my gamepad works perfectly with Tennis Elbow, and you're the only one reporting this kind of glitch, so I'm afraid something is wrong only with your joystick, and that is extremly delicate to find what...
could you try this little program named "JoyToKey" :
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA016823 ... glish.html ..?
It maps Joystick to Keyboard. So in Tennis Elbow, you set your controller to Keyboard 1, and with JoyToKey, you set your joystick to emulate the press of keys.