An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
I can recall exactly one dramatic instance of the racquet slipping from my hand when delivering a serve. On a very humid day, I lost my grip on the racquet on downward follow through of my service motion. It was like spiking a football after a touchdown. At no point was my racquet anywhere near the net.
Today we celebrate our arrival at the final way to lose a point outlined in “Player Loses Point” in the ITF Rules of Tennis. If you were planning on a celebration to commemorate the completion of this section, please put that on hold. There are still eight case rulings and two USTA comments associated with the “Player Loses Point” section remaining. By my estimate, we are at the approximate half way point for this topic.
Some rules don’t seem to have any practical reason to exist. This brings us to to the penultimate rule in the main body of “Player Loses Point.”
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Next up in the discussion of how to lose a point is throwing a racquet. The first image that springs to mind for me is a racquet abuse code violation, but this is an entirely different scenario. The point is lost if the ball in play touches the racket when the player is not holding it.
Losing a point is figuratively painful. Sometimes losing a point is literally painful. This brings us to the topic of a player losing a point due to direct contact with the ball. The actual wording of the rule makes this sound gentle and innocuous. The modern tennis vernacular for losing a point in this manner is “getting pegged.” If the ball was delivered with enough velocity, this is can also be known as the “Wilson Tattoo.”
I feel compelled to note that I am not scouring the internet for clips of umpires missing calls. However, missed calls are the ones that tend to be captured and posted to YouTube, so that is generally what turns up in searches. Additionally, missed calls are usually great backdrops for more extensive discussions about the nuances of the rules. They are also fabulously entertaining.
The next part of the rule on how to lose a point contains extensive descriptions of the player and the net proximity. It is by far the wordiest of all the subsections contained in the “Player Loses Point” rule.
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I distinctly remember the day when I realized that I had mastered the trick of catching the ball out of the air with my racquet. Casually snatching a ball out of the air with the racquet is the pinnacle of tennis cool for a budding tennis player. Doing so on a ball that is in play is a loss of the point.
I have discovered that it can be tremendously fun to conjure scenarios that break the rules of tennis. This is an unanticipated side effect of my systemic march through the USTA Friend at Court. The rule we have arrived at today is firmly in that category.
If it seems like I have already written about this rule, it is because I actually have. In “Permanent Fixtures, Again” I wrote a lot about how the ball striking a permanent fixture is a point loss. There is good reason for that. It is because the section we were covering at that time basically says the exact same thing.