I love tennis. I enjoy playing it (though badly) and I also enjoy watching tennis on TV.
One of the things that makes tennis such fun is the very clever scoring system. Even at match point there is still the chance that some sort of amazing turn-around can be staged to snatch victory from the jaws
of defeat.
However this scoring system does mean that 5-set singles matches at grand slam events can go on... and on... and on... for hours and hours. At Wimbledon rain or bad light often interupts play; players get exhausted and this reduces their chances of winning their next match. TV coverage gets chopped about and fans get frustrated at incomplete matches.
My idea is to speed things up by reducing each match in the championship to a basic tie break. i.e: The first player to reach seven points, wins the match. But if the score reaches six-points-all, the winner is the first player to win two points in a row.
Back of envelope calcuations would indicate that an average men's singles match at a grand slam events takes about 2œ hours to complete - a tie-break match should reduce this to about 20 minutes.
This would mean that all 126 men's singles matches played at Wimbledon each year could be completed in aproximately 42 hours instead of 315 hours. The whole championship could easily be completed over a single weekend. In fact the finalists would have played tennis for a total of just 120 minutes - less than they might play in a single match decided over five sets.
This would allow more grand slam events to be contested each year making the sport more accessible to people around the world.
I suspect that the major golf championships could also benefit from the same kind of system.