Found at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, issue from Sunday, October13.

"Virtual Glorification"
-how tennisfans homage their stars on the internet


Filderstadt. After they have finished their work, they sit down at their computers, and start typing. Sometimes up to 4 or 5 hours a day. The subject of their work is always the same: The Tennisplayer Jelena Dokic. And they only write positiv about the 19 year old Yougoslavian, as these hobby-writers work for www.Jelena-Dokic.com, the leading-one of the many Internetsites about the fifth best player of the world.

As Jelena Dokic lost to russian Tatiana Panova at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix at Fildersatdt on thursday evening, Gerhard Grundhammer couldnt find the right words for his match report. Even though he was, equipped with a press-accreditation, watching her match live. "She played extremely well at the first set, but then she continued as if she intentionally tried to loose. I cant write that. So I interviewed Tatiana Panova, her doubles partner, instead." But as the canadian webmaster, Pierre Cantin, a student from Montreal, has already been asleep until G.Grundhammer finally produced something properly at the next morning, the Dokic-Fans were waiting in vain until friday afternoon, for news about the loss of their idol at South-Germany.

But such delays are not unusual at internet fan-sites about tennis-players. Many of them (as the german fan-site www.jelenadokic.de) suffer, that the dear of the fans for the objekt of their passion dies, or simply the enthusiasm moves away.

G.Grundhammer is at the team for two years now. Together with the canadian creator of the page, an australian who writes under the alias "conchita slice", an american and a welchman they write a preview and a match report for every single match of their hero, and try to publish everything about Jelena Dokic on their site.

Why do people sacrifice their free-time for a Tennisplayer they hardly know? "I love the game of Jelena Dokic, and she is really interesting as a person, you know. Through that passion you get to know many interesting people from all over the world, and its a good way to practice my english, too" says Gerhard Grundhammer, who used to live in Liverpool, England, for three years. "It`s got nothing to do with love or something like that."

Jelena Dokic doesn`t know him personally, even though she looks at the internet-site occasionally. "She has to concentrate on her sport to be successful, and cant worry about people like us, and we dont expect that" he says. The staff-people of the sites are satisfied if they have as many visitors as possible on their sites. At top-months, Pierre Cantin and his team register more than 100.000 "hits", a fantastic number, concidering how many sites about tennisplayers are around! Some of these sites are official and professional as the one of the Williams-Sisters - or even self-made by the player - as of the slovenian Tina Pisnik - who writes her reports in the first person.

Nearly every Tennisplayer has his own fan community at the internet. So has, as an example, the usbekistanian Iroda Tulyaganova seven web-sites about her. But German players are not present, but even there something will happen in the near future. Greta Arn asked the Jelena-Dokic.com team at Filderstadt to arrange a site about her, what they proudly accepted.

The most popular player at the internet is neither the best one, nor the most successful one. It is (who else?) Anna Kournikova. About 2000 websites homage the nowdays injured russian glam-girl.