An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Once upon a time, I gambled away the toss for choice of ends and service to my opponent prior to being assigned a court at a USTA Major Zone tournament. The side bet was on which of two other players in the draw would be the last to arrive for the first round matches. At the time, I considered the act to be brazenly outside of the rules.
Rule 8 of the ITF Rules of Tennis, as printed in the USTA Friend at Court, is titled “Server & Receiver.” This section essentially does nothing other than to define those two terms.
When I was looking for a media source of the events described in the “An Inconvenient Truth” post, I mentioned that a random twitter userRead More
While the rules of tennis are fairly straight forward and compact in the main body, the appendices are extensive, convoluted, and the place where all hell breaks loose such as shortened scoring and other alternative formats. This brings us to the topic of the match tie-break.
The US Soccer Federation shocks me. Not because blatant misogyny is a a clear problem for that organization, but rather because it is so deeply rooted that it is regarded as a valid legal claim. So what does this have to do with tennis?
When I started in on the best-of-three and best-of-five set rules for matches, I mentioned that the format is inextricably linked to gender politics. InRead More
I think that I would have skipped on past the nuance that the WTA Age eligibility rules emerged from the insane summer of 1994, butRead More
Yesterday in Part 1 of the Crazy Summer of 1994, I wrote about how turmoil in many of the WTA star player’s lives were dominatingRead More
Context is important to fully understand any historical event. Today I want to take us back in time to the summer of 1994 as bracketedRead More
Every once in a while there is a modern perspective about past events that doesn’t exactly align with all the facts. Current conventional wisdom isRead More