaces” is technical shorthand with cultural weight: faster courts reward first-strike tennis, big serves, and short points; slower courts extend rallies, spotlight movement and improvisation, and reduce the lottery feeling that can creep into matches dominated by unreturnable serves. Novotna, a virtuoso of net play and touch, understood speed as more than physics. It’s a script that decides which skills get to look “great” on television and which get buried.

Her repeated “interesting” is telling. She isn’t arguing for fairness in the abstract; she’s arguing for engagement - for a game that produces narrative, momentum shifts, and visible problem-solving. That’s the subtext: tennis is competing with every other attention economy, and if it becomes too quick or too one-dimensional, it risks feeling like a series of isolated events rather than a story you can inhabit.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, debates over homogenized courts, bigger hitters, and TV-friendly pacing were already simmering. Novotna’s line reads like an early, player-driven pitch for tennis as something curated, not merely endured.